Remaking the Chinese Empire: Manchu-Korean Relations, 1616–1911
By Yuanchong Wang
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Remaking the Chinese Empire examines China's development from an empire into a modern state through the lens of Sino-Korean political relations during the Qing period. Incorporating Korea into the historical narrative of the Chinese empire, it demonstrates that the Manchu regime used its relations with Chosŏn Korea to establish, legitimize, and consolidate its identity as the civilized center of the world, as a cosmopolitan empire, and as a modern sovereign state.
For the Manchu regime and for the Chosŏn Dynasty, the relationship was one of mutual dependence, central to building and maintaining political legitimacy. Yuanchong Wang illuminates how this relationship served as the very model for China's foreign relations. Ultimately, this precipitated contests, conflicts, and compromises among empires and states in East Asia, Inner Asia, and Southeast Asia – in particular, in the nineteenth century when international law reached the Chinese world. By adopting a long-term and cross-border perspective on high politics at the empire's core and periphery, Wang revises our understanding of the rise and transformation of the last imperial dynasty of China. His work reveals new insights on the clashes between China's foreign relations system and its Western counterpart, imperialism and colonialism in the Chinese world, and the formation of modern sovereign states in East Asia. Most significantly, Remaking the Chinese Empire breaks free of the established, national history-oriented paradigm, establishing a new paradigm through which to observe and analyze the Korean impact on the Qing Dynasty.
Review
""In Remaking the Chinese Empire, Wang shows how the tributary system actually functioned, providing details from travel accounts of the Chosn++?n missions to Qing, and vice versa. Drawing deftly on sources in Manchu, Korean, and Chinese, he complicates our picture of the Qing as an Inner Asian/Manchu empire, a part of which included China proper.""
About the Author
Yuanchong Wang is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Delaware.
Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Note on Romanization and Conventions Chinese and Korean Reign Periods, 1600–1911 Introduction Part I KOWTOWING TO OUR GREAT EMPEROR 1. Conquering Chosŏn: The Rise of the Manchu Regime as the Middle Kingdom, 1616– 43 2. Barbarianizing Chosŏn: The Chosŏn Model and the Chinese Empire, 1644–1761 3. Justifying the Civilized: The Qing’s Contacts with Chosŏn, Annam, and Britain, 1762–1861 Part II SAVING OUR CHOSŎN 4. Defining Chosŏn: Qing China’s Depiction of Chosŏn’s Status, 1862–76 5. Supervising Chosŏn: Qing China’s Patriarchal Role in Chosŏn, 1877–84 6. Losing Chosŏn: The Rise of a Modern Chinese State, 1885–1911 Conclusion Notes Glossary of Chinese Characters Bibliography Index
REMAKING THE CHINESE EMPIRE
Manchu-Korean Relations, 1616–1911
Yuanchong Wang
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Romanization and Conventions
Chinese and Korean Reign Periods, 1600–1911
Introduction
Part I KOWTOWING TO OUR GREAT EMPEROR
1. Conquering Chosŏn: The Rise of the Manchu Regime as the Middle Kingdom, 1616–43
2. Barbarianizing Chosŏn: The Chosŏn Model and the Chinese Empire, 1644–1761
3. Justifying the Civilized: The Qing’s Contacts with Chosŏn, Annam, and Britain, 1762–1861
Part II SAVING OUR CHOSŎN
4. Defining Chosŏn: Qing China’s Depiction of Chosŏn’s Status, 1862–76
5. Supervising Chosŏn: Qing China’s Patriarchal Role in Chosŏn, 1877–84
6. Losing Chosŏn: The Rise of a Modern Chinese State, 1885–1911
Conclusion
Notes
Glossary of Chinese Characters
Bibliography
Index
Next Chapter
==
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Introduction Day dawned on April 25, 1644, in the seventeenth year of the reign of the Chongzhen emperor of the Ming Dynasty of China. As the first rays of the sun struck the walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing, a large group of rebels stormed the gates. Right before the rebels swarmed the imperial halls, the emperor managed to climb up an artificial hill behind the palace and hang himself from a tree. His loyal servant, a eunuch who had cared for the desperate thirty-three-year-old em- peror since the latter’s birth, hanged himself from another tree. The Ming Dynasty, or the Great Ming, which had governed China for 277 years, came to a sudden end. The Ming’s unexpected demise put one of its generals, Wu Sangui (1612–78), who was fighting on the front lines of an unrelated conflict about 190 miles east of Beijing, in an awkward position. General Wu was defending Shanhai Pass, a strategic military outpost of the Great Wall connecting inner China with Manchuria, in the war with the Qing, a regime founded in 1616 by the nomadic Manchus in Manchuria. The war had lasted for almost three decades, during which the Manchus had decisively defeated the Ming troops in Manchuria, subordinated neighboring Mongol tribes, and conquered the Chosŏn Dynasty of Korea, a loyal tributary state of China. Shanhai Pass became the last fortification preventing the formidable barbarians, as both Ming Chinese and Chosŏn Koreans regarded the Manchus, from entering inner China. As Beijing fell into the rebels’ hands, General Wu lost his country overnight. In Manchuria, the Manchu emperor seized the opportunity to send his troops under the leadership of Prince Dorgon (1612–50) to the outskirts of Shanhai Pass, where the army waited to cross the Great Wall to enter inner China. Meanwhile, the rebels in Beijing began to march toward the pass, with General Wu’s father as a hostage, in order to annihilate Wu. In this life- or-death situation, Wu chose the Manchus as his allies. He opened the giant gate to allow the Manchu forces to pass through the Great Wall and help him defeat the rebels. Among those who entered the pass along with the Manchu forces was the crown prince of Chosŏn Korea. The prince had been living with the Manchus for seven years, since 1637, when the Manchus had conquered Chosŏn and taken him and his younger brother hostage.¹ The guardians of the pass, General Wu’s army, also included people of Korean origin. Among them was a young Korean officer, Ch’oe Hyo-il, who had joined General Wu’s anti-Manchu fight after 1627, when the Manchus first invaded Chosŏn. Ch’oe was not to live long, but he did not die at the hands of the Manchu conquerors. On June 6, 1644, the Manchus took over Beijing without a fight. In a hall standing amid the debris of the Forbidden City, which had been burned by the rebels, Prince Dorgon accepted the ca- pitulation of the Chinese officials of the Ming, witnessed by the Korean crown prince. Ch’oe, however, refused to prostrate himself in front of the Manchu prince, who in his mind was a barbarian. Instead, dressed in a Ming-style robe, he went to Chongzhen’s tomb to mourn for the Ming—the civilized Middle Kingdom, or Zhongguo in Chinese. Ch’oe died near the tomb after a seven-day hunger strike. General Wu buried his body and commemorated him in an elegy.² A Korean subject, Ch’oe died not only for the Chinese emperor but also for a civilization embodied by the Chinese dynasty and his homeland. Yet when he sacrificed himself, he did not realize that the Manchu regime was transforming itself by embracing the ideological, political, and cultural norms of the same civi- lization. More importantly, before it crossed the Great Wall in 1644, the Qing had begun to use its hierarchical relationship with Chosŏn to fashion itself as the civilized center of the world. As history unfolded, this relationship lasted for 258 years until the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, and it continued to exert a strong influence over China and Korea thereafter. From the early seventeenth to the early twentieth century, the Qing used its relationship with Chosŏn as an ideo- logical tool to consolidate its identity as the Middle Kingdom and to manage its relations with other neighboring countries and the newly conquered polities that stretched from Manchuria and the Mongol steppe to Turkestan and the Himalayas. By the time the Eurasian empire fell apart in 1911, Qing China had evolved into a multiethnic and multicultural modern state, providing a solid foundation for state building in the rest of the twentieth century. Among the factors that helped the
Qing remake the Chinese empire, what stood out in particular were the politico-cultural discourse and imperial norms drawn from the Manchu-Korean contacts. These took place within a hierarchical framework I call Zongfan, a term I will explain below. The microhistory of Manchu-Korean relations vividly reflects the macrohistory of China’s transformation during the course of the three centuries, making Sino-Korean relations distinct from China’s relations with other coun- tries. This book reveals the development of China from an empire into a modern state through the lens of the dynamics of Sino-Korean political relations from 1616 to 1911. It incorporates Chosŏn Korea into the historical narrative of Qing China by examining the high politics of the two countries. The book shows that the Manchu regime used its constant relations with Chosŏn to establish, legitimize, consolidate, and present its identity as the civilized center of the known world, as a cosmopolitan empire, and as a modern sovereign state. By employing a long-term historical and cross-border perspective to observe the bilateral relationship, this book casts new light on the rise and inner changes of the Chinese empire during the Qing period, the clashes between the Chinese foreign-relations system and its Western counterpart, and the formation of modern sovereign states in East Asia. Revitalizing the Concept of Zongfan in the Narrative of Late Imperial China I use the Chinese term Zongfan, or in some cases the English phrase “Chinese world order,” rather than the oft-adopted English translation “tributary,” to refer to the nature of the hierarchical relationship between late imperial China and its subordinate countries, which included Korea. I reserve the term “tributary” for re- lated aspects of this system.³ “Late imperial China” in this book refers to China from 1368 to 1911, namely, the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing periods following the collapse of the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) of the Mongol Empire. As I argue below, the Zongfan system was central to establishing the political orthodox legit- imacy of China and its subordinate countries. As a key concept of Confucianism, political orthodox legitimacy (Ch., Zhengtong) refers to the universal ideological, moral, cultural, and social rationale behind the legitimate status of a political entity in the hierarchy of the Chinese world. In late imperial times, this legitimacy en- tailed “name and status” (Ch., mingfen) and “great unification” (Ch., da yitong) and found its dedicated audience in the ruling elites and Confucian scholars of Ming and Qing China, Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910), and Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868).⁴ As a politico-cultural structure, the Zongfan system is believed to have been established in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). It was associated with the kinship-based feudal system (Ch., zongfa fengjian) of the day. This system was practiced between two sides, Zong and fan. Zong refers to the royal lineage of the Chinese monarch, who claimed to be the “Son of Heaven” (Ch., tianzi) residing in the Middle Kingdom with absolute patriarchal authority and exclusive orthodox legitimacy as the human agent of the “Mandate of Heaven” (Ch., tianming). Fan originally meant the clan(s) of the royal family who established outposts on Chi- na’s borders, where the rulers’ legitimacy was dependent on investiture by the Son of Heaven. The two sides of the kinship constituted the familistic hierarchy and the order of “all-under-Heaven” (Ch., tianxia)—the known universe to the people within this political entity.⁵ The connotation of China’s periphery evolved within this feudalistic model by incorporating all countries or polities outside China into the category of fan. Ac- cording to the ideal tenets, on a regular basis the fan dispatched emissaries, “ministers of ministers” (Ch., peichen), bearing taxes or tribute to the central court, where they would offer appropriate obedience to the Son of Heaven and receive largesse or gifts. In return, the court would not only send envoys to the fan to in- vest the rulers with legitimate titles but also protect the fan whenever necessary. This reciprocity was the foundation of the double policy of “serving the great” (Ch., shida) and “cherishing the small” (Ch., zixiao). The exchanges of emissaries following ritual codes dictated by the Middle Kingdom kept the Zongfan system running. This model later evolved into the basic philosophy of the foreign policy of late imperial China.⁶ In addition to being defined by its geographical distance from the central court, the fan could also be characterized in kinship terms as inner fan and outer fan.
The inner fan maintained a strong blood relationship with the emperor, but the outer fan did not. In the case of Korea, the situation was complex. The imperial norms of the successive Chinese dynasties preferred to ascribe the beginning of Sino-Korean kinship to Jizi (K., Kija), a royal member of the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600–1046 BC) who was believed to have been invested by the Western Zhou court with the lands of ancient Chosŏn. This legend produced an assumption of a unique cultural homogeneity that the Chinese side deeply endorsed and that helped unified Chinese dynasties see Korea as belonging within China’s territorial perimeter.⁷ The Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) and the Tang Dynasty (618–907) invaded Korea and integrated parts of the Korean lands into China. In the 1260s the Mongol forces of the Yuan Dynasty gradually came to control the Koryŏ Dynasty of Korea (918–1392), and in the 1270s the Mongol court invested King Ch’ungnyŏl (r. 1274–1308), who married the Princess of Qi of Kublai Khan, as the consort of the imperial princess and the king of Koryŏ (K., Puma Koryŏ kugwang).⁸ After the Ming overthrew the Yuan, it ceased practicing the Yuan’s policy toward Koryŏ, which had been based on strong personal ties between the Mongol and Korean courts through state marriage. After its establishment in 1368, the Ming followed the feudal principles of the Zhou Dynasty and the Zongfan practice of the Yuan in establishing the Zongfan system within its domain, but it had no desire to extend the system to Koryŏ. The founding father of the new dynasty claimed that Ming China would never invade Koryŏ or fourteen other neighboring countries. In 1392 a new Korean regime replaced Koryŏ and immediately sent emissaries to China to pursue imperial investi- ture of the kingship. Although the Ming conferred the title “Chosŏn” on the new regime, after Jizi Chosŏn, it did not endow the Korean king with investiture until 1401, when Emperor Jianwen (r. 1399–1402) invested the third king of Chosŏn (T’aejong, r. 1400–1418), formally extending the Zongfan arrangement to the king- dom. In the imperial mandate, the Ming underlined that the king should serve as a fence of the civilized kingdom and “assist China forever” (Ch., yongfu yu Zhongguo).⁹ In 1403 Emperor Yongle (r. 1402–24) awarded the same king an official robe commensurate with the rank of first-degree prince (Ch., qinwang, a brother of the emperor), further integrating Chosŏn into the Ming Zongfan system.¹⁰ In the transition from the Yuan-Koryŏ relationship to the Ming-Chosŏn one, the Ming made a consequential shift in China’s policy toward Korea: China allowed Korea independence as a foreign country in practice, but it continued to regulate the bilateral relationship with reference to Zongfan norms in the domestic feudal sense and on the ideological level. In the familistic and culturally homogeneous Zongfan context, the Ming depicted Chosŏn as an outer fan descending from Jizi, while Chosŏn identified itself as a “vassal” (K., chehu; Ch., zhuhou) of the Ming court and viewed their relationship in father-son and monarch-subordinate terms.¹¹ Simultaneously, Neo-Confucianism (K., Chŏngju hak), which celebrated Confucian social hierarchy, had become the ruling ideology during the Yuan Dy- nasty, and had lately been introduced to Korea, helping to institutionalize and stabilize this bilateral relationship.¹² After the Ming rescued Chosŏn from a Japa- nese invasion in the 1590s, Chosŏn became even more committed to the Ming, regarding the Ming as its “parent nation” (K., pumo chi pang).¹³ This arrangement seemed similar to the feudalism practiced in medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan, but as a cross-border framework it possessed features unique to the Confu- cianism-sup-port- Chinese world. As part 2 of this book demonstrates, in the nineteenth century the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship built on these features confused European and Japanese diplomats, who could not find historical precedents for it within their own worlds. However, as scholars have pointed out, applying the Ming-Chosŏn hierarchical relationship to Sino-Korean contacts or China’s foreign relations before 1400 would be ahistorical.¹⁴ The Qing inherited the Ming Zongfan mechanism in its contacts with Chosŏn, but the Manchus’ kinship relations with Mongol tribes complicated the outer fan spectrum of the empire. This point is illustrated by the multilayered nature of the outer fan and the varied usage of the term in Qing political discourse, partic- ularly in referring to political entities within the Qing pilgrimage system (Ch., chaojin) and to countries in Southeast Asia, such as Siam (Thailand).¹⁵ The Manchu court nevertheless understood Chosŏn and other subordinate entities as members of the Qing-centric family, in which the position of these entities was similar or
even equal to that of their Mongol counterparts.¹⁶ As the Ministry of Rites (Ch., Libu) described it to the Qianlong emperor in 1768 in the context of investing the Korean king’s grandson as the successor to the throne, “The outer fan are the same as Zongfan in terms of their relations with the central court” (Ch., Waifan zhi yu zongfan, shi shu xiangtong). Similarly, in 1790 the Qianlong emperor awarded the Vietnamese king, Nguyễn Huệ (r. 1788–92), a golden leather belt that only Zongfan of the royal family could use.¹⁷ The term “Zongfan” aptly encapsulates the relationship between the center/patriarch and the periphery/family members during the Qing period, and for this reason I have revitalized it in this book. Reinterpreting the Rise of the Modern Chinese State through the Lens of Qing-Chosŏn Relations The involvement of Chosŏn in the Ming-Qing war led to two fierce Manchu invasions of the country in 1627 and 1636. After conquering Chosŏn in early 1637, the Qing established a Zongfan relationship with it by replacing the Ming in the patriarchal position. Scholars have widely regarded Sino-Korean relations in China’s late imperial period as the quintessential manifestation of the Sinocentric order.¹⁸ Some scholars have tended to attribute the uniqueness of the relationship to the parties’ shared Confucian culture, especially Neo-Confucianism, while others have preferred to emphasize China’s political or military influence or control in the hegemonic sense.¹⁹ This book embraces the cultural perspective, but it simultaneously underlines the significant effect that the Manchu use of violence had on the establishment and maintenance of Qing-Chosŏn ties in the early seventeenth century. More importantly, I avoid enshrining the Qing-Chosŏn relationship in the pantheon of Chinese narratives of Sino-Korean relations since the Western Zhou, and I refrain from conflating the Qing-Chosŏn relationship with that be- tween the Ming and Chosŏn. Rather, I explore the unique and crucial role of these bonds in providing the Qing with the political, intellectual, and ideological sources with which it reconstructed itself and the Chinese empire and eventually gave birth to a modern Chinese state. A key term in analyzing the Sinocentric hierarchical arrangement between Qing China and other countries imagined in Qing imperial discourse is yi. Like so many abstract terms in Chinese (or indeed any language), its meaning varies according to context, but I have generally translated it as “barbarians.” As the fol- lowing chapters show, yi, which was often used to describe outsiders in Sino-foreign contacts, did not necessarily carry a pejorative connotation. I also demon- strate a change in the meaning of yi from the perspective of the Manchu regime. The story of the Qing-Chosŏn relationship unfolds within the broader process of the Qing’s efforts to meet the unprecedented challenge of proving its orthodox legitimacy in the politico-cultural setting of the “civilized vs. barbarian distinction” (Ch., Hua–Yi zhi bian; K., Hwa–I ŭi chai).²⁰ It was against the background of this civilized–barbarian dichotomy that the Korean warrior Ch’oi sacrificed himself in Manchu-occupied Beijing, and it was in light of this distinction that his homeland strengthened its identity as “Little China” (K., So Chunghwa) in the post-Ming era, while the Qing positioned itself within the pedigree of the Middle Kingdom as the civilized center and the “Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao). The establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship in 1637 was a watershed event in the history of the Qing’s prodigious enterprise of redefining itself and remaking the Chinese world. Scholars have commonly dated the Ming-Qing transition to the Manchu occupation of Beijing in 1644, but the Manchu regime in fact had initiated its bid for status as the Middle Kingdom at least a decade earlier, by employing the politico-cultural discourse embedded in the Zongfan struc- ture. After 1637, the Qing progressively converted Chosŏn into a prototypical “outer subordinate,” known as waifan (outer fan) or shuguo (subordinate country) in the Chinese language and tulergi gurun (outer country) or harangga gurun (subordinate country) in the Manchu language. Very significantly, the Qing imperial terms abruptly reversed the Manchu-Korean hierarchical arrangement in the Ming period by portraying Chosŏn as a country of barbarians on the periphery of the Qing. In its frequent contacts with Chosŏn from 1637 to 1643, the Qing strengthened the new bilateral political arrangement and developed a mature model for man- aging its relations with other newly conquered or subordinated entities. I call this model the “Chosŏn model” (Ch., Chaoxian shili, lit. “Korean cases/examples”).
As part 1 explains, the model constituted a pattern by which a country or a political entity could follow Chosŏn into the Qing-centric Zongfan system primarily by receiving imperial investitures from the Qing, adopting the regnal titles and calendar of the Qing, and sending emissaries and tribute to the Qing on a regular basis. The idea behind this model was to encourage outlying regions to embrace the Qing as the civilized center of the world and to affirm its supreme political and cultural position. After 1644, as the Qing continued its conquest of inner China by marching west and southwest, it used the Chosŏn model as a handy soft- power weapon to manage its political relations with other entities and to consolidate its new identification as the center of all-under-Heaven. The Qing-Chosŏn hierarchy was far more than just the final chapter in the long Sino-Korean Zongfan history. Rather, it buttressed the rationale of the entire Zongfan system by keeping the periphery of the Chinese empire informed and regulated while the Manchu regime controlled and remade the empire at the core. The Qing’s dynamic relations with its first Confucian outer fan—Chosŏn—played a vital role in establishing, institutionalizing, and nourishing the entire Qing- centric system of foreign relations. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Qing had constructed a new imperial order within and beyond its Eurasian empire. It had simultaneously labeled Britain and other European states “countries of barbarians” and posited them on the periphery of China. These states, however, changed their status vis-à-vis China through gunboat diplomacy and treaties in the nineteenth century, when they encountered the Chinese world through such outer fan as Annam (Vietnam), Ryukyu, and Chosŏn. The introduction, translation, and dissemination of international law in the Chinese world put China, China’s outer fan, and the European states on an equal footing in terms of their state sovereignty. Nevertheless, the relationship between Qing China and its outer fan re- mained unchanged until the very end of the nineteenth century in that they still needed each other to acquire mutually constitutive and mutually defined orthodox legitimacy in their own world. What confused the Western states in their contacts with the outer fan of China in the late nineteenth century was the nebulous nature of the Zongfan mech- anism that constantly shunted them into perplexing negotiations with Beijing, the only place where diplomacy with outsiders could be conducted in accordance with Zongfan conventions. The disputes emerging at the periphery of China were thus transferred to the center of the empire, where they converged as an ac- cumulative force to trigger certain reforms within China that in turn spread to and deeply influenced the periphery. Although this model may seem similar to con- temporary relationships between European powers and their overseas colonies, it had a fundamentally different structure, as later sections and chapters will elab- orate. The most typical case among the manifold and interwoven disputes regarding this mechanism arose in Chosŏn Korea. The political and diplomatic conundrum of the international status of Chosŏn led the Qing and Chosŏn into legal quagmires and prompted both sides to mod- ify their time-honored relations in the context of both the inner and the outer dual networks, as chapters 5 and 6 explain. But the various adjustments made to the relationship on both sides in the chaotic decade of the 1880s kept the Zongfan fundamentals untouched, as neither side could overcome the ideological dilemma caused by their mutually constitutive legitimacy at the level of high politics in the Confucian world. This double bind meant that colonizing Chosŏn was not an option for China in the turbulent period before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894. The growing controversy between China, Korea, Japan, and Western states finally resulted in the termination of the Sino-Korean Zongfan relationship in 1895. Accordingly, the cosmopolitan Chinese empire withdrew its political and cultural reach from its subordinate countries and became identical with the Chinese state defined by the norms of international law. After the war, China and Korea negotiated a new treaty for an equal state-to-state relationship, but the new arrangement lasted only a few years before both the Chosŏn Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty ceased to exist in 1910 and 1911, respectively. This book describes the trajectory of this varied relationship and shows its significance for the devel- opment of modern China and East Asia. Revisiting the Chinese Empire under the Qing
This book defines the Qing as an empire and as a Chinese empire. As I explain below, this empire included Chosŏn in a politico-cultural sense. The term “empire” as a European concept that was always traced back to the Romans did not exist in the Chinese political lexicon until 1895, when the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Shi- monoseki addressed the Qing as the “Great Qing Empire” in Chinese characters (Da Qing diguo), as a counterpart to the “Great Japanese Empire” (Dai Nippon teikoku).²¹ None of the ruling dynasties before the end of the Qing ever claimed to hold an empire, either in Chinese or, when the ruling house was not Han Chi- nese, in any other language. Even nowadays, describing a Chinese dynasty as an empire remains rare among historians in China. Nevertheless, if we define an em- pire broadly as a political entity in which different peoples are governed differently, Chinese history from 221 BC, when the Qin Dynasty (221–207 BC) unified China as a multiethnic polity, to the present is clearly a history of empires.²² In this book, the Chinese empire (Ch., Zhonghua diguo) refers to a multiethnic and multicultural polity in which the Middle Kingdom represented the political and cultural core against the background of the civilized–barbarian distinction and for which the concepts of “Mandate of Heaven” and “all-under-Heaven” served as constitutional ideologies to establish its political orthodox legitimacy and Confu- cian orthodox legitimacy (Ch., daotong). This definition may not fit all the dynasties that claimed the name of the Middle Kingdom, because, as R. Bin Wong ob- serves, “the ideas and institutions of this empire were neither constant over time nor uniform through space.”²³ But it applies to the dynasties in Chinese history such as the Tang, the Northern and Southern Song (960–1279), the Liao (907–1125), the Xixia (1038–1227), the Jin (1115–1234), the Yuan, the Ming, and the Qing. The Manchu ethnicity of the imperial house was not a barrier to the Qing’s presentation of itself as a Chinese empire, in particular after 1644, when the term “Chinese” (Ch., Zhongguo ren) took on a multiethnic character. The Qing had presented itself as a Chinese empire as early as 1689 in the Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia. The original treaty text, written in Latin by the French Jesuit Jean-François Gerbillon (1654–1707), who was serving the Manchu court, called the Qing Sinicum Imperium (Chinese Empire) as a counterpart to Ruthenicum Imperium (Russian Empire). The French version of the treaty rendered the term as l’Empire de la Chine (Empire of China) as a counterpart to l’Empire de Moscovie (Empire of Muscovy).²⁴ In the Manchu translation of the treaty, the Qing court used the term Dulimbai gurun to define itself as China/Zhongguo; this term is equivalent to “Chinese Empire” in the other versions of the text.²⁵ When “Chinese” became a multiethnic descriptor, the Qing also became the representative of Chinese culture, in particular the Confucianism that lay at the core of imperial political discourse. In 1712 Emperor Kangxi instructed the Manchu official Tulišen (1667–1740), an envoy to the Turgūt Mongols in Russia, that if the “khan of Russia” (Ma., Cagan han) asked what was esteemed in China, Tulišen should respond that “our country takes fidelity, filial piety, benevolence, jus- tice, and sincerity as fundamentals.”²⁶ All of these concepts came from Confucianism, not from Manchu ideologies. After all, it was this Confucian identity and politico-cultural discourse informed by Confucianism, not the Qing’s Manchu characteristics or its realpolitik practiced along the newly conquered frontiers in Inner Asia, that determined the Qing’s political orthodox legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom and enabled it to obtain and justify Confucian orthodox legitimacy. This Confucian identity on the state level later helped the Qing display its Chineseness and win strong support from Han Chinese scholars, who assisted the dy- nasty in weathering the storm of anti-Manchu rebellions in the nineteenth century. This book broadly defines “Chineseness” as the state of being the legitimate Middle Kingdom, thus referring to statecraft, not ethnicity. I interpret the Chinese empire under the Qing in two dimensions: the territorial empire and the politico-cultural empire. The territorial Chinese empire was equal to the Great Qing, composed primarily of the Manchu court, the inner provinces (Ch., zhisheng, “directly controlled provinces”), and the first group of outer fan, which were under the management of the central institution of Lifan yuan. These outer fan included regions and groups such as the Cahar Mongols, Tibet, and Mongol and Muslim tribes in Xinjiang. The Chinese name Lifan yuan means “the ministry of managing the affairs of the fan,” and it differs from the organization’s Manchu name, Tulergi golo be dasara jurgan, which means “the institution in charge of the outer provinces.” Scholars have generally translated it as “Court of
Colonial Affairs” or “Mongolian Superintendency.” This book adopts the latter rendering. The politico-cultural Chinese empire encompassed not only these polit- ical entities but also the second group of outer fan, whose contacts with China took place via the Ministry of Rites and whose shared characteristic was their iden- tification of the Son of Heaven in China as the highest sovereign in the world (see figure I.1).
FIGURE I.1. The structure of the Chinese empire during the Qing. A = the court; B = inner provinces; C = outer fan under the Mongolian Superintendency (MS); D = outer fan under the Ministry of Rites (MOR), primarily Chosŏn, Ryukyu, and Annam; E = Western countries listed by the Qing as outer fan; AB = inner China, or China proper; ABC = the Great Qing, or the territorial Chinese empire; ABCD = the politico-cultural Chinese empire; ABCDE = all-under-Heaven. Three key issues in the relationship between China and its outer fan within the politico-cultural Chinese empire invite elaboration: sovereignty, borders, and subjects. These issues were woven together in imperial times by the cosmopolitan idea of all-under-Heaven and were critically questioned within the context of the nation-state order of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. China, or Zhongguo, had historically always been mutually defined by its relations with the countries on its periphery—that is, by a combination of the country’s own perception of itself and the devotion of its neighbors to Chinese civilization. The nebu- lous dual nature of China’s identity posed a challenge to Chinese scholars who sought to define China anew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by comparing it to European states. These scholars could not find an established and consistent name for their homeland in history. For example, Huang Zunxian (1848–1905), a distinguished diplomat and scholar, reviewed the conventional civilized–barbarian discourse and preferred to call China the “central civilized country” (Ch., Huaxia). In his treatise exploring the reasons for China’s weakness, Liang Qichao (1873–1929), an intellectual leader of China’s modernization, pointed out that for a long time the Chinese had seen no difference between “state” and “all-under-Heaven” or between “state” and “court.”²⁷ Huang’s and Liang’s arguments reflected the cosmopolitan nature of the Chinese world, in which sovereignty, borders, and subjects manifested themselves in ways distinct from those of its Western counterpart. The nature of the sovereignty of an outer fan in the Chinese world was twofold: it was fully independent in terms of the territorial Chinese empire but fully dependent in relation to the politico-cultural Chinese empire. An outer fan enjoyed the right of independence, that is, autonomy or self-rule—zizhu in Chinese— within its boundaries. As Jean-Baptiste Grosier (1743–1823) in the 1780s and George N. Curzon (1859–1925) in the 1890s observed, the king of Chosŏn was an independent and supreme sovereign in his own lands.²⁸ The kings of the Nguyễn Dynasty (1802–1945) of Vietnam went even further, claiming to be “emperors” and calling Vietnam the “Middle Kingdom” in the first half of the nineteenth century.²⁹ The kingship of the fan, however, was ultimately subjugated to the emper- orship of China. As demonstrated by Emperor Qianlong’s deposition of the king of Vietnam, Lê Duy Kỳ (1765–93), and his investment of a new king in 1789, the emperor possessed absolute patriarchal power over the kings. This was particularly true for the Confucian kingship of Chosŏn.³⁰ What determined this rela- tionship was not China’s military power or geopolitical gravity or its “suzerainty,” as Western and Japanese diplomats understood it in the nineteenth century, but the mutually constitutive legitimacy of each side of the bilateral arrangement that was undergirded by Zongfan tenets and Confucian ethos. As a consequence, in the 1830s and the 1870s, the king of Chosŏn refused to negotiate with Western representatives on the grounds that “subordinates of a fan have no right to con- duct diplomacy” (Ch., fanchen wu waijiao).³¹ Vietnam adhered to the same ideology until the early 1880s.³² Within this system, a Korean king did not have his own regnal title during his lifetime but gained a posthumous title or temple name, which is why I tend to refer to Korean kings as, simply, “the king,” or to use their names (“Yi Chong,” for example) rather than their temple names (“Injo,” Yi Chong’s temple name). Although the awarding of temple names to the kings could suggest a portrayal of Korea as independent of China in an abstract sense and in an intellectual sense, in practice China’s patriarchal and divine imperial power was always real and effective.³³ The differences between peoples on either side of the borders that separated Qing China and its outer fan were clear, but these distinctions were not translated into the language of nation-states, as illustrated by the Qing’s cartographic survey in the Kangxi period and the Qing’s juridical negotiations with Annam and Chosŏn over legal cases.³⁴ The territorial border between China and the outer fan could be diluted and blurred by the shared ideology of all-under-Heaven within
the Zongfan framework. In this cultural context, the Qing court treated fan such as Chosŏn as a part—even an indispensable part—of the “imperial dynasty” (Ch., huangchao) or the “Heavenly Dynasty.” For the most part, scholars do not consider countries such as Chosŏn to have been components of the Chinese empire during the Qing. This view results from the dissemination of nationalist historiography in East Asia since the late nineteenth century and cleaves closely to a terri- torial definition of the Chinese empire. The Chinese empire as a politico-cultural unit, however, encompassed its outer fan beyond China’s borders, where China’s centrality was further constructed by local manifestations of the divine authority of the Chinese sovereign. Believing that all lands of the outer fan were under his rule in this sense, Emperor Yongzheng demarcated a new border with Annam in 1727 that allowed Annam to extend its territory 12.45 miles (40 Chinese li) farther into China in order to end the territorial disputes between the two sides. Chosŏn never ceased trying to redraw its borders, as reflected in its prolonged negotiations with China over border demarcation in the Tumen River area from the 1710s to the 1880s, yet the Korean court had endorsed the Chinese imperial discourse of all-under-Heaven since the Ming period.³⁵ In 1593, for example, the king of Chosŏn (Sŏnjo, r. 1567–1608) claimed that Chosŏn was a vassal (K., chehu) of China and had been regarded by the Chinese dynasties as an “inner subor- dinate” (K., naebok; Ch., neifu) since Jizi. The king further emphasized that Chosŏn “is actually China’s land and China lets our country manage it.”³⁶ In the 1730s the Qing historians in History of the Ming commented that “Chosŏn was the Ming’s subordinate country, but it was not different from an inner part of China [Ch., yunei].”³⁷ The position of Chosŏn as part of the Chinese empire remained unchanged during the Qing in terms of imperial norms. In 1784 and 1788, Emperor Qianlong noted that Korea was almost the peer of the Qing’s “inner subordinates.”³⁸ In the rituals that marked imperial edicts, the Qing imperial ritual code made it clear that the local officials of Chosŏn should perform the same rituals as did “those in directly controlled provinces” (Ch., ru zhisheng zhi yi).³⁹ Another indicator of Chosŏn’s position was the annual calendar of the Qing (Ch., Shixian li or Shixian shu; Ma., Erin forgon i ton i bithe), issued every year by the Imperial Astronomical Bureau (Ch., Qintian jian; Ma., Abka be ginggulere yamun), which Korean emissaries had to retrieve from Beijing. The calendar included charts of the sunrise and sunset times and charts of the solar terms in “each province” (Ch., gesheng; Ma., yaya golo) and “each Mongol and Muslim tribe” (Ch., ge menggu huibu; Ma., geren monggo be, hoise i aiman) under Qing jurisdiction. From 1645, when the Qing inaugurated the calendar, Chosŏn was included in the list of inner provinces such as Shanxi and Shandong and later showed up alongside Mukden, Nerchinsk (Ma., Nibcu), Sanxing (Ma., Ilan hala), Bodune (Ma., Bedune), Heilongjiang (Ma., Sahaliyan ula), and Jilin. Following Chosŏn, Annam was added to the lists in 1789 and Ryukyu in 1810.⁴⁰ As Johan Elverskog has pointed out, “A fundamental role of the emperor was to control the flow of time properly by creating the calendar and propitiating its cultural force through ritual and ceremony.”⁴¹ Many maps of the known world produced by the cartographers of the Qing and Chosŏn in the eighteenth century, such as the Huangyu quanlan tu (Map of a complete view of the imperial lands, known as the Kangxi Atlas), also presented and substantiated this cosmopolitan ideology by including Chosŏn as part of the empire.⁴² The Qing thus subtly but unmistakably incorporated the group of outer fan into the Chinese empire. Cosmopolitan ideas strongly shaped the Qing’s understanding of the subjects within and beyond its borders, even after international law reached China in the 1860s. In 1643, for instance, the Qing emphasized to Chosŏn that “the two countries have become one family” (Ch., liangguo yijia) and that “the people of Chosŏn are also ours.”⁴³ In 1882, when the Chinese governors in Manchuria reported to Beijing that many poor Korean peasants had crossed the border to cultivate Chi- nese lands, Emperor Guangxu noted, “In the eyes of the local officials, there is certainly a line between them and us [Ch., bici zhi fen], but in the eyes of the court, there is originally no difference between the inside and the outside [Ch., neiwai zhi bie].”⁴⁴ A group of Korean students learning Western technologies in Tianjin in 1882 were also treated by Chinese officials as “loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao zhi chizi) and were granted free tuition.⁴⁵ In 1886 the Guangxu emperor emphasized that Chosŏn was close to Beijing and had “no particular difference from other provinces in the inner land” (Ch., you yu neidi
xingsheng wuyi).⁴⁶ For Qing China, Chosŏn was equal to a “domestic subordinate” (Ch., neichen), which might have been the impetus behind the proposals made by a large number of Chinese officials in the 1880s to convert Chosŏn into “prefectures and counties” of China—an approach I call “provincialization”—in order to save “our Chosŏn” (Ch., wo Chaoxian). Within the Zongfan framework, these factors—sovereignty, borders, and subjects—were not complex issues between Qing China and its outer fan. But when international law and the norms embedded in it, such as sovereignty and suzerainty, reached East Asia in the 1860s and acted as a catalyst for the independence (Ch., duli; K., t’ŭngnip; J., dokuritsu) of the outer fan, these issues became controversial and began to be reconsidered and redefined in accordance with the im- ported legal terms in both China and its outer fan. Nevertheless, as part 2 of this book shows, the politico-cultural Chinese empire connecting the Middle King- dom and its outer fan remained unchanged at that time, because international law could not endow the two sides with the necessary political orthodox legitimacy. What drew China into the wars with France in Vietnam in 1883 and with Japan in Chosŏn in 1894, therefore, was not the territorial Chinese empire but the politi- co-cul-tural one. Similarly, what Japan defeated in 1895 was the tangible former rather than the invisible latter. In this regard, this book reveals the complexity of the dual presentation of the Chinese empire under the Qing, in particular in the late nineteenth century, when China and Korea tried to deliver a legal definition of their relationship to Japan and Western states. After 1895 the politico-cultural empire began to draw back from its extended frontier in its subordinate countries to China’s geographical borders, eventually becoming identical to the territorial empire. Through the decline of the politico-cultural empire emerged a modern Chi- nese state. In his study of empires and states, Frederick Cooper argued that “France only became a nation-state in 1962, when it gave up the last vital element of its impe- rial structure, Algeria.”⁴⁷ Although China is not France and Korea is not Algeria, Korea had served for centuries as a key part of the politico-cultural Chinese em- pire, and under the Qing it acted as an “outlying province” of the empire in the Qing imperial norms.⁴⁸ It is thus not an exaggeration to say that China became a modern nation-state only once it recognized the absolute independence and sovereignty of the Korean state after World War II, especially after the Korean War in the 1950s. It was also in the 1950s that the People’s Republic of China officially endorsed the independence of the Mongolian People’s Republic, which had been part of the Chinese empire under the Qing, while at the same time integrating the northwestern region of the empire—Xinjiang and Tibet—into the territory of New China. At that point, the Korean side finally accomplished the prolonged process of decentering China and became equal to its Chinese counterpart.⁴⁹ Within this conceptual framework, this book traces the historical process through which both China and Korea detached themselves from the Chinese empire and moved toward modern state building in the postimperial era. Renegotiating Qing Imperialism Scholars of China and East Asia have commonly identified imperialism (Ch., Diguo zhuyi) with the West or Japan. As a concept, imperialism refers to a system that was underpinned by a series of aggressive political, economic, or diplomatic policies carried out by Western and Japanese powers against other states. Through these policies, the imperial powers attempted to reap the highest possible profits from the countries they subjugated via unequal treaties, while com- peting with each other for primacy. Imperialism is thus seen as a holdover of Western capitalism (Ch., Ziben zhuyi) and colonialism (Ch., Zhimin zhuyi) that reached the Chinese world aggressively after 1800.⁵⁰ This interpretation also reflects a phenomenon that scholars have called the “great divergence” between China and the West in world economic history.⁵¹ The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 marks the rise of imperialism in East Asia, a regime under which Qing China, too, suffered heavily. Historical narratives along these lines have promoted a Chinese victim mentality and nourished Chinese nationalism in the twentieth cen- tury, in particular after the Leninist definition of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism became popular in scholarship.⁵²
Since the second half of the twentieth century, two groups of scholars have questioned and complicated this received wisdom. The first group comprises stu- dents of the High Qing (that is, from the Kangxi to the Qianlong period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), who have promulgated the paradigm of “New Qing history” that is characterized by an Inner Asian and ethnic approach to interpreting the multiethnic and multicultural Qing.⁵³ The second group con- sists of students of Sino-Korean relations who have depicted Qing China’s policy toward Chosŏn in the late nineteenth century as imperialism. The approach of the first group might be called “High Qing imperialism,” and that of the second group “Late Qing imperialism.” The High Qing imperialism school describes the High Qing as an institutional agent of imperialism, a system of coercive instruments aimed at extending the core area of the empire and keeping the empire functioning. This Qing imperialism manifested itself in geopolitical and global competitions between the Qing, the Mongol khanates and Muslim tribes in Inner Asia, the indigenous and cross-border tribes in southwestern China, the Russian Empire, and the British Empire.⁵⁴ Chinese and European colonialism and capitalism found their place in these intense competitions.⁵⁵ What fundamentally supports this argument of Qing imperi- alism is the fact of the Qing’s territorial expansion by force, followed by the political and cultural hegemony that it introduced to the newly conquered borderlands. However, if the High Qing was an agent of imperialism, all Chinese regimes that extended China’s borders would fall into the same category, including the Han, the Tang, the Yuan, the Ming, and the People’s Republic of China. In this sense, the thesis of High Qing imperialism risks detaching its interpretations of the Qing Empire from the pre-Qing Chinese historical context and being construed as a complement to Eurocentric narratives of imperialism in the broader context. The argument of Late Qing imperialism, by contrast, distinguishes the Qing from its predecessors in Chinese history by asserting that the Late Qing exercised imperialism through coercive means characterized by power politics and economic expansion in the late nineteenth century. The leading proponents of this ap- proach concede that the Late Qing was a victim of Western and Japanese imperialism but claim that it simultaneously practiced its own imperialism over weaker countries. This overseas imperialism fits the general definition that historians have drawn from the history of the Roman Empire: “an unequal power relationship between two states in which the dominant state exercises various forms of control, often forcibly, over the weaker state.”⁵⁶ Whereas the theory of High Qing im- perialism does not take the Manchu conquest of Chosŏn in 1637 into consideration and leaves Chosŏn largely off the list of victims of that imperialism, Chosŏn is typically the only identified victim of Late Qing imperialism, which was embodied by activities such as sending troops to Chosŏn and obtaining treaty ports and settlements through unequal treaties that granted the Chinese extraterritoriality. The concept of “informal empire,” originally coined to refer to the powerful eco- nomic expansion of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, provides this argument with further intellectual support.⁵⁷ In retrospect, the argument of Late Qing imperialism bears a remarkable resemblance to the interpretation of China’s behavior in Chosŏn put forward by Western diplomats and observers in the nineteenth century. As M. Frederick Nelson has pointed out, “Under the assumption that China had nothing but a religious and ceremonial connection with Korea, Westerners viewed her growing de facto control of Korea as pure and unjustified power politics directed against an independent state.”⁵⁸ By likening the Qing to its Western imperial counterparts, the thesis of Late Qing imperialism homogenizes Qing China as a major participant and a powerful predator in Euro- centric global history, therefore strengthening the approach of interpreting the histories of others with reference to that of the West instead of contextualizing these histories in their local milieus. As this book shows, the Qing activities in Korea in the late nineteenth century were a manifestation not of imperialism, but of Zongfan empiricism. The argument of Qing imperialism, including both High Qing imperialism and Late Qing imperialism, serves as a normative tool for interpreting the constant changes undergone by China in its various forms. In order to explain those changes, this book renegotiates Qing imperialism by presenting the Qing as an empire that used ideological tools—the Chosŏn model and a set of imperial norms embodied by the model—to establish and consolidate its political authority and
cultural superiority in the Chinese world. What I call “Zongfanism” in this book can provide us with a different perspective for observing the rise and fall of the Eurasian Chinese empire under the Qing Dynasty and the rise of modern sovereign states in China and its neighboring countries. Zongfanism refers to a Chinese system of political and diplomatic communication conducted between, on the one hand, a political entity that culturally identified itself as the exclusive civilized center of the world, and, on the other hand, the political entities on its periphery that the center considered less civilized or even barbarian. The sovereign of the center possessed absolute patriarchal authority over the monarchs of the subordinate entities, while the two sides enjoyed mutually constitutive legitimacy in- formed by their shared politico-cultural norms. Zongfanism transcends the entrenched divide between premodern and modern Chinese history. Historians have generally identified the Opium War of 1839–42 as the twilight of premodern China and the dawn of modern China. Along these lines, the mainstream narrative of Qing China holds that the pre-modern system of China’s foreign relations was incompatible with the modern treaty system, with which it was finally replaced. The principal problem with this paradigm lies not in its Eurocentrism per se (indeed, “modern” is a criterion rooted in European history) but rather in its neglect of constant factors within China’s foreign policy that bridged the premodern and modern periods without conspicuous changes. In other words, the factors that historians have widely identified as having led to the “stagnation” of China before it encountered the industrialized West constitute the very key to understanding late imperial China.⁵⁹ The Chinese empire lived with its indigenous norms, not imported ones. The Zongfan perspective does not aim to replace that of Qing imperialism, nor can it completely account for the Qing’s activities during the high tide of the Manchu conquest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from Manchuria to the Korean peninsula and from Xinjiang to Tibet.⁶⁰ It instead aims to reveal the crucial relationships between the construction and dissemination of imperial ideology from the center to the periphery on the one hand, and imperial top-down statecraft in practice on the other. In the early twenty-first century, China has begun to exploit sophisticated ideas drawn from its recent history to preserve the legitimacy and unity of the multiethnic and multicultural Chinese state and to manage its relations with neighboring countries and the world. In this contemporary context, it may be helpful to examine the trajectory of changes in the Chinese world from an inside perspective, and the following chapters seek to do just that.
Introduction
Day dawned on April 25, 1644, in the seventeenth year of the reign of the Chongzhen emperor of the Ming Dynasty of China. As the first rays of the sun struck the walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing, a large group of rebels stormed the gates. Right before the rebels swarmed the imperial halls, the emperor managed to climb up an artificial hill behind the palace and hang himself from a tree. His loyal servant, a eunuch who had cared for the desperate thirty-three-year-old emperor since the latter’s birth, hanged himself from another tree. The Ming Dynasty, or the Great Ming, which had governed China for 277 years, came to a sudden end.
The Ming’s unexpected demise put one of its generals, Wu Sangui (1612–78), who was fighting on the front lines of an unrelated conflict about 190 miles east of Beijing, in an awkward position. General Wu was defending Shanhai Pass, a strategic military outpost of the Great Wall connecting inner China with Manchuria, in the war with the Qing, a regime founded in 1616 by the nomadic Manchus in Manchuria. The war had lasted for almost three decades, during which the Manchus had decisively defeated the Ming troops in Manchuria, subordinated neighboring Mongol tribes, and conquered the Chosŏn Dynasty of Korea, a loyal tributary state of China. Shanhai Pass became the last fortification preventing the formidable barbarians, as both Ming Chinese and Chosŏn Koreans regarded the Manchus, from entering inner China. As Beijing fell into the rebels’ hands, General Wu lost his country overnight. In Manchuria, the Manchu emperor seized the opportunity to send his troops under the leadership of Prince Dorgon (1612–50) to the outskirts of Shanhai Pass, where the army waited to cross the Great Wall to enter inner China. Meanwhile, the rebels in Beijing began to march toward the pass, with General Wu’s father as a hostage, in order to annihilate Wu. In this life-or-death situation, Wu chose the Manchus as his allies. He opened the giant gate to allow the Manchu forces to pass through the Great Wall and help him defeat the rebels.
Among those who entered the pass along with the Manchu forces was the crown prince of Chosŏn Korea. The prince had been living with the Manchus for seven years, since 1637, when the Manchus had conquered Chosŏn and taken him and his younger brother hostage.¹ The guardians of the pass, General Wu’s army, also included people of Korean origin. Among them was a young Korean officer, Ch’oe Hyo-il, who had joined General Wu’s anti-Manchu fight after 1627, when the Manchus first invaded Chosŏn. Ch’oe was not to live long, but he did not die at the hands of the Manchu conquerors. On June 6, 1644, the Manchus took over Beijing without a fight. In a hall standing amid the debris of the Forbidden City, which had been burned by the rebels, Prince Dorgon accepted the capitulation of the Chinese officials of the Ming, witnessed by the Korean crown prince. Ch’oe, however, refused to prostrate himself in front of the Manchu prince, who in his mind was a barbarian. Instead, dressed in a Ming-style robe, he went to Chongzhen’s tomb to mourn for the Ming—the civilized Middle Kingdom, or Zhongguo in Chinese. Ch’oe died near the tomb after a seven-day hunger strike. General Wu buried his body and commemorated him in an elegy.²
A Korean subject, Ch’oe died not only for the Chinese emperor but also for a civilization embodied by the Chinese dynasty and his homeland. Yet when he sacrificed himself, he did not realize that the Manchu regime was transforming itself by embracing the ideological, political, and cultural norms of the same civilization. More importantly, before it crossed the Great Wall in 1644, the Qing had begun to use its hierarchical relationship with Chosŏn to fashion itself as the civilized center of the world. As history unfolded, this relationship lasted for 258 years until the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, and it continued to exert a strong influence over China and Korea thereafter. From the early seventeenth to the early twentieth century, the Qing used its relationship with Chosŏn as an ideological tool to consolidate its identity as the Middle Kingdom and to manage its relations with other neighboring countries and the newly conquered polities that stretched from Manchuria and the Mongol steppe to Turkestan and the Himalayas. By the time the Eurasian empire fell apart in 1911, Qing China had evolved into a multiethnic and multicultural modern state, providing a solid foundation for state building in the rest of the twentieth century. Among the factors that helped the
Qing remake the Chinese empire, what stood out in particular were the politico-cultural discourse and imperial norms drawn from the Manchu-Korean contacts. These took place within a hierarchical framework I call Zongfan, a term I will explain below. The microhistory of Manchu-Korean relations vividly reflects the macrohistory of China’s transformation during the course of the three centuries, making Sino-Korean relations distinct from China’s relations with other countries.
This book reveals the development of China from an empire into a modern state through the lens of the dynamics of Sino-Korean political relations from 1616 to 1911. It incorporates Chosŏn Korea into the historical narrative of Qing China by examining the high politics of the two countries. The book shows that the Manchu regime used its constant relations with Chosŏn to establish, legitimize, consolidate, and present its identity as the civilized center of the known world, as a cosmopolitan empire, and as a modern sovereign state. By employing a long-term historical and cross-border perspective to observe the bilateral relationship, this book casts new light on the rise and inner changes of the Chinese empire during the Qing period, the clashes between the Chinese foreign-relations system and its Western counterpart, and the formation of modern sovereign states in East Asia.
Revitalizing the Concept of Zongfan in the Narrative of Late Imperial China
I use the Chinese term Zongfan, or in some cases the English phrase Chinese world order, rather than the oft-adopted English translation tributary, to refer to the nature of the hierarchical relationship between late imperial China and its subordinate countries, which included Korea. I reserve the term tributary for related aspects of this system.³ Late imperial China in this book refers to China from 1368 to 1911, namely, the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing periods following the collapse of the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) of the Mongol Empire. As I argue below, the Zongfan system was central to establishing the political orthodox legitimacy of China and its subordinate countries. As a key concept of Confucianism, political orthodox legitimacy (Ch., Zhengtong) refers to the universal ideological, moral, cultural, and social rationale behind the legitimate status of a political entity in the hierarchy of the Chinese world. In late imperial times, this legitimacy entailed name and status (Ch., mingfen) and great unification (Ch., da yitong) and found its dedicated audience in the ruling elites and Confucian scholars of Ming and Qing China, Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910), and Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868).⁴
As a politico-cultural structure, the Zongfan system is believed to have been established in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). It was associated with the kinship-based feudal system (Ch., zongfa fengjian) of the day. This system was practiced between two sides, Zong and fan. Zong refers to the royal lineage of the Chinese monarch, who claimed to be the Son of Heaven (Ch., tianzi) residing in the Middle Kingdom with absolute patriarchal authority and exclusive orthodox legitimacy as the human agent of the Mandate of Heaven (Ch., tianming). Fan originally meant the clan(s) of the royal family who established outposts on China’s borders, where the rulers’ legitimacy was dependent on investiture by the Son of Heaven. The two sides of the kinship constituted the familistic hierarchy and the order of all-under-Heaven (Ch., tianxia)—the known universe to the people within this political entity.⁵
The connotation of China’s periphery evolved within this feudalistic model by incorporating all countries or polities outside China into the category of fan. According to the ideal tenets, on a regular basis the fan dispatched emissaries, ministers of ministers (Ch., peichen), bearing taxes or tribute to the central court, where they would offer appropriate obedience to the Son of Heaven and receive largesse or gifts. In return, the court would not only send envoys to the fan to invest the rulers with legitimate titles but also protect the fan whenever necessary. This reciprocity was the foundation of the double policy of serving the great (Ch., shida) and cherishing the small (Ch., zixiao). The exchanges of emissaries following ritual codes dictated by the Middle Kingdom kept the Zongfan system running. This model later evolved into the basic philosophy of the foreign policy of late imperial China.⁶
In addition to being defined by its geographical distance from the central court, the fan could also be characterized in kinship terms as inner fan and outer fan.
The inner fan maintained a strong blood relationship with the emperor, but the outer fan did not. In the case of Korea, the situation was complex. The imperial norms of the successive Chinese dynasties preferred to ascribe the beginning of Sino-Korean kinship to Jizi (K., Kija), a royal member of the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600–1046 BC) who was believed to have been invested by the Western Zhou court with the lands of ancient Chosŏn. This legend produced an assumption of a unique cultural homogeneity that the Chinese side deeply endorsed and that helped unified Chinese dynasties see Korea as belonging within China’s territorial perimeter.⁷ The Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) and the Tang Dynasty (618–907) invaded Korea and integrated parts of the Korean lands into China. In the 1260s the Mongol forces of the Yuan Dynasty gradually came to control the Koryŏ Dynasty of Korea (918–1392), and in the 1270s the Mongol court invested King Ch’ungnyŏl (r. 1274–1308), who married the Princess of Qi of Kublai Khan, as the consort of the imperial princess and the king of Koryŏ (K., Puma Koryŏ kugwang).⁸ After the Ming overthrew the Yuan, it ceased practicing the Yuan’s policy toward Koryŏ, which had been based on strong personal ties between the Mongol and Korean courts through state marriage.
After its establishment in 1368, the Ming followed the feudal principles of the Zhou Dynasty and the Zongfan practice of the Yuan in establishing the Zongfan system within its domain, but it had no desire to extend the system to Koryŏ. The founding father of the new dynasty claimed that Ming China would never invade Koryŏ or fourteen other neighboring countries. In 1392 a new Korean regime replaced Koryŏ and immediately sent emissaries to China to pursue imperial investiture of the kingship. Although the Ming conferred the title Chosŏn on the new regime, after Jizi Chosŏn, it did not endow the Korean king with investiture until 1401, when Emperor Jianwen (r. 1399–1402) invested the third king of Chosŏn (T’aejong, r. 1400–1418), formally extending the Zongfan arrangement to the kingdom. In the imperial mandate, the Ming underlined that the king should serve as a fence of the civilized kingdom and assist China forever (Ch., yongfu yu Zhongguo).⁹ In 1403 Emperor Yongle (r. 1402–24) awarded the same king an official robe commensurate with the rank of first-degree prince (Ch., qinwang, a brother of the emperor), further integrating Chosŏn into the Ming Zongfan system.¹⁰
In the transition from the Yuan-Koryŏ relationship to the Ming-Chosŏn one, the Ming made a consequential shift in China’s policy toward Korea: China allowed Korea independence as a foreign country in practice, but it continued to regulate the bilateral relationship with reference to Zongfan norms in the domestic feudal sense and on the ideological level. In the familistic and culturally homogeneous Zongfan context, the Ming depicted Chosŏn as an outer fan descending from Jizi, while Chosŏn identified itself as a vassal (K., chehu; Ch., zhuhou) of the Ming court and viewed their relationship in father-son and monarch-subordinate terms.¹¹ Simultaneously, Neo-Confucianism (K., Chŏngju hak), which celebrated Confucian social hierarchy, had become the ruling ideology during the Yuan Dynasty, and had lately been introduced to Korea, helping to institutionalize and stabilize this bilateral relationship.¹² After the Ming rescued Chosŏn from a Japanese invasion in the 1590s, Chosŏn became even more committed to the Ming, regarding the Ming as its parent nation (K., pumo chi pang).¹³ This arrangement seemed similar to the feudalism practiced in medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan, but as a cross-border framework it possessed features unique to the Confucianism-supported Chinese world. As part 2 of this book demonstrates, in the nineteenth century the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship built on these features confused European and Japanese diplomats, who could not find historical precedents for it within their own worlds. However, as scholars have pointed out, applying the Ming-Chosŏn hierarchical relationship to Sino-Korean contacts or China’s foreign relations before 1400 would be ahistorical.¹⁴
The Qing inherited the Ming Zongfan mechanism in its contacts with Chosŏn, but the Manchus’ kinship relations with Mongol tribes complicated the outer fan spectrum of the empire. This point is illustrated by the multilayered nature of the outer fan and the varied usage of the term in Qing political discourse, particularly in referring to political entities within the Qing pilgrimage system (Ch., chaojin) and to countries in Southeast Asia, such as Siam (Thailand).¹⁵ The Manchu court nevertheless understood Chosŏn and other subordinate entities as members of the Qing-centric family, in which the position of these entities was similar or
even equal to that of their Mongol counterparts.¹⁶ As the Ministry of Rites (Ch., Libu) described it to the Qianlong emperor in 1768 in the context of investing the Korean king’s grandson as the successor to the throne, "The outer fan are the same as Zongfan in terms of their relations with the central court" (Ch., Waifan zhi yu zongfan, shi shu xiangtong). Similarly, in 1790 the Qianlong emperor awarded the Vietnamese king, Nguyễn Huệ (r. 1788–92), a golden leather belt that only Zongfan of the royal family could use.¹⁷ The term Zongfan aptly encapsulates the relationship between the center/patriarch and the periphery/family members during the Qing period, and for this reason I have revitalized it in this book.
Reinterpreting the Rise of the Modern Chinese State through the Lens of Qing-Chosŏn Relations
The involvement of Chosŏn in the Ming-Qing war led to two fierce Manchu invasions of the country in 1627 and 1636. After conquering Chosŏn in early 1637, the Qing established a Zongfan relationship with it by replacing the Ming in the patriarchal position. Scholars have widely regarded Sino-Korean relations in China’s late imperial period as the quintessential manifestation of the Sinocentric order.¹⁸ Some scholars have tended to attribute the uniqueness of the relationship to the parties’ shared Confucian culture, especially Neo-Confucianism, while others have preferred to emphasize China’s political or military influence or control in the hegemonic sense.¹⁹ This book embraces the cultural perspective, but it simultaneously underlines the significant effect that the Manchu use of violence had on the establishment and maintenance of Qing-Chosŏn ties in the early seventeenth century. More importantly, I avoid enshrining the Qing-Chosŏn relationship in the pantheon of Chinese narratives of Sino-Korean relations since the Western Zhou, and I refrain from conflating the Qing-Chosŏn relationship with that between the Ming and Chosŏn. Rather, I explore the unique and crucial role of these bonds in providing the Qing with the political, intellectual, and ideological sources with which it reconstructed itself and the Chinese empire and eventually gave birth to a modern Chinese state.
A key term in analyzing the Sinocentric hierarchical arrangement between Qing China and other countries imagined in Qing imperial discourse is yi. Like so many abstract terms in Chinese (or indeed any language), its meaning varies according to context, but I have generally translated it as barbarians. As the following chapters show, yi, which was often used to describe outsiders in Sino-foreign contacts, did not necessarily carry a pejorative connotation. I also demonstrate a change in the meaning of yi from the perspective of the Manchu regime. The story of the Qing-Chosŏn relationship unfolds within the broader process of the Qing’s efforts to meet the unprecedented challenge of proving its orthodox legitimacy in the politico-cultural setting of the civilized vs. barbarian distinction (Ch., Hua–Yi zhi bian; K., Hwa–I ŭi chai).²⁰ It was against the background of this civilized–barbarian dichotomy that the Korean warrior Ch’oi sacrificed himself in Manchu-occupied Beijing, and it was in light of this distinction that his homeland strengthened its identity as Little China (K., So Chunghwa) in the post-Ming era, while the Qing positioned itself within the pedigree of the Middle Kingdom as the civilized center and the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao).
The establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship in 1637 was a watershed event in the history of the Qing’s prodigious enterprise of redefining itself and remaking the Chinese world. Scholars have commonly dated the Ming-Qing transition to the Manchu occupation of Beijing in 1644, but the Manchu regime in fact had initiated its bid for status as the Middle Kingdom at least a decade earlier, by employing the politico-cultural discourse embedded in the Zongfan structure. After 1637, the Qing progressively converted Chosŏn into a prototypical outer subordinate, known as waifan (outer fan) or shuguo (subordinate country) in the Chinese language and tulergi gurun (outer country) or harangga gurun (subordinate country) in the Manchu language. Very significantly, the Qing imperial terms abruptly reversed the Manchu-Korean hierarchical arrangement in the Ming period by portraying Chosŏn as a country of barbarians on the periphery of the Qing.
In its frequent contacts with Chosŏn from 1637 to 1643, the Qing strengthened the new bilateral political arrangement and developed a mature model for managing its relations with other newly conquered or subordinated entities. I call this model the Chosŏn model (Ch., Chaoxian shili, lit. Korean cases/examples).
As part 1 explains, the model constituted a pattern by which a country or a political entity could follow Chosŏn into the Qing-centric Zongfan system primarily by receiving imperial investitures from the Qing, adopting the regnal titles and calendar of the Qing, and sending emissaries and tribute to the Qing on a regular basis. The idea behind this model was to encourage outlying regions to embrace the Qing as the civilized center of the world and to affirm its supreme political and cultural position. After 1644, as the Qing continued its conquest of inner China by marching west and southwest, it used the Chosŏn model as a handy soft-power weapon to manage its political relations with other entities and to consolidate its new identification as the center of all-under-Heaven.
The Qing-Chosŏn hierarchy was far more than just the final chapter in the long Sino-Korean Zongfan history. Rather, it buttressed the rationale of the entire Zongfan system by keeping the periphery of the Chinese empire informed and regulated while the Manchu regime controlled and remade the empire at the core. The Qing’s dynamic relations with its first Confucian outer fan—Chosŏn—played a vital role in establishing, institutionalizing, and nourishing the entire Qing-centric system of foreign relations. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Qing had constructed a new imperial order within and beyond its Eurasian empire. It had simultaneously labeled Britain and other European states countries of barbarians and posited them on the periphery of China. These states, however, changed their status vis-à-vis China through gunboat diplomacy and treaties in the nineteenth century, when they encountered the Chinese world through such outer fan as Annam (Vietnam), Ryukyu, and Chosŏn. The introduction, translation, and dissemination of international law in the Chinese world put China, China’s outer fan, and the European states on an equal footing in terms of their state sovereignty. Nevertheless, the relationship between Qing China and its outer fan remained unchanged until the very end of the nineteenth century in that they still needed each other to acquire mutually constitutive and mutually defined orthodox legitimacy in their own world.
What confused the Western states in their contacts with the outer fan of China in the late nineteenth century was the nebulous nature of the Zongfan mechanism that constantly shunted them into perplexing negotiations with Beijing, the only place where diplomacy with outsiders could be conducted in accordance with Zongfan conventions. The disputes emerging at the periphery of China were thus transferred to the center of the empire, where they converged as an accumulative force to trigger certain reforms within China that in turn spread to and deeply influenced the periphery. Although this model may seem similar to contemporary relationships between European powers and their overseas colonies, it had a fundamentally different structure, as later sections and chapters will elaborate. The most typical case among the manifold and interwoven disputes regarding this mechanism arose in Chosŏn Korea.
The political and diplomatic conundrum of the international status of Chosŏn led the Qing and Chosŏn into legal quagmires and prompted both sides to modify their time-honored relations in the context of both the inner and the outer dual networks, as chapters 5 and 6 explain. But the various adjustments made to the relationship on both sides in the chaotic decade of the 1880s kept the Zongfan fundamentals untouched, as neither side could overcome the ideological dilemma caused by their mutually constitutive legitimacy at the level of high politics in the Confucian world. This double bind meant that colonizing Chosŏn was not an option for China in the turbulent period before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894. The growing controversy between China, Korea, Japan, and Western states finally resulted in the termination of the Sino-Korean Zongfan relationship in 1895. Accordingly, the cosmopolitan Chinese empire withdrew its political and cultural reach from its subordinate countries and became identical with the Chinese state defined by the norms of international law. After the war, China and Korea negotiated a new treaty for an equal state-to-state relationship, but the new arrangement lasted only a few years before both the Chosŏn Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty ceased to exist in 1910 and 1911, respectively. This book describes the trajectory of this varied relationship and shows its significance for the development of modern China and East Asia.
Revisiting the Chinese Empire under the Qing
This book defines the Qing as an empire and as a Chinese empire. As I explain below, this empire included Chosŏn in a politico-cultural sense. The term empire as a European concept that was always traced back to the Romans did not exist in the Chinese political lexicon until 1895, when the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Shimonoseki addressed the Qing as the Great Qing Empire in Chinese characters (Da Qing diguo), as a counterpart to the Great Japanese Empire (Dai Nippon teikoku).²¹ None of the ruling dynasties before the end of the Qing ever claimed to hold an empire, either in Chinese or, when the ruling house was not Han Chinese, in any other language. Even nowadays, describing a Chinese dynasty as an empire remains rare among historians in China. Nevertheless, if we define an empire broadly as a political entity in which different peoples are governed differently, Chinese history from 221 BC, when the Qin Dynasty (221–207 BC) unified China as a multiethnic polity, to the present is clearly a history of empires.²² In this book, the Chinese empire (Ch., Zhonghua diguo) refers to a multiethnic and multicultural polity in which the Middle Kingdom represented the political and cultural core against the background of the civilized–barbarian distinction and for which the concepts of Mandate of Heaven and all-under-Heaven served as constitutional ideologies to establish its political orthodox legitimacy and Confucian orthodox legitimacy (Ch., daotong). This definition may not fit all the dynasties that claimed the name of the Middle Kingdom, because, as R. Bin Wong observes, the ideas and institutions of this empire were neither constant over time nor uniform through space.²³ But it applies to the dynasties in Chinese history such as the Tang, the Northern and Southern Song (960–1279), the Liao (907–1125), the Xixia (1038–1227), the Jin (1115–1234), the Yuan, the Ming, and the Qing.
The Manchu ethnicity of the imperial house was not a barrier to the Qing’s presentation of itself as a Chinese empire, in particular after 1644, when the term Chinese (Ch., Zhongguo ren) took on a multiethnic character. The Qing had presented itself as a Chinese empire as early as 1689 in the Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia. The original treaty text, written in Latin by the French Jesuit Jean-François Gerbillon (1654–1707), who was serving the Manchu court, called the Qing Sinicum Imperium (Chinese Empire) as a counterpart to Ruthenicum Imperium (Russian Empire). The French version of the treaty rendered the term as l’Empire de la Chine (Empire of China) as a counterpart to l’Empire de Moscovie (Empire of Muscovy).²⁴ In the Manchu translation of the treaty, the Qing court used the term Dulimbai gurun to define itself as China/Zhongguo; this term is equivalent to Chinese Empire in the other versions of the text.²⁵
When Chinese became a multiethnic descriptor, the Qing also became the representative of Chinese culture, in particular the Confucianism that lay at the core of imperial political discourse. In 1712 Emperor Kangxi instructed the Manchu official Tulišen (1667–1740), an envoy to the Turgūt Mongols in Russia, that if the khan of Russia (Ma., Cagan han) asked what was esteemed in China, Tulišen should respond that our country takes fidelity, filial piety, benevolence, justice, and sincerity as fundamentals.²⁶ All of these concepts came from Confucianism, not from Manchu ideologies. After all, it was this Confucian identity and politico-cultural discourse informed by Confucianism, not the Qing’s Manchu characteristics or its realpolitik practiced along the newly conquered frontiers in Inner Asia, that determined the Qing’s political orthodox legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom and enabled it to obtain and justify Confucian orthodox legitimacy. This Confucian identity on the state level later helped the Qing display its Chineseness and win strong support from Han Chinese scholars, who assisted the dynasty in weathering the storm of anti-Manchu rebellions in the nineteenth century. This book broadly defines Chineseness as the state of being the legitimate Middle Kingdom, thus referring to statecraft, not ethnicity.
I interpret the Chinese empire under the Qing in two dimensions: the territorial empire and the politico-cultural empire. The territorial Chinese empire was equal to the Great Qing, composed primarily of the Manchu court, the inner provinces (Ch., zhisheng, directly controlled provinces), and the first group of outer fan, which were under the management of the central institution of Lifan yuan. These outer fan included regions and groups such as the Cahar Mongols, Tibet, and Mongol and Muslim tribes in Xinjiang. The Chinese name Lifan yuan means "the ministry of managing the affairs of the fan," and it differs from the organization’s Manchu name, Tulergi golo be dasara jurgan, which means the institution in charge of the outer provinces. Scholars have generally translated it as "Court of
Colonial Affairs or Mongolian Superintendency." This book adopts the latter rendering. The politico-cultural Chinese empire encompassed not only these political entities but also the second group of outer fan, whose contacts with China took place via the Ministry of Rites and whose shared characteristic was their identification of the Son of Heaven in China as the highest sovereign in the world (see figure I.1).
FIGURE I.1. The structure of the Chinese empire during the Qing. A = the court; B = inner provinces; C = outer fan under the Mongolian Superintendency (MS); D = outer fan under the Ministry of Rites (MOR), primarily Chosŏn, Ryukyu, and Annam; E = Western countries listed by the Qing as outer fan; AB = inner China, or China proper; ABC = the Great Qing, or the territorial Chinese empire; ABCD = the politico-cultural Chinese empire; ABCDE = all-under-Heaven.
Three key issues in the relationship between China and its outer fan within the politico-cultural Chinese empire invite elaboration: sovereignty, borders, and subjects. These issues were woven together in imperial times by the cosmopolitan idea of all-under-Heaven and were critically questioned within the context of the nation-state order of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. China, or Zhongguo, had historically always been mutually defined by its relations with the countries on its periphery—that is, by a combination of the country’s own perception of itself and the devotion of its neighbors to Chinese civilization. The nebulous dual nature of China’s identity posed a challenge to Chinese scholars who sought to define China anew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by comparing it to European states. These scholars could not find an established and consistent name for their homeland in history. For example, Huang Zunxian (1848–1905), a distinguished diplomat and scholar, reviewed the conventional civilized–barbarian discourse and preferred to call China the central civilized country (Ch., Huaxia). In his treatise exploring the reasons for China’s weakness, Liang Qichao (1873–1929), an intellectual leader of China’s modernization, pointed out that for a long time the Chinese had seen no difference between state and all-under-Heaven or between state and court.²⁷ Huang’s and Liang’s arguments reflected the cosmopolitan nature of the Chinese world, in which sovereignty, borders, and subjects manifested themselves in ways distinct from those of its Western counterpart.
The nature of the sovereignty of an outer fan in the Chinese world was twofold: it was fully independent in terms of the territorial Chinese empire but fully dependent in relation to the politico-cultural Chinese empire. An outer fan enjoyed the right of independence, that is, autonomy or self-rule—zizhu in Chinese—within its boundaries. As Jean-Baptiste Grosier (1743–1823) in the 1780s and George N. Curzon (1859–1925) in the 1890s observed, the king of Chosŏn was an independent and supreme sovereign in his own lands.²⁸ The kings of the Nguyễn Dynasty (1802–1945) of Vietnam went even further, claiming to be emperors and calling Vietnam the Middle Kingdom in the first half of the nineteenth century.²⁹ The kingship of the fan, however, was ultimately subjugated to the emperorship of China. As demonstrated by Emperor Qianlong’s deposition of the king of Vietnam, Lê Duy Kỳ (1765–93), and his investment of a new king in 1789, the emperor possessed absolute patriarchal power over the kings. This was particularly true for the Confucian kingship of Chosŏn.³⁰ What determined this relationship was not China’s military power or geopolitical gravity or its suzerainty, as Western and Japanese diplomats understood it in the nineteenth century, but the mutually constitutive legitimacy of each side of the bilateral arrangement that was undergirded by Zongfan tenets and Confucian ethos. As a consequence, in the 1830s and the 1870s, the king of Chosŏn refused to negotiate with Western representatives on the grounds that "subordinates of a fan have no right to conduct diplomacy" (Ch., fanchen wu waijiao).³¹ Vietnam adhered to the same ideology until the early 1880s.³² Within this system, a Korean king did not have his own regnal title during his lifetime but gained a posthumous title or temple name, which is why I tend to refer to Korean kings as, simply, the king, or to use their names (Yi Chong, for example) rather than their temple names (Injo, Yi Chong’s temple name). Although the awarding of temple names to the kings could suggest a portrayal of Korea as independent of China in an abstract sense and in an intellectual sense, in practice China’s patriarchal and divine imperial power was always real and effective.³³
The differences between peoples on either side of the borders that separated Qing China and its outer fan were clear, but these distinctions were not translated into the language of nation-states, as illustrated by the Qing’s cartographic survey in the Kangxi period and the Qing’s juridical negotiations with Annam and Chosŏn over legal cases.³⁴ The territorial border between China and the outer fan could be diluted and blurred by the shared ideology of all-under-Heaven within
the Zongfan framework. In this cultural context, the Qing court treated fan such as Chosŏn as a part—even an indispensable part—of the imperial dynasty (Ch., huangchao) or the Heavenly Dynasty. For the most part, scholars do not consider countries such as Chosŏn to have been components of the Chinese empire during the Qing. This view results from the dissemination of nationalist historiography in East Asia since the late nineteenth century and cleaves closely to a territorial definition of the Chinese empire. The Chinese empire as a politico-cultural unit, however, encompassed its outer fan beyond China’s borders, where China’s centrality was further constructed by local manifestations of the divine authority of the Chinese sovereign. Believing that all lands of the outer fan were under his rule in this sense, Emperor Yongzheng demarcated a new border with Annam in 1727 that allowed Annam to extend its territory 12.45 miles (40 Chinese li) farther into China in order to end the territorial disputes between the two sides.
Chosŏn never ceased trying to redraw its borders, as reflected in its prolonged negotiations with China over border demarcation in the Tumen River area from the 1710s to the 1880s, yet the Korean court had endorsed the Chinese imperial discourse of all-under-Heaven since the Ming period.³⁵ In 1593, for example, the king of Chosŏn (Sŏnjo, r. 1567–1608) claimed that Chosŏn was a vassal (K., chehu) of China and had been regarded by the Chinese dynasties as an inner subordinate (K., naebok; Ch., neifu) since Jizi. The king further emphasized that Chosŏn is actually China’s land and China lets our country manage it.³⁶ In the 1730s the Qing historians in History of the Ming commented that "Chosŏn was the Ming’s subordinate country, but it was not different from an inner part of China [Ch., yunei]."³⁷ The position of Chosŏn as part of the Chinese empire remained unchanged during the Qing in terms of imperial norms. In 1784 and 1788, Emperor Qianlong noted that Korea was almost the peer of the Qing’s inner subordinates.³⁸ In the rituals that marked imperial edicts, the Qing imperial ritual code made it clear that the local officials of Chosŏn should perform the same rituals as did those in directly controlled provinces (Ch., ru zhisheng zhi yi).³⁹
Another indicator of Chosŏn’s position was the annual calendar of the Qing (Ch., Shixian li or Shixian shu; Ma., Erin forgon i ton i bithe), issued every year by the Imperial Astronomical Bureau (Ch., Qintian jian; Ma., Abka be ginggulere yamun), which Korean emissaries had to retrieve from Beijing. The calendar included charts of the sunrise and sunset times and charts of the solar terms in each province (Ch., gesheng; Ma., yaya golo) and each Mongol and Muslim tribe (Ch., ge menggu huibu; Ma., geren monggo be, hoise i aiman) under Qing jurisdiction. From 1645, when the Qing inaugurated the calendar, Chosŏn was included in the list of inner provinces such as Shanxi and Shandong and later showed up alongside Mukden, Nerchinsk (Ma., Nibcu), Sanxing (Ma., Ilan hala), Bodune (Ma., Bedune), Heilongjiang (Ma., Sahaliyan ula), and Jilin. Following Chosŏn, Annam was added to the lists in 1789 and Ryukyu in 1810.⁴⁰ As Johan Elverskog has pointed out, A fundamental role of the emperor was to control the flow of time properly by creating the calendar and propitiating its cultural force through ritual and ceremony.⁴¹ Many maps of the known world produced by the cartographers of the Qing and Chosŏn in the eighteenth century, such as the Huangyu quanlan tu (Map of a complete view of the imperial lands, known as the Kangxi Atlas), also presented and substantiated this cosmopolitan ideology by including Chosŏn as part of the empire.⁴² The Qing thus subtly but unmistakably incorporated the group of outer fan into the Chinese empire.
Cosmopolitan ideas strongly shaped the Qing’s understanding of the subjects within and beyond its borders, even after international law reached China in the 1860s. In 1643, for instance, the Qing emphasized to Chosŏn that the two countries have become one family (Ch., liangguo yijia) and that the people of Chosŏn are also ours.⁴³ In 1882, when the Chinese governors in Manchuria reported to Beijing that many poor Korean peasants had crossed the border to cultivate Chinese lands, Emperor Guangxu noted, "In the eyes of the local officials, there is certainly a line between them and us [Ch., bici zhi fen], but in the eyes of the court, there is originally no difference between the inside and the outside [Ch., neiwai zhi bie]."⁴⁴ A group of Korean students learning Western technologies in Tianjin in 1882 were also treated by Chinese officials as loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao zhi chizi) and were granted free tuition.⁴⁵ In 1886 the Guangxu emperor emphasized that Chosŏn was close to Beijing and had no particular difference from other provinces in the inner land (Ch., you yu neidi
xingsheng wuyi).⁴⁶ For Qing China, Chosŏn was equal to a domestic subordinate (Ch., neichen), which might have been the impetus behind the proposals made by a large number of Chinese officials in the 1880s to convert Chosŏn into prefectures and counties of China—an approach I call provincialization—in order to save our Chosŏn (Ch., wo Chaoxian).
Within the Zongfan framework, these factors—sovereignty, borders, and subjects—were not complex issues between Qing China and its outer fan. But when international law and the norms embedded in it, such as sovereignty and suzerainty, reached East Asia in the 1860s and acted as a catalyst for the independence (Ch., duli; K., t’ŭngnip; J., dokuritsu) of the outer fan, these issues became controversial and began to be reconsidered and redefined in accordance with the imported legal terms in both China and its outer fan. Nevertheless, as part 2 of this book shows, the politico-cultural Chinese empire connecting the Middle Kingdom and its outer fan remained unchanged at that time, because international law could not endow the two sides with the necessary political orthodox legitimacy.
What drew China into the wars with France in Vietnam in 1883 and with Japan in Chosŏn in 1894, therefore, was not the territorial Chinese empire but the politico-cultural one. Similarly, what Japan defeated in 1895 was the tangible former rather than the invisible latter. In this regard, this book reveals the complexity of the dual presentation of the Chinese empire under the Qing, in particular in the late nineteenth century, when China and Korea tried to deliver a legal definition of their relationship to Japan and Western states. After 1895 the politico-cultural empire began to draw back from its extended frontier in its subordinate countries to China’s geographical borders, eventually becoming identical to the territorial empire. Through the decline of the politico-cultural empire emerged a modern Chinese state.
In his study of empires and states, Frederick Cooper argued that France only became a nation-state in 1962, when it gave up the last vital element of its imperial structure, Algeria.⁴⁷ Although China is not France and Korea is not Algeria, Korea had served for centuries as a key part of the politico-cultural Chinese empire, and under the Qing it acted as an outlying province of the empire in the Qing imperial norms.⁴⁸ It is thus not an exaggeration to say that China became a modern nation-state only once it recognized the absolute independence and sovereignty of the Korean state after World War II, especially after the Korean War in the 1950s. It was also in the 1950s that the People’s Republic of China officially endorsed the independence of the Mongolian People’s Republic, which had been part of the Chinese empire under the Qing, while at the same time integrating the northwestern region of the empire—Xinjiang and Tibet—into the territory of New China. At that point, the Korean side finally accomplished the prolonged process of decentering China and became equal to its Chinese counterpart.⁴⁹ Within this conceptual framework, this book traces the historical process through which both China and Korea detached themselves from the Chinese empire and moved toward modern state building in the postimperial era.
Renegotiating Qing Imperialism
Scholars of China and East Asia have commonly identified imperialism (Ch., Diguo zhuyi) with the West or Japan. As a concept, imperialism refers to a system that was underpinned by a series of aggressive political, economic, or diplomatic policies carried out by Western and Japanese powers against other states. Through these policies, the imperial powers attempted to reap the highest possible profits from the countries they subjugated via unequal treaties, while competing with each other for primacy. Imperialism is thus seen as a holdover of Western capitalism (Ch., Ziben zhuyi) and colonialism (Ch., Zhimin zhuyi) that reached the Chinese world aggressively after 1800.⁵⁰ This interpretation also reflects a phenomenon that scholars have called the great divergence between China and the West in world economic history.⁵¹ The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 marks the rise of imperialism in East Asia, a regime under which Qing China, too, suffered heavily. Historical narratives along these lines have promoted a Chinese victim mentality and nourished Chinese nationalism in the twentieth century, in particular after the Leninist definition of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism became popular in scholarship.⁵²
Since the second half of the twentieth century, two groups of scholars have questioned and complicated this received wisdom. The first group comprises students of the High Qing (that is, from the Kangxi to the Qianlong period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), who have promulgated the paradigm of New Qing history that is characterized by an Inner Asian and ethnic approach to interpreting the multiethnic and multicultural Qing.⁵³ The second group consists of students of Sino-Korean relations who have depicted Qing China’s policy toward Chosŏn in the late nineteenth century as imperialism. The approach of the first group might be called High Qing imperialism, and that of the second group Late Qing imperialism.
The High Qing imperialism school describes the High Qing as an institutional agent of imperialism, a system of coercive instruments aimed at extending the core area of the empire and keeping the empire functioning. This Qing imperialism manifested itself in geopolitical and global competitions between the Qing, the Mongol khanates and Muslim tribes in Inner Asia, the indigenous and cross-border tribes in southwestern China, the Russian Empire, and the British Empire.⁵⁴ Chinese and European colonialism and capitalism found their place in these intense competitions.⁵⁵ What fundamentally supports this argument of Qing imperialism is the fact of the Qing’s territorial expansion by force, followed by the political and cultural hegemony that it introduced to the newly conquered borderlands. However, if the High Qing was an agent of imperialism, all Chinese regimes that extended China’s borders would fall into the same category, including the Han, the Tang, the Yuan, the Ming, and the People’s Republic of China. In this sense, the thesis of High Qing imperialism risks detaching its interpretations of the Qing Empire from the pre-Qing Chinese historical context and being construed as a complement to Eurocentric narratives of imperialism in the broader context.
The argument of Late Qing imperialism, by contrast, distinguishes the Qing from its predecessors in Chinese history by asserting that the Late Qing exercised imperialism through coercive means characterized by power politics and economic expansion in the late nineteenth century. The leading proponents of this approach concede that the Late Qing was a victim of Western and Japanese imperialism but claim that it simultaneously practiced its own imperialism over weaker countries. This overseas imperialism fits the general definition that historians have drawn from the history of the Roman Empire: an unequal power relationship between two states in which the dominant state exercises various forms of control, often forcibly, over the weaker state.⁵⁶ Whereas the theory of High Qing imperialism does not take the Manchu conquest of Chosŏn in 1637 into consideration and leaves Chosŏn largely off the list of victims of that imperialism, Chosŏn is typically the only identified victim of Late Qing imperialism, which was embodied by activities such as sending troops to Chosŏn and obtaining treaty ports and settlements through unequal treaties that granted the Chinese extraterritoriality. The concept of informal empire, originally coined to refer to the powerful economic expansion of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, provides this argument with further intellectual support.⁵⁷ In retrospect, the argument of Late Qing imperialism bears a remarkable resemblance to the interpretation of China’s behavior in Chosŏn put forward by Western diplomats and observers in the nineteenth century. As M. Frederick Nelson has pointed out, "Under the assumption that China had nothing but a religious and ceremonial connection with Korea, Westerners viewed her growing de facto control of Korea as pure and unjustified power politics directed against an independent state."⁵⁸ By likening the Qing to its Western imperial counterparts, the thesis of Late Qing imperialism homogenizes Qing China as a major participant and a powerful predator in Eurocentric global history, therefore strengthening the approach of interpreting the histories of others with reference to that of the West instead of contextualizing these histories in their local milieus. As this book shows, the Qing activities in Korea in the late nineteenth century were a manifestation not of imperialism, but of Zongfan empiricism.
The argument of Qing imperialism, including both High Qing imperialism and Late Qing imperialism, serves as a normative tool for interpreting the constant changes undergone by China in its various forms. In order to explain those changes, this book renegotiates Qing imperialism by presenting the Qing as an empire that used ideological tools—the Chosŏn model and a set of imperial norms embodied by the model—to establish and consolidate its political authority and
cultural superiority in the Chinese world. What I call Zongfanism in this book can provide us with a different perspective for observing the rise and fall of the Eurasian Chinese empire under the Qing Dynasty and the rise of modern sovereign states in China and its neighboring countries. Zongfanism refers to a Chinese system of political and diplomatic communication conducted between, on the one hand, a political entity that culturally identified itself as the exclusive civilized center of the world, and, on the other hand, the political entities on its periphery that the center considered less civilized or even barbarian. The sovereign of the center possessed absolute patriarchal authority over the monarchs of the subordinate entities, while the two sides enjoyed mutually constitutive legitimacy informed by their shared politico-cultural norms.
Zongfanism transcends the entrenched divide between premodern and modern Chinese history. Historians have generally identified the Opium War of 1839–42 as the twilight of premodern China and the dawn of modern China. Along these lines, the mainstream narrative of Qing China holds that the pre-modern system of China’s foreign relations was incompatible with the modern treaty system, with which it was finally replaced. The principal problem with this paradigm lies not in its Eurocentrism per se (indeed, modern is a criterion rooted in European history) but rather in its neglect of constant factors within China’s foreign policy that bridged the premodern and modern periods without conspicuous changes. In other words, the factors that historians have widely identified as having led to the stagnation of China before it encountered the industrialized West constitute the very key to understanding late imperial China.⁵⁹ The Chinese empire lived with its indigenous norms, not imported ones.
The Zongfan perspective does not aim to replace that of Qing imperialism, nor can it completely account for the Qing’s activities during the high tide of the Manchu conquest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from Manchuria to the Korean peninsula and from Xinjiang to Tibet.⁶⁰ It instead aims to reveal the crucial relationships between the construction and dissemination of imperial ideology from the center to the periphery on the one hand, and imperial top-down statecraft in practice on the other. In the early twenty-first century, China has begun to exploit sophisticated ideas drawn from its recent history to preserve the legitimacy and unity of the multiethnic and multicultural Chinese state and to manage its relations with neighboring countries and the world. In this contemporary context, it may be helpful to examine the trajectory of changes in the Chinese world from an inside perspective, and the following chapters seek to do just that.
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Introduction Day dawned on April 25, 1644, in the seventeenth year of the reign of the Chongzhen emperor of the Ming Dynasty of China. As the first rays of the sun struck the walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing, a large group of rebels stormed the gates. Right before the rebels swarmed the imperial halls, the emperor managed to climb up an artificial hill behind the palace and hang himself from a tree. His loyal servant, a eunuch who had cared for the desperate thirty-three-year-old em- peror since the latter’s birth, hanged himself from another tree. The Ming Dynasty, or the Great Ming, which had governed China for 277 years, came to a sudden end. The Ming’s unexpected demise put one of its generals, Wu Sangui (1612–78), who was fighting on the front lines of an unrelated conflict about 190 miles east of Beijing, in an awkward position. General Wu was defending Shanhai Pass, a strategic military outpost of the Great Wall connecting inner China with Manchuria, in the war with the Qing, a regime founded in 1616 by the nomadic Manchus in Manchuria. The war had lasted for almost three decades, during which the Manchus had decisively defeated the Ming troops in Manchuria, subordinated neighboring Mongol tribes, and conquered the Chosŏn Dynasty of Korea, a loyal tributary state of China. Shanhai Pass became the last fortification preventing the formidable barbarians, as both Ming Chinese and Chosŏn Koreans regarded the Manchus, from entering inner China. As Beijing fell into the rebels’ hands, General Wu lost his country overnight. In Manchuria, the Manchu emperor seized the opportunity to send his troops under the leadership of Prince Dorgon (1612–50) to the outskirts of Shanhai Pass, where the army waited to cross the Great Wall to enter inner China. Meanwhile, the rebels in Beijing began to march toward the pass, with General Wu’s father as a hostage, in order to annihilate Wu. In this life- or-death situation, Wu chose the Manchus as his allies. He opened the giant gate to allow the Manchu forces to pass through the Great Wall and help him defeat the rebels. Among those who entered the pass along with the Manchu forces was the crown prince of Chosŏn Korea. The prince had been living with the Manchus for seven years, since 1637, when the Manchus had conquered Chosŏn and taken him and his younger brother hostage.¹ The guardians of the pass, General Wu’s army, also included people of Korean origin. Among them was a young Korean officer, Ch’oe Hyo-il, who had joined General Wu’s anti-Manchu fight after 1627, when the Manchus first invaded Chosŏn. Ch’oe was not to live long, but he did not die at the hands of the Manchu conquerors. On June 6, 1644, the Manchus took over Beijing without a fight. In a hall standing amid the debris of the Forbidden City, which had been burned by the rebels, Prince Dorgon accepted the ca- pitulation of the Chinese officials of the Ming, witnessed by the Korean crown prince. Ch’oe, however, refused to prostrate himself in front of the Manchu prince, who in his mind was a barbarian. Instead, dressed in a Ming-style robe, he went to Chongzhen’s tomb to mourn for the Ming—the civilized Middle Kingdom, or Zhongguo in Chinese. Ch’oe died near the tomb after a seven-day hunger strike. General Wu buried his body and commemorated him in an elegy.² A Korean subject, Ch’oe died not only for the Chinese emperor but also for a civilization embodied by the Chinese dynasty and his homeland. Yet when he sacrificed himself, he did not realize that the Manchu regime was transforming itself by embracing the ideological, political, and cultural norms of the same civi- lization. More importantly, before it crossed the Great Wall in 1644, the Qing had begun to use its hierarchical relationship with Chosŏn to fashion itself as the civilized center of the world. As history unfolded, this relationship lasted for 258 years until the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, and it continued to exert a strong influence over China and Korea thereafter. From the early seventeenth to the early twentieth century, the Qing used its relationship with Chosŏn as an ideo- logical tool to consolidate its identity as the Middle Kingdom and to manage its relations with other neighboring countries and the newly conquered polities that stretched from Manchuria and the Mongol steppe to Turkestan and the Himalayas. By the time the Eurasian empire fell apart in 1911, Qing China had evolved into a multiethnic and multicultural modern state, providing a solid foundation for state building in the rest of the twentieth century. Among the factors that helped the
Qing remake the Chinese empire, what stood out in particular were the politico-cultural discourse and imperial norms drawn from the Manchu-Korean contacts. These took place within a hierarchical framework I call Zongfan, a term I will explain below. The microhistory of Manchu-Korean relations vividly reflects the macrohistory of China’s transformation during the course of the three centuries, making Sino-Korean relations distinct from China’s relations with other coun- tries. This book reveals the development of China from an empire into a modern state through the lens of the dynamics of Sino-Korean political relations from 1616 to 1911. It incorporates Chosŏn Korea into the historical narrative of Qing China by examining the high politics of the two countries. The book shows that the Manchu regime used its constant relations with Chosŏn to establish, legitimize, consolidate, and present its identity as the civilized center of the known world, as a cosmopolitan empire, and as a modern sovereign state. By employing a long-term historical and cross-border perspective to observe the bilateral relationship, this book casts new light on the rise and inner changes of the Chinese empire during the Qing period, the clashes between the Chinese foreign-relations system and its Western counterpart, and the formation of modern sovereign states in East Asia. Revitalizing the Concept of Zongfan in the Narrative of Late Imperial China I use the Chinese term Zongfan, or in some cases the English phrase “Chinese world order,” rather than the oft-adopted English translation “tributary,” to refer to the nature of the hierarchical relationship between late imperial China and its subordinate countries, which included Korea. I reserve the term “tributary” for re- lated aspects of this system.³ “Late imperial China” in this book refers to China from 1368 to 1911, namely, the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing periods following the collapse of the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) of the Mongol Empire. As I argue below, the Zongfan system was central to establishing the political orthodox legit- imacy of China and its subordinate countries. As a key concept of Confucianism, political orthodox legitimacy (Ch., Zhengtong) refers to the universal ideological, moral, cultural, and social rationale behind the legitimate status of a political entity in the hierarchy of the Chinese world. In late imperial times, this legitimacy en- tailed “name and status” (Ch., mingfen) and “great unification” (Ch., da yitong) and found its dedicated audience in the ruling elites and Confucian scholars of Ming and Qing China, Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910), and Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868).⁴ As a politico-cultural structure, the Zongfan system is believed to have been established in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). It was associated with the kinship-based feudal system (Ch., zongfa fengjian) of the day. This system was practiced between two sides, Zong and fan. Zong refers to the royal lineage of the Chinese monarch, who claimed to be the “Son of Heaven” (Ch., tianzi) residing in the Middle Kingdom with absolute patriarchal authority and exclusive orthodox legitimacy as the human agent of the “Mandate of Heaven” (Ch., tianming). Fan originally meant the clan(s) of the royal family who established outposts on Chi- na’s borders, where the rulers’ legitimacy was dependent on investiture by the Son of Heaven. The two sides of the kinship constituted the familistic hierarchy and the order of “all-under-Heaven” (Ch., tianxia)—the known universe to the people within this political entity.⁵ The connotation of China’s periphery evolved within this feudalistic model by incorporating all countries or polities outside China into the category of fan. Ac- cording to the ideal tenets, on a regular basis the fan dispatched emissaries, “ministers of ministers” (Ch., peichen), bearing taxes or tribute to the central court, where they would offer appropriate obedience to the Son of Heaven and receive largesse or gifts. In return, the court would not only send envoys to the fan to in- vest the rulers with legitimate titles but also protect the fan whenever necessary. This reciprocity was the foundation of the double policy of “serving the great” (Ch., shida) and “cherishing the small” (Ch., zixiao). The exchanges of emissaries following ritual codes dictated by the Middle Kingdom kept the Zongfan system running. This model later evolved into the basic philosophy of the foreign policy of late imperial China.⁶ In addition to being defined by its geographical distance from the central court, the fan could also be characterized in kinship terms as inner fan and outer fan.
The inner fan maintained a strong blood relationship with the emperor, but the outer fan did not. In the case of Korea, the situation was complex. The imperial norms of the successive Chinese dynasties preferred to ascribe the beginning of Sino-Korean kinship to Jizi (K., Kija), a royal member of the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600–1046 BC) who was believed to have been invested by the Western Zhou court with the lands of ancient Chosŏn. This legend produced an assumption of a unique cultural homogeneity that the Chinese side deeply endorsed and that helped unified Chinese dynasties see Korea as belonging within China’s territorial perimeter.⁷ The Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) and the Tang Dynasty (618–907) invaded Korea and integrated parts of the Korean lands into China. In the 1260s the Mongol forces of the Yuan Dynasty gradually came to control the Koryŏ Dynasty of Korea (918–1392), and in the 1270s the Mongol court invested King Ch’ungnyŏl (r. 1274–1308), who married the Princess of Qi of Kublai Khan, as the consort of the imperial princess and the king of Koryŏ (K., Puma Koryŏ kugwang).⁸ After the Ming overthrew the Yuan, it ceased practicing the Yuan’s policy toward Koryŏ, which had been based on strong personal ties between the Mongol and Korean courts through state marriage. After its establishment in 1368, the Ming followed the feudal principles of the Zhou Dynasty and the Zongfan practice of the Yuan in establishing the Zongfan system within its domain, but it had no desire to extend the system to Koryŏ. The founding father of the new dynasty claimed that Ming China would never invade Koryŏ or fourteen other neighboring countries. In 1392 a new Korean regime replaced Koryŏ and immediately sent emissaries to China to pursue imperial investi- ture of the kingship. Although the Ming conferred the title “Chosŏn” on the new regime, after Jizi Chosŏn, it did not endow the Korean king with investiture until 1401, when Emperor Jianwen (r. 1399–1402) invested the third king of Chosŏn (T’aejong, r. 1400–1418), formally extending the Zongfan arrangement to the king- dom. In the imperial mandate, the Ming underlined that the king should serve as a fence of the civilized kingdom and “assist China forever” (Ch., yongfu yu Zhongguo).⁹ In 1403 Emperor Yongle (r. 1402–24) awarded the same king an official robe commensurate with the rank of first-degree prince (Ch., qinwang, a brother of the emperor), further integrating Chosŏn into the Ming Zongfan system.¹⁰ In the transition from the Yuan-Koryŏ relationship to the Ming-Chosŏn one, the Ming made a consequential shift in China’s policy toward Korea: China allowed Korea independence as a foreign country in practice, but it continued to regulate the bilateral relationship with reference to Zongfan norms in the domestic feudal sense and on the ideological level. In the familistic and culturally homogeneous Zongfan context, the Ming depicted Chosŏn as an outer fan descending from Jizi, while Chosŏn identified itself as a “vassal” (K., chehu; Ch., zhuhou) of the Ming court and viewed their relationship in father-son and monarch-subordinate terms.¹¹ Simultaneously, Neo-Confucianism (K., Chŏngju hak), which celebrated Confucian social hierarchy, had become the ruling ideology during the Yuan Dy- nasty, and had lately been introduced to Korea, helping to institutionalize and stabilize this bilateral relationship.¹² After the Ming rescued Chosŏn from a Japa- nese invasion in the 1590s, Chosŏn became even more committed to the Ming, regarding the Ming as its “parent nation” (K., pumo chi pang).¹³ This arrangement seemed similar to the feudalism practiced in medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan, but as a cross-border framework it possessed features unique to the Confu- cianism-sup-port- Chinese world. As part 2 of this book demonstrates, in the nineteenth century the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship built on these features confused European and Japanese diplomats, who could not find historical precedents for it within their own worlds. However, as scholars have pointed out, applying the Ming-Chosŏn hierarchical relationship to Sino-Korean contacts or China’s foreign relations before 1400 would be ahistorical.¹⁴ The Qing inherited the Ming Zongfan mechanism in its contacts with Chosŏn, but the Manchus’ kinship relations with Mongol tribes complicated the outer fan spectrum of the empire. This point is illustrated by the multilayered nature of the outer fan and the varied usage of the term in Qing political discourse, partic- ularly in referring to political entities within the Qing pilgrimage system (Ch., chaojin) and to countries in Southeast Asia, such as Siam (Thailand).¹⁵ The Manchu court nevertheless understood Chosŏn and other subordinate entities as members of the Qing-centric family, in which the position of these entities was similar or
even equal to that of their Mongol counterparts.¹⁶ As the Ministry of Rites (Ch., Libu) described it to the Qianlong emperor in 1768 in the context of investing the Korean king’s grandson as the successor to the throne, “The outer fan are the same as Zongfan in terms of their relations with the central court” (Ch., Waifan zhi yu zongfan, shi shu xiangtong). Similarly, in 1790 the Qianlong emperor awarded the Vietnamese king, Nguyễn Huệ (r. 1788–92), a golden leather belt that only Zongfan of the royal family could use.¹⁷ The term “Zongfan” aptly encapsulates the relationship between the center/patriarch and the periphery/family members during the Qing period, and for this reason I have revitalized it in this book. Reinterpreting the Rise of the Modern Chinese State through the Lens of Qing-Chosŏn Relations The involvement of Chosŏn in the Ming-Qing war led to two fierce Manchu invasions of the country in 1627 and 1636. After conquering Chosŏn in early 1637, the Qing established a Zongfan relationship with it by replacing the Ming in the patriarchal position. Scholars have widely regarded Sino-Korean relations in China’s late imperial period as the quintessential manifestation of the Sinocentric order.¹⁸ Some scholars have tended to attribute the uniqueness of the relationship to the parties’ shared Confucian culture, especially Neo-Confucianism, while others have preferred to emphasize China’s political or military influence or control in the hegemonic sense.¹⁹ This book embraces the cultural perspective, but it simultaneously underlines the significant effect that the Manchu use of violence had on the establishment and maintenance of Qing-Chosŏn ties in the early seventeenth century. More importantly, I avoid enshrining the Qing-Chosŏn relationship in the pantheon of Chinese narratives of Sino-Korean relations since the Western Zhou, and I refrain from conflating the Qing-Chosŏn relationship with that be- tween the Ming and Chosŏn. Rather, I explore the unique and crucial role of these bonds in providing the Qing with the political, intellectual, and ideological sources with which it reconstructed itself and the Chinese empire and eventually gave birth to a modern Chinese state. A key term in analyzing the Sinocentric hierarchical arrangement between Qing China and other countries imagined in Qing imperial discourse is yi. Like so many abstract terms in Chinese (or indeed any language), its meaning varies according to context, but I have generally translated it as “barbarians.” As the fol- lowing chapters show, yi, which was often used to describe outsiders in Sino-foreign contacts, did not necessarily carry a pejorative connotation. I also demon- strate a change in the meaning of yi from the perspective of the Manchu regime. The story of the Qing-Chosŏn relationship unfolds within the broader process of the Qing’s efforts to meet the unprecedented challenge of proving its orthodox legitimacy in the politico-cultural setting of the “civilized vs. barbarian distinction” (Ch., Hua–Yi zhi bian; K., Hwa–I ŭi chai).²⁰ It was against the background of this civilized–barbarian dichotomy that the Korean warrior Ch’oi sacrificed himself in Manchu-occupied Beijing, and it was in light of this distinction that his homeland strengthened its identity as “Little China” (K., So Chunghwa) in the post-Ming era, while the Qing positioned itself within the pedigree of the Middle Kingdom as the civilized center and the “Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao). The establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship in 1637 was a watershed event in the history of the Qing’s prodigious enterprise of redefining itself and remaking the Chinese world. Scholars have commonly dated the Ming-Qing transition to the Manchu occupation of Beijing in 1644, but the Manchu regime in fact had initiated its bid for status as the Middle Kingdom at least a decade earlier, by employing the politico-cultural discourse embedded in the Zongfan struc- ture. After 1637, the Qing progressively converted Chosŏn into a prototypical “outer subordinate,” known as waifan (outer fan) or shuguo (subordinate country) in the Chinese language and tulergi gurun (outer country) or harangga gurun (subordinate country) in the Manchu language. Very significantly, the Qing imperial terms abruptly reversed the Manchu-Korean hierarchical arrangement in the Ming period by portraying Chosŏn as a country of barbarians on the periphery of the Qing. In its frequent contacts with Chosŏn from 1637 to 1643, the Qing strengthened the new bilateral political arrangement and developed a mature model for man- aging its relations with other newly conquered or subordinated entities. I call this model the “Chosŏn model” (Ch., Chaoxian shili, lit. “Korean cases/examples”).
As part 1 explains, the model constituted a pattern by which a country or a political entity could follow Chosŏn into the Qing-centric Zongfan system primarily by receiving imperial investitures from the Qing, adopting the regnal titles and calendar of the Qing, and sending emissaries and tribute to the Qing on a regular basis. The idea behind this model was to encourage outlying regions to embrace the Qing as the civilized center of the world and to affirm its supreme political and cultural position. After 1644, as the Qing continued its conquest of inner China by marching west and southwest, it used the Chosŏn model as a handy soft- power weapon to manage its political relations with other entities and to consolidate its new identification as the center of all-under-Heaven. The Qing-Chosŏn hierarchy was far more than just the final chapter in the long Sino-Korean Zongfan history. Rather, it buttressed the rationale of the entire Zongfan system by keeping the periphery of the Chinese empire informed and regulated while the Manchu regime controlled and remade the empire at the core. The Qing’s dynamic relations with its first Confucian outer fan—Chosŏn—played a vital role in establishing, institutionalizing, and nourishing the entire Qing- centric system of foreign relations. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Qing had constructed a new imperial order within and beyond its Eurasian empire. It had simultaneously labeled Britain and other European states “countries of barbarians” and posited them on the periphery of China. These states, however, changed their status vis-à-vis China through gunboat diplomacy and treaties in the nineteenth century, when they encountered the Chinese world through such outer fan as Annam (Vietnam), Ryukyu, and Chosŏn. The introduction, translation, and dissemination of international law in the Chinese world put China, China’s outer fan, and the European states on an equal footing in terms of their state sovereignty. Nevertheless, the relationship between Qing China and its outer fan re- mained unchanged until the very end of the nineteenth century in that they still needed each other to acquire mutually constitutive and mutually defined orthodox legitimacy in their own world. What confused the Western states in their contacts with the outer fan of China in the late nineteenth century was the nebulous nature of the Zongfan mech- anism that constantly shunted them into perplexing negotiations with Beijing, the only place where diplomacy with outsiders could be conducted in accordance with Zongfan conventions. The disputes emerging at the periphery of China were thus transferred to the center of the empire, where they converged as an ac- cumulative force to trigger certain reforms within China that in turn spread to and deeply influenced the periphery. Although this model may seem similar to con- temporary relationships between European powers and their overseas colonies, it had a fundamentally different structure, as later sections and chapters will elab- orate. The most typical case among the manifold and interwoven disputes regarding this mechanism arose in Chosŏn Korea. The political and diplomatic conundrum of the international status of Chosŏn led the Qing and Chosŏn into legal quagmires and prompted both sides to mod- ify their time-honored relations in the context of both the inner and the outer dual networks, as chapters 5 and 6 explain. But the various adjustments made to the relationship on both sides in the chaotic decade of the 1880s kept the Zongfan fundamentals untouched, as neither side could overcome the ideological dilemma caused by their mutually constitutive legitimacy at the level of high politics in the Confucian world. This double bind meant that colonizing Chosŏn was not an option for China in the turbulent period before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894. The growing controversy between China, Korea, Japan, and Western states finally resulted in the termination of the Sino-Korean Zongfan relationship in 1895. Accordingly, the cosmopolitan Chinese empire withdrew its political and cultural reach from its subordinate countries and became identical with the Chinese state defined by the norms of international law. After the war, China and Korea negotiated a new treaty for an equal state-to-state relationship, but the new arrangement lasted only a few years before both the Chosŏn Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty ceased to exist in 1910 and 1911, respectively. This book describes the trajectory of this varied relationship and shows its significance for the devel- opment of modern China and East Asia. Revisiting the Chinese Empire under the Qing
This book defines the Qing as an empire and as a Chinese empire. As I explain below, this empire included Chosŏn in a politico-cultural sense. The term “empire” as a European concept that was always traced back to the Romans did not exist in the Chinese political lexicon until 1895, when the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Shi- monoseki addressed the Qing as the “Great Qing Empire” in Chinese characters (Da Qing diguo), as a counterpart to the “Great Japanese Empire” (Dai Nippon teikoku).²¹ None of the ruling dynasties before the end of the Qing ever claimed to hold an empire, either in Chinese or, when the ruling house was not Han Chi- nese, in any other language. Even nowadays, describing a Chinese dynasty as an empire remains rare among historians in China. Nevertheless, if we define an em- pire broadly as a political entity in which different peoples are governed differently, Chinese history from 221 BC, when the Qin Dynasty (221–207 BC) unified China as a multiethnic polity, to the present is clearly a history of empires.²² In this book, the Chinese empire (Ch., Zhonghua diguo) refers to a multiethnic and multicultural polity in which the Middle Kingdom represented the political and cultural core against the background of the civilized–barbarian distinction and for which the concepts of “Mandate of Heaven” and “all-under-Heaven” served as constitutional ideologies to establish its political orthodox legitimacy and Confu- cian orthodox legitimacy (Ch., daotong). This definition may not fit all the dynasties that claimed the name of the Middle Kingdom, because, as R. Bin Wong ob- serves, “the ideas and institutions of this empire were neither constant over time nor uniform through space.”²³ But it applies to the dynasties in Chinese history such as the Tang, the Northern and Southern Song (960–1279), the Liao (907–1125), the Xixia (1038–1227), the Jin (1115–1234), the Yuan, the Ming, and the Qing. The Manchu ethnicity of the imperial house was not a barrier to the Qing’s presentation of itself as a Chinese empire, in particular after 1644, when the term “Chinese” (Ch., Zhongguo ren) took on a multiethnic character. The Qing had presented itself as a Chinese empire as early as 1689 in the Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia. The original treaty text, written in Latin by the French Jesuit Jean-François Gerbillon (1654–1707), who was serving the Manchu court, called the Qing Sinicum Imperium (Chinese Empire) as a counterpart to Ruthenicum Imperium (Russian Empire). The French version of the treaty rendered the term as l’Empire de la Chine (Empire of China) as a counterpart to l’Empire de Moscovie (Empire of Muscovy).²⁴ In the Manchu translation of the treaty, the Qing court used the term Dulimbai gurun to define itself as China/Zhongguo; this term is equivalent to “Chinese Empire” in the other versions of the text.²⁵ When “Chinese” became a multiethnic descriptor, the Qing also became the representative of Chinese culture, in particular the Confucianism that lay at the core of imperial political discourse. In 1712 Emperor Kangxi instructed the Manchu official Tulišen (1667–1740), an envoy to the Turgūt Mongols in Russia, that if the “khan of Russia” (Ma., Cagan han) asked what was esteemed in China, Tulišen should respond that “our country takes fidelity, filial piety, benevolence, jus- tice, and sincerity as fundamentals.”²⁶ All of these concepts came from Confucianism, not from Manchu ideologies. After all, it was this Confucian identity and politico-cultural discourse informed by Confucianism, not the Qing’s Manchu characteristics or its realpolitik practiced along the newly conquered frontiers in Inner Asia, that determined the Qing’s political orthodox legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom and enabled it to obtain and justify Confucian orthodox legitimacy. This Confucian identity on the state level later helped the Qing display its Chineseness and win strong support from Han Chinese scholars, who assisted the dy- nasty in weathering the storm of anti-Manchu rebellions in the nineteenth century. This book broadly defines “Chineseness” as the state of being the legitimate Middle Kingdom, thus referring to statecraft, not ethnicity. I interpret the Chinese empire under the Qing in two dimensions: the territorial empire and the politico-cultural empire. The territorial Chinese empire was equal to the Great Qing, composed primarily of the Manchu court, the inner provinces (Ch., zhisheng, “directly controlled provinces”), and the first group of outer fan, which were under the management of the central institution of Lifan yuan. These outer fan included regions and groups such as the Cahar Mongols, Tibet, and Mongol and Muslim tribes in Xinjiang. The Chinese name Lifan yuan means “the ministry of managing the affairs of the fan,” and it differs from the organization’s Manchu name, Tulergi golo be dasara jurgan, which means “the institution in charge of the outer provinces.” Scholars have generally translated it as “Court of
Colonial Affairs” or “Mongolian Superintendency.” This book adopts the latter rendering. The politico-cultural Chinese empire encompassed not only these polit- ical entities but also the second group of outer fan, whose contacts with China took place via the Ministry of Rites and whose shared characteristic was their iden- tification of the Son of Heaven in China as the highest sovereign in the world (see figure I.1).
FIGURE I.1. The structure of the Chinese empire during the Qing. A = the court; B = inner provinces; C = outer fan under the Mongolian Superintendency (MS); D = outer fan under the Ministry of Rites (MOR), primarily Chosŏn, Ryukyu, and Annam; E = Western countries listed by the Qing as outer fan; AB = inner China, or China proper; ABC = the Great Qing, or the territorial Chinese empire; ABCD = the politico-cultural Chinese empire; ABCDE = all-under-Heaven. Three key issues in the relationship between China and its outer fan within the politico-cultural Chinese empire invite elaboration: sovereignty, borders, and subjects. These issues were woven together in imperial times by the cosmopolitan idea of all-under-Heaven and were critically questioned within the context of the nation-state order of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. China, or Zhongguo, had historically always been mutually defined by its relations with the countries on its periphery—that is, by a combination of the country’s own perception of itself and the devotion of its neighbors to Chinese civilization. The nebu- lous dual nature of China’s identity posed a challenge to Chinese scholars who sought to define China anew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by comparing it to European states. These scholars could not find an established and consistent name for their homeland in history. For example, Huang Zunxian (1848–1905), a distinguished diplomat and scholar, reviewed the conventional civilized–barbarian discourse and preferred to call China the “central civilized country” (Ch., Huaxia). In his treatise exploring the reasons for China’s weakness, Liang Qichao (1873–1929), an intellectual leader of China’s modernization, pointed out that for a long time the Chinese had seen no difference between “state” and “all-under-Heaven” or between “state” and “court.”²⁷ Huang’s and Liang’s arguments reflected the cosmopolitan nature of the Chinese world, in which sovereignty, borders, and subjects manifested themselves in ways distinct from those of its Western counterpart. The nature of the sovereignty of an outer fan in the Chinese world was twofold: it was fully independent in terms of the territorial Chinese empire but fully dependent in relation to the politico-cultural Chinese empire. An outer fan enjoyed the right of independence, that is, autonomy or self-rule—zizhu in Chinese— within its boundaries. As Jean-Baptiste Grosier (1743–1823) in the 1780s and George N. Curzon (1859–1925) in the 1890s observed, the king of Chosŏn was an independent and supreme sovereign in his own lands.²⁸ The kings of the Nguyễn Dynasty (1802–1945) of Vietnam went even further, claiming to be “emperors” and calling Vietnam the “Middle Kingdom” in the first half of the nineteenth century.²⁹ The kingship of the fan, however, was ultimately subjugated to the emper- orship of China. As demonstrated by Emperor Qianlong’s deposition of the king of Vietnam, Lê Duy Kỳ (1765–93), and his investment of a new king in 1789, the emperor possessed absolute patriarchal power over the kings. This was particularly true for the Confucian kingship of Chosŏn.³⁰ What determined this rela- tionship was not China’s military power or geopolitical gravity or its “suzerainty,” as Western and Japanese diplomats understood it in the nineteenth century, but the mutually constitutive legitimacy of each side of the bilateral arrangement that was undergirded by Zongfan tenets and Confucian ethos. As a consequence, in the 1830s and the 1870s, the king of Chosŏn refused to negotiate with Western representatives on the grounds that “subordinates of a fan have no right to con- duct diplomacy” (Ch., fanchen wu waijiao).³¹ Vietnam adhered to the same ideology until the early 1880s.³² Within this system, a Korean king did not have his own regnal title during his lifetime but gained a posthumous title or temple name, which is why I tend to refer to Korean kings as, simply, “the king,” or to use their names (“Yi Chong,” for example) rather than their temple names (“Injo,” Yi Chong’s temple name). Although the awarding of temple names to the kings could suggest a portrayal of Korea as independent of China in an abstract sense and in an intellectual sense, in practice China’s patriarchal and divine imperial power was always real and effective.³³ The differences between peoples on either side of the borders that separated Qing China and its outer fan were clear, but these distinctions were not translated into the language of nation-states, as illustrated by the Qing’s cartographic survey in the Kangxi period and the Qing’s juridical negotiations with Annam and Chosŏn over legal cases.³⁴ The territorial border between China and the outer fan could be diluted and blurred by the shared ideology of all-under-Heaven within
the Zongfan framework. In this cultural context, the Qing court treated fan such as Chosŏn as a part—even an indispensable part—of the “imperial dynasty” (Ch., huangchao) or the “Heavenly Dynasty.” For the most part, scholars do not consider countries such as Chosŏn to have been components of the Chinese empire during the Qing. This view results from the dissemination of nationalist historiography in East Asia since the late nineteenth century and cleaves closely to a terri- torial definition of the Chinese empire. The Chinese empire as a politico-cultural unit, however, encompassed its outer fan beyond China’s borders, where China’s centrality was further constructed by local manifestations of the divine authority of the Chinese sovereign. Believing that all lands of the outer fan were under his rule in this sense, Emperor Yongzheng demarcated a new border with Annam in 1727 that allowed Annam to extend its territory 12.45 miles (40 Chinese li) farther into China in order to end the territorial disputes between the two sides. Chosŏn never ceased trying to redraw its borders, as reflected in its prolonged negotiations with China over border demarcation in the Tumen River area from the 1710s to the 1880s, yet the Korean court had endorsed the Chinese imperial discourse of all-under-Heaven since the Ming period.³⁵ In 1593, for example, the king of Chosŏn (Sŏnjo, r. 1567–1608) claimed that Chosŏn was a vassal (K., chehu) of China and had been regarded by the Chinese dynasties as an “inner subor- dinate” (K., naebok; Ch., neifu) since Jizi. The king further emphasized that Chosŏn “is actually China’s land and China lets our country manage it.”³⁶ In the 1730s the Qing historians in History of the Ming commented that “Chosŏn was the Ming’s subordinate country, but it was not different from an inner part of China [Ch., yunei].”³⁷ The position of Chosŏn as part of the Chinese empire remained unchanged during the Qing in terms of imperial norms. In 1784 and 1788, Emperor Qianlong noted that Korea was almost the peer of the Qing’s “inner subordinates.”³⁸ In the rituals that marked imperial edicts, the Qing imperial ritual code made it clear that the local officials of Chosŏn should perform the same rituals as did “those in directly controlled provinces” (Ch., ru zhisheng zhi yi).³⁹ Another indicator of Chosŏn’s position was the annual calendar of the Qing (Ch., Shixian li or Shixian shu; Ma., Erin forgon i ton i bithe), issued every year by the Imperial Astronomical Bureau (Ch., Qintian jian; Ma., Abka be ginggulere yamun), which Korean emissaries had to retrieve from Beijing. The calendar included charts of the sunrise and sunset times and charts of the solar terms in “each province” (Ch., gesheng; Ma., yaya golo) and “each Mongol and Muslim tribe” (Ch., ge menggu huibu; Ma., geren monggo be, hoise i aiman) under Qing jurisdiction. From 1645, when the Qing inaugurated the calendar, Chosŏn was included in the list of inner provinces such as Shanxi and Shandong and later showed up alongside Mukden, Nerchinsk (Ma., Nibcu), Sanxing (Ma., Ilan hala), Bodune (Ma., Bedune), Heilongjiang (Ma., Sahaliyan ula), and Jilin. Following Chosŏn, Annam was added to the lists in 1789 and Ryukyu in 1810.⁴⁰ As Johan Elverskog has pointed out, “A fundamental role of the emperor was to control the flow of time properly by creating the calendar and propitiating its cultural force through ritual and ceremony.”⁴¹ Many maps of the known world produced by the cartographers of the Qing and Chosŏn in the eighteenth century, such as the Huangyu quanlan tu (Map of a complete view of the imperial lands, known as the Kangxi Atlas), also presented and substantiated this cosmopolitan ideology by including Chosŏn as part of the empire.⁴² The Qing thus subtly but unmistakably incorporated the group of outer fan into the Chinese empire. Cosmopolitan ideas strongly shaped the Qing’s understanding of the subjects within and beyond its borders, even after international law reached China in the 1860s. In 1643, for instance, the Qing emphasized to Chosŏn that “the two countries have become one family” (Ch., liangguo yijia) and that “the people of Chosŏn are also ours.”⁴³ In 1882, when the Chinese governors in Manchuria reported to Beijing that many poor Korean peasants had crossed the border to cultivate Chi- nese lands, Emperor Guangxu noted, “In the eyes of the local officials, there is certainly a line between them and us [Ch., bici zhi fen], but in the eyes of the court, there is originally no difference between the inside and the outside [Ch., neiwai zhi bie].”⁴⁴ A group of Korean students learning Western technologies in Tianjin in 1882 were also treated by Chinese officials as “loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao zhi chizi) and were granted free tuition.⁴⁵ In 1886 the Guangxu emperor emphasized that Chosŏn was close to Beijing and had “no particular difference from other provinces in the inner land” (Ch., you yu neidi
xingsheng wuyi).⁴⁶ For Qing China, Chosŏn was equal to a “domestic subordinate” (Ch., neichen), which might have been the impetus behind the proposals made by a large number of Chinese officials in the 1880s to convert Chosŏn into “prefectures and counties” of China—an approach I call “provincialization”—in order to save “our Chosŏn” (Ch., wo Chaoxian). Within the Zongfan framework, these factors—sovereignty, borders, and subjects—were not complex issues between Qing China and its outer fan. But when international law and the norms embedded in it, such as sovereignty and suzerainty, reached East Asia in the 1860s and acted as a catalyst for the independence (Ch., duli; K., t’ŭngnip; J., dokuritsu) of the outer fan, these issues became controversial and began to be reconsidered and redefined in accordance with the im- ported legal terms in both China and its outer fan. Nevertheless, as part 2 of this book shows, the politico-cultural Chinese empire connecting the Middle King- dom and its outer fan remained unchanged at that time, because international law could not endow the two sides with the necessary political orthodox legitimacy. What drew China into the wars with France in Vietnam in 1883 and with Japan in Chosŏn in 1894, therefore, was not the territorial Chinese empire but the politi- co-cul-tural one. Similarly, what Japan defeated in 1895 was the tangible former rather than the invisible latter. In this regard, this book reveals the complexity of the dual presentation of the Chinese empire under the Qing, in particular in the late nineteenth century, when China and Korea tried to deliver a legal definition of their relationship to Japan and Western states. After 1895 the politico-cultural empire began to draw back from its extended frontier in its subordinate countries to China’s geographical borders, eventually becoming identical to the territorial empire. Through the decline of the politico-cultural empire emerged a modern Chi- nese state. In his study of empires and states, Frederick Cooper argued that “France only became a nation-state in 1962, when it gave up the last vital element of its impe- rial structure, Algeria.”⁴⁷ Although China is not France and Korea is not Algeria, Korea had served for centuries as a key part of the politico-cultural Chinese em- pire, and under the Qing it acted as an “outlying province” of the empire in the Qing imperial norms.⁴⁸ It is thus not an exaggeration to say that China became a modern nation-state only once it recognized the absolute independence and sovereignty of the Korean state after World War II, especially after the Korean War in the 1950s. It was also in the 1950s that the People’s Republic of China officially endorsed the independence of the Mongolian People’s Republic, which had been part of the Chinese empire under the Qing, while at the same time integrating the northwestern region of the empire—Xinjiang and Tibet—into the territory of New China. At that point, the Korean side finally accomplished the prolonged process of decentering China and became equal to its Chinese counterpart.⁴⁹ Within this conceptual framework, this book traces the historical process through which both China and Korea detached themselves from the Chinese empire and moved toward modern state building in the postimperial era. Renegotiating Qing Imperialism Scholars of China and East Asia have commonly identified imperialism (Ch., Diguo zhuyi) with the West or Japan. As a concept, imperialism refers to a system that was underpinned by a series of aggressive political, economic, or diplomatic policies carried out by Western and Japanese powers against other states. Through these policies, the imperial powers attempted to reap the highest possible profits from the countries they subjugated via unequal treaties, while com- peting with each other for primacy. Imperialism is thus seen as a holdover of Western capitalism (Ch., Ziben zhuyi) and colonialism (Ch., Zhimin zhuyi) that reached the Chinese world aggressively after 1800.⁵⁰ This interpretation also reflects a phenomenon that scholars have called the “great divergence” between China and the West in world economic history.⁵¹ The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 marks the rise of imperialism in East Asia, a regime under which Qing China, too, suffered heavily. Historical narratives along these lines have promoted a Chinese victim mentality and nourished Chinese nationalism in the twentieth cen- tury, in particular after the Leninist definition of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism became popular in scholarship.⁵²
Since the second half of the twentieth century, two groups of scholars have questioned and complicated this received wisdom. The first group comprises stu- dents of the High Qing (that is, from the Kangxi to the Qianlong period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), who have promulgated the paradigm of “New Qing history” that is characterized by an Inner Asian and ethnic approach to interpreting the multiethnic and multicultural Qing.⁵³ The second group con- sists of students of Sino-Korean relations who have depicted Qing China’s policy toward Chosŏn in the late nineteenth century as imperialism. The approach of the first group might be called “High Qing imperialism,” and that of the second group “Late Qing imperialism.” The High Qing imperialism school describes the High Qing as an institutional agent of imperialism, a system of coercive instruments aimed at extending the core area of the empire and keeping the empire functioning. This Qing imperialism manifested itself in geopolitical and global competitions between the Qing, the Mongol khanates and Muslim tribes in Inner Asia, the indigenous and cross-border tribes in southwestern China, the Russian Empire, and the British Empire.⁵⁴ Chinese and European colonialism and capitalism found their place in these intense competitions.⁵⁵ What fundamentally supports this argument of Qing imperi- alism is the fact of the Qing’s territorial expansion by force, followed by the political and cultural hegemony that it introduced to the newly conquered borderlands. However, if the High Qing was an agent of imperialism, all Chinese regimes that extended China’s borders would fall into the same category, including the Han, the Tang, the Yuan, the Ming, and the People’s Republic of China. In this sense, the thesis of High Qing imperialism risks detaching its interpretations of the Qing Empire from the pre-Qing Chinese historical context and being construed as a complement to Eurocentric narratives of imperialism in the broader context. The argument of Late Qing imperialism, by contrast, distinguishes the Qing from its predecessors in Chinese history by asserting that the Late Qing exercised imperialism through coercive means characterized by power politics and economic expansion in the late nineteenth century. The leading proponents of this ap- proach concede that the Late Qing was a victim of Western and Japanese imperialism but claim that it simultaneously practiced its own imperialism over weaker countries. This overseas imperialism fits the general definition that historians have drawn from the history of the Roman Empire: “an unequal power relationship between two states in which the dominant state exercises various forms of control, often forcibly, over the weaker state.”⁵⁶ Whereas the theory of High Qing im- perialism does not take the Manchu conquest of Chosŏn in 1637 into consideration and leaves Chosŏn largely off the list of victims of that imperialism, Chosŏn is typically the only identified victim of Late Qing imperialism, which was embodied by activities such as sending troops to Chosŏn and obtaining treaty ports and settlements through unequal treaties that granted the Chinese extraterritoriality. The concept of “informal empire,” originally coined to refer to the powerful eco- nomic expansion of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, provides this argument with further intellectual support.⁵⁷ In retrospect, the argument of Late Qing imperialism bears a remarkable resemblance to the interpretation of China’s behavior in Chosŏn put forward by Western diplomats and observers in the nineteenth century. As M. Frederick Nelson has pointed out, “Under the assumption that China had nothing but a religious and ceremonial connection with Korea, Westerners viewed her growing de facto control of Korea as pure and unjustified power politics directed against an independent state.”⁵⁸ By likening the Qing to its Western imperial counterparts, the thesis of Late Qing imperialism homogenizes Qing China as a major participant and a powerful predator in Euro- centric global history, therefore strengthening the approach of interpreting the histories of others with reference to that of the West instead of contextualizing these histories in their local milieus. As this book shows, the Qing activities in Korea in the late nineteenth century were a manifestation not of imperialism, but of Zongfan empiricism. The argument of Qing imperialism, including both High Qing imperialism and Late Qing imperialism, serves as a normative tool for interpreting the constant changes undergone by China in its various forms. In order to explain those changes, this book renegotiates Qing imperialism by presenting the Qing as an empire that used ideological tools—the Chosŏn model and a set of imperial norms embodied by the model—to establish and consolidate its political authority and
cultural superiority in the Chinese world. What I call “Zongfanism” in this book can provide us with a different perspective for observing the rise and fall of the Eurasian Chinese empire under the Qing Dynasty and the rise of modern sovereign states in China and its neighboring countries. Zongfanism refers to a Chinese system of political and diplomatic communication conducted between, on the one hand, a political entity that culturally identified itself as the exclusive civilized center of the world, and, on the other hand, the political entities on its periphery that the center considered less civilized or even barbarian. The sovereign of the center possessed absolute patriarchal authority over the monarchs of the subordinate entities, while the two sides enjoyed mutually constitutive legitimacy in- formed by their shared politico-cultural norms. Zongfanism transcends the entrenched divide between premodern and modern Chinese history. Historians have generally identified the Opium War of 1839–42 as the twilight of premodern China and the dawn of modern China. Along these lines, the mainstream narrative of Qing China holds that the pre-modern system of China’s foreign relations was incompatible with the modern treaty system, with which it was finally replaced. The principal problem with this paradigm lies not in its Eurocentrism per se (indeed, “modern” is a criterion rooted in European history) but rather in its neglect of constant factors within China’s foreign policy that bridged the premodern and modern periods without conspicuous changes. In other words, the factors that historians have widely identified as having led to the “stagnation” of China before it encountered the industrialized West constitute the very key to understanding late imperial China.⁵⁹ The Chinese empire lived with its indigenous norms, not imported ones. The Zongfan perspective does not aim to replace that of Qing imperialism, nor can it completely account for the Qing’s activities during the high tide of the Manchu conquest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from Manchuria to the Korean peninsula and from Xinjiang to Tibet.⁶⁰ It instead aims to reveal the crucial relationships between the construction and dissemination of imperial ideology from the center to the periphery on the one hand, and imperial top-down statecraft in practice on the other. In the early twenty-first century, China has begun to exploit sophisticated ideas drawn from its recent history to preserve the legitimacy and unity of the multiethnic and multicultural Chinese state and to manage its relations with neighboring countries and the world. In this contemporary context, it may be helpful to examine the trajectory of changes in the Chinese world from an inside perspective, and the following chapters seek to do just that.
Introduction
Day dawned on April 25, 1644, in the seventeenth year of the reign of the Chongzhen emperor of the Ming Dynasty of China. As the first rays of the sun struck the walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing, a large group of rebels stormed the gates. Right before the rebels swarmed the imperial halls, the emperor managed to climb up an artificial hill behind the palace and hang himself from a tree. His loyal servant, a eunuch who had cared for the desperate thirty-three-year-old emperor since the latter’s birth, hanged himself from another tree. The Ming Dynasty, or the Great Ming, which had governed China for 277 years, came to a sudden end.
The Ming’s unexpected demise put one of its generals, Wu Sangui (1612–78), who was fighting on the front lines of an unrelated conflict about 190 miles east of Beijing, in an awkward position. General Wu was defending Shanhai Pass, a strategic military outpost of the Great Wall connecting inner China with Manchuria, in the war with the Qing, a regime founded in 1616 by the nomadic Manchus in Manchuria. The war had lasted for almost three decades, during which the Manchus had decisively defeated the Ming troops in Manchuria, subordinated neighboring Mongol tribes, and conquered the Chosŏn Dynasty of Korea, a loyal tributary state of China. Shanhai Pass became the last fortification preventing the formidable barbarians, as both Ming Chinese and Chosŏn Koreans regarded the Manchus, from entering inner China. As Beijing fell into the rebels’ hands, General Wu lost his country overnight. In Manchuria, the Manchu emperor seized the opportunity to send his troops under the leadership of Prince Dorgon (1612–50) to the outskirts of Shanhai Pass, where the army waited to cross the Great Wall to enter inner China. Meanwhile, the rebels in Beijing began to march toward the pass, with General Wu’s father as a hostage, in order to annihilate Wu. In this life-or-death situation, Wu chose the Manchus as his allies. He opened the giant gate to allow the Manchu forces to pass through the Great Wall and help him defeat the rebels.
Among those who entered the pass along with the Manchu forces was the crown prince of Chosŏn Korea. The prince had been living with the Manchus for seven years, since 1637, when the Manchus had conquered Chosŏn and taken him and his younger brother hostage.¹ The guardians of the pass, General Wu’s army, also included people of Korean origin. Among them was a young Korean officer, Ch’oe Hyo-il, who had joined General Wu’s anti-Manchu fight after 1627, when the Manchus first invaded Chosŏn. Ch’oe was not to live long, but he did not die at the hands of the Manchu conquerors. On June 6, 1644, the Manchus took over Beijing without a fight. In a hall standing amid the debris of the Forbidden City, which had been burned by the rebels, Prince Dorgon accepted the capitulation of the Chinese officials of the Ming, witnessed by the Korean crown prince. Ch’oe, however, refused to prostrate himself in front of the Manchu prince, who in his mind was a barbarian. Instead, dressed in a Ming-style robe, he went to Chongzhen’s tomb to mourn for the Ming—the civilized Middle Kingdom, or Zhongguo in Chinese. Ch’oe died near the tomb after a seven-day hunger strike. General Wu buried his body and commemorated him in an elegy.²
A Korean subject, Ch’oe died not only for the Chinese emperor but also for a civilization embodied by the Chinese dynasty and his homeland. Yet when he sacrificed himself, he did not realize that the Manchu regime was transforming itself by embracing the ideological, political, and cultural norms of the same civilization. More importantly, before it crossed the Great Wall in 1644, the Qing had begun to use its hierarchical relationship with Chosŏn to fashion itself as the civilized center of the world. As history unfolded, this relationship lasted for 258 years until the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, and it continued to exert a strong influence over China and Korea thereafter. From the early seventeenth to the early twentieth century, the Qing used its relationship with Chosŏn as an ideological tool to consolidate its identity as the Middle Kingdom and to manage its relations with other neighboring countries and the newly conquered polities that stretched from Manchuria and the Mongol steppe to Turkestan and the Himalayas. By the time the Eurasian empire fell apart in 1911, Qing China had evolved into a multiethnic and multicultural modern state, providing a solid foundation for state building in the rest of the twentieth century. Among the factors that helped the
Qing remake the Chinese empire, what stood out in particular were the politico-cultural discourse and imperial norms drawn from the Manchu-Korean contacts. These took place within a hierarchical framework I call Zongfan, a term I will explain below. The microhistory of Manchu-Korean relations vividly reflects the macrohistory of China’s transformation during the course of the three centuries, making Sino-Korean relations distinct from China’s relations with other countries.
This book reveals the development of China from an empire into a modern state through the lens of the dynamics of Sino-Korean political relations from 1616 to 1911. It incorporates Chosŏn Korea into the historical narrative of Qing China by examining the high politics of the two countries. The book shows that the Manchu regime used its constant relations with Chosŏn to establish, legitimize, consolidate, and present its identity as the civilized center of the known world, as a cosmopolitan empire, and as a modern sovereign state. By employing a long-term historical and cross-border perspective to observe the bilateral relationship, this book casts new light on the rise and inner changes of the Chinese empire during the Qing period, the clashes between the Chinese foreign-relations system and its Western counterpart, and the formation of modern sovereign states in East Asia.
Revitalizing the Concept of Zongfan in the Narrative of Late Imperial China
I use the Chinese term Zongfan, or in some cases the English phrase Chinese world order, rather than the oft-adopted English translation tributary, to refer to the nature of the hierarchical relationship between late imperial China and its subordinate countries, which included Korea. I reserve the term tributary for related aspects of this system.³ Late imperial China in this book refers to China from 1368 to 1911, namely, the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing periods following the collapse of the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) of the Mongol Empire. As I argue below, the Zongfan system was central to establishing the political orthodox legitimacy of China and its subordinate countries. As a key concept of Confucianism, political orthodox legitimacy (Ch., Zhengtong) refers to the universal ideological, moral, cultural, and social rationale behind the legitimate status of a political entity in the hierarchy of the Chinese world. In late imperial times, this legitimacy entailed name and status (Ch., mingfen) and great unification (Ch., da yitong) and found its dedicated audience in the ruling elites and Confucian scholars of Ming and Qing China, Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910), and Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868).⁴
As a politico-cultural structure, the Zongfan system is believed to have been established in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). It was associated with the kinship-based feudal system (Ch., zongfa fengjian) of the day. This system was practiced between two sides, Zong and fan. Zong refers to the royal lineage of the Chinese monarch, who claimed to be the Son of Heaven (Ch., tianzi) residing in the Middle Kingdom with absolute patriarchal authority and exclusive orthodox legitimacy as the human agent of the Mandate of Heaven (Ch., tianming). Fan originally meant the clan(s) of the royal family who established outposts on China’s borders, where the rulers’ legitimacy was dependent on investiture by the Son of Heaven. The two sides of the kinship constituted the familistic hierarchy and the order of all-under-Heaven (Ch., tianxia)—the known universe to the people within this political entity.⁵
The connotation of China’s periphery evolved within this feudalistic model by incorporating all countries or polities outside China into the category of fan. According to the ideal tenets, on a regular basis the fan dispatched emissaries, ministers of ministers (Ch., peichen), bearing taxes or tribute to the central court, where they would offer appropriate obedience to the Son of Heaven and receive largesse or gifts. In return, the court would not only send envoys to the fan to invest the rulers with legitimate titles but also protect the fan whenever necessary. This reciprocity was the foundation of the double policy of serving the great (Ch., shida) and cherishing the small (Ch., zixiao). The exchanges of emissaries following ritual codes dictated by the Middle Kingdom kept the Zongfan system running. This model later evolved into the basic philosophy of the foreign policy of late imperial China.⁶
In addition to being defined by its geographical distance from the central court, the fan could also be characterized in kinship terms as inner fan and outer fan.
The inner fan maintained a strong blood relationship with the emperor, but the outer fan did not. In the case of Korea, the situation was complex. The imperial norms of the successive Chinese dynasties preferred to ascribe the beginning of Sino-Korean kinship to Jizi (K., Kija), a royal member of the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600–1046 BC) who was believed to have been invested by the Western Zhou court with the lands of ancient Chosŏn. This legend produced an assumption of a unique cultural homogeneity that the Chinese side deeply endorsed and that helped unified Chinese dynasties see Korea as belonging within China’s territorial perimeter.⁷ The Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) and the Tang Dynasty (618–907) invaded Korea and integrated parts of the Korean lands into China. In the 1260s the Mongol forces of the Yuan Dynasty gradually came to control the Koryŏ Dynasty of Korea (918–1392), and in the 1270s the Mongol court invested King Ch’ungnyŏl (r. 1274–1308), who married the Princess of Qi of Kublai Khan, as the consort of the imperial princess and the king of Koryŏ (K., Puma Koryŏ kugwang).⁸ After the Ming overthrew the Yuan, it ceased practicing the Yuan’s policy toward Koryŏ, which had been based on strong personal ties between the Mongol and Korean courts through state marriage.
After its establishment in 1368, the Ming followed the feudal principles of the Zhou Dynasty and the Zongfan practice of the Yuan in establishing the Zongfan system within its domain, but it had no desire to extend the system to Koryŏ. The founding father of the new dynasty claimed that Ming China would never invade Koryŏ or fourteen other neighboring countries. In 1392 a new Korean regime replaced Koryŏ and immediately sent emissaries to China to pursue imperial investiture of the kingship. Although the Ming conferred the title Chosŏn on the new regime, after Jizi Chosŏn, it did not endow the Korean king with investiture until 1401, when Emperor Jianwen (r. 1399–1402) invested the third king of Chosŏn (T’aejong, r. 1400–1418), formally extending the Zongfan arrangement to the kingdom. In the imperial mandate, the Ming underlined that the king should serve as a fence of the civilized kingdom and assist China forever (Ch., yongfu yu Zhongguo).⁹ In 1403 Emperor Yongle (r. 1402–24) awarded the same king an official robe commensurate with the rank of first-degree prince (Ch., qinwang, a brother of the emperor), further integrating Chosŏn into the Ming Zongfan system.¹⁰
In the transition from the Yuan-Koryŏ relationship to the Ming-Chosŏn one, the Ming made a consequential shift in China’s policy toward Korea: China allowed Korea independence as a foreign country in practice, but it continued to regulate the bilateral relationship with reference to Zongfan norms in the domestic feudal sense and on the ideological level. In the familistic and culturally homogeneous Zongfan context, the Ming depicted Chosŏn as an outer fan descending from Jizi, while Chosŏn identified itself as a vassal (K., chehu; Ch., zhuhou) of the Ming court and viewed their relationship in father-son and monarch-subordinate terms.¹¹ Simultaneously, Neo-Confucianism (K., Chŏngju hak), which celebrated Confucian social hierarchy, had become the ruling ideology during the Yuan Dynasty, and had lately been introduced to Korea, helping to institutionalize and stabilize this bilateral relationship.¹² After the Ming rescued Chosŏn from a Japanese invasion in the 1590s, Chosŏn became even more committed to the Ming, regarding the Ming as its parent nation (K., pumo chi pang).¹³ This arrangement seemed similar to the feudalism practiced in medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan, but as a cross-border framework it possessed features unique to the Confucianism-supported Chinese world. As part 2 of this book demonstrates, in the nineteenth century the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship built on these features confused European and Japanese diplomats, who could not find historical precedents for it within their own worlds. However, as scholars have pointed out, applying the Ming-Chosŏn hierarchical relationship to Sino-Korean contacts or China’s foreign relations before 1400 would be ahistorical.¹⁴
The Qing inherited the Ming Zongfan mechanism in its contacts with Chosŏn, but the Manchus’ kinship relations with Mongol tribes complicated the outer fan spectrum of the empire. This point is illustrated by the multilayered nature of the outer fan and the varied usage of the term in Qing political discourse, particularly in referring to political entities within the Qing pilgrimage system (Ch., chaojin) and to countries in Southeast Asia, such as Siam (Thailand).¹⁵ The Manchu court nevertheless understood Chosŏn and other subordinate entities as members of the Qing-centric family, in which the position of these entities was similar or
even equal to that of their Mongol counterparts.¹⁶ As the Ministry of Rites (Ch., Libu) described it to the Qianlong emperor in 1768 in the context of investing the Korean king’s grandson as the successor to the throne, "The outer fan are the same as Zongfan in terms of their relations with the central court" (Ch., Waifan zhi yu zongfan, shi shu xiangtong). Similarly, in 1790 the Qianlong emperor awarded the Vietnamese king, Nguyễn Huệ (r. 1788–92), a golden leather belt that only Zongfan of the royal family could use.¹⁷ The term Zongfan aptly encapsulates the relationship between the center/patriarch and the periphery/family members during the Qing period, and for this reason I have revitalized it in this book.
Reinterpreting the Rise of the Modern Chinese State through the Lens of Qing-Chosŏn Relations
The involvement of Chosŏn in the Ming-Qing war led to two fierce Manchu invasions of the country in 1627 and 1636. After conquering Chosŏn in early 1637, the Qing established a Zongfan relationship with it by replacing the Ming in the patriarchal position. Scholars have widely regarded Sino-Korean relations in China’s late imperial period as the quintessential manifestation of the Sinocentric order.¹⁸ Some scholars have tended to attribute the uniqueness of the relationship to the parties’ shared Confucian culture, especially Neo-Confucianism, while others have preferred to emphasize China’s political or military influence or control in the hegemonic sense.¹⁹ This book embraces the cultural perspective, but it simultaneously underlines the significant effect that the Manchu use of violence had on the establishment and maintenance of Qing-Chosŏn ties in the early seventeenth century. More importantly, I avoid enshrining the Qing-Chosŏn relationship in the pantheon of Chinese narratives of Sino-Korean relations since the Western Zhou, and I refrain from conflating the Qing-Chosŏn relationship with that between the Ming and Chosŏn. Rather, I explore the unique and crucial role of these bonds in providing the Qing with the political, intellectual, and ideological sources with which it reconstructed itself and the Chinese empire and eventually gave birth to a modern Chinese state.
A key term in analyzing the Sinocentric hierarchical arrangement between Qing China and other countries imagined in Qing imperial discourse is yi. Like so many abstract terms in Chinese (or indeed any language), its meaning varies according to context, but I have generally translated it as barbarians. As the following chapters show, yi, which was often used to describe outsiders in Sino-foreign contacts, did not necessarily carry a pejorative connotation. I also demonstrate a change in the meaning of yi from the perspective of the Manchu regime. The story of the Qing-Chosŏn relationship unfolds within the broader process of the Qing’s efforts to meet the unprecedented challenge of proving its orthodox legitimacy in the politico-cultural setting of the civilized vs. barbarian distinction (Ch., Hua–Yi zhi bian; K., Hwa–I ŭi chai).²⁰ It was against the background of this civilized–barbarian dichotomy that the Korean warrior Ch’oi sacrificed himself in Manchu-occupied Beijing, and it was in light of this distinction that his homeland strengthened its identity as Little China (K., So Chunghwa) in the post-Ming era, while the Qing positioned itself within the pedigree of the Middle Kingdom as the civilized center and the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao).
The establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship in 1637 was a watershed event in the history of the Qing’s prodigious enterprise of redefining itself and remaking the Chinese world. Scholars have commonly dated the Ming-Qing transition to the Manchu occupation of Beijing in 1644, but the Manchu regime in fact had initiated its bid for status as the Middle Kingdom at least a decade earlier, by employing the politico-cultural discourse embedded in the Zongfan structure. After 1637, the Qing progressively converted Chosŏn into a prototypical outer subordinate, known as waifan (outer fan) or shuguo (subordinate country) in the Chinese language and tulergi gurun (outer country) or harangga gurun (subordinate country) in the Manchu language. Very significantly, the Qing imperial terms abruptly reversed the Manchu-Korean hierarchical arrangement in the Ming period by portraying Chosŏn as a country of barbarians on the periphery of the Qing.
In its frequent contacts with Chosŏn from 1637 to 1643, the Qing strengthened the new bilateral political arrangement and developed a mature model for managing its relations with other newly conquered or subordinated entities. I call this model the Chosŏn model (Ch., Chaoxian shili, lit. Korean cases/examples).
As part 1 explains, the model constituted a pattern by which a country or a political entity could follow Chosŏn into the Qing-centric Zongfan system primarily by receiving imperial investitures from the Qing, adopting the regnal titles and calendar of the Qing, and sending emissaries and tribute to the Qing on a regular basis. The idea behind this model was to encourage outlying regions to embrace the Qing as the civilized center of the world and to affirm its supreme political and cultural position. After 1644, as the Qing continued its conquest of inner China by marching west and southwest, it used the Chosŏn model as a handy soft-power weapon to manage its political relations with other entities and to consolidate its new identification as the center of all-under-Heaven.
The Qing-Chosŏn hierarchy was far more than just the final chapter in the long Sino-Korean Zongfan history. Rather, it buttressed the rationale of the entire Zongfan system by keeping the periphery of the Chinese empire informed and regulated while the Manchu regime controlled and remade the empire at the core. The Qing’s dynamic relations with its first Confucian outer fan—Chosŏn—played a vital role in establishing, institutionalizing, and nourishing the entire Qing-centric system of foreign relations. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Qing had constructed a new imperial order within and beyond its Eurasian empire. It had simultaneously labeled Britain and other European states countries of barbarians and posited them on the periphery of China. These states, however, changed their status vis-à-vis China through gunboat diplomacy and treaties in the nineteenth century, when they encountered the Chinese world through such outer fan as Annam (Vietnam), Ryukyu, and Chosŏn. The introduction, translation, and dissemination of international law in the Chinese world put China, China’s outer fan, and the European states on an equal footing in terms of their state sovereignty. Nevertheless, the relationship between Qing China and its outer fan remained unchanged until the very end of the nineteenth century in that they still needed each other to acquire mutually constitutive and mutually defined orthodox legitimacy in their own world.
What confused the Western states in their contacts with the outer fan of China in the late nineteenth century was the nebulous nature of the Zongfan mechanism that constantly shunted them into perplexing negotiations with Beijing, the only place where diplomacy with outsiders could be conducted in accordance with Zongfan conventions. The disputes emerging at the periphery of China were thus transferred to the center of the empire, where they converged as an accumulative force to trigger certain reforms within China that in turn spread to and deeply influenced the periphery. Although this model may seem similar to contemporary relationships between European powers and their overseas colonies, it had a fundamentally different structure, as later sections and chapters will elaborate. The most typical case among the manifold and interwoven disputes regarding this mechanism arose in Chosŏn Korea.
The political and diplomatic conundrum of the international status of Chosŏn led the Qing and Chosŏn into legal quagmires and prompted both sides to modify their time-honored relations in the context of both the inner and the outer dual networks, as chapters 5 and 6 explain. But the various adjustments made to the relationship on both sides in the chaotic decade of the 1880s kept the Zongfan fundamentals untouched, as neither side could overcome the ideological dilemma caused by their mutually constitutive legitimacy at the level of high politics in the Confucian world. This double bind meant that colonizing Chosŏn was not an option for China in the turbulent period before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894. The growing controversy between China, Korea, Japan, and Western states finally resulted in the termination of the Sino-Korean Zongfan relationship in 1895. Accordingly, the cosmopolitan Chinese empire withdrew its political and cultural reach from its subordinate countries and became identical with the Chinese state defined by the norms of international law. After the war, China and Korea negotiated a new treaty for an equal state-to-state relationship, but the new arrangement lasted only a few years before both the Chosŏn Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty ceased to exist in 1910 and 1911, respectively. This book describes the trajectory of this varied relationship and shows its significance for the development of modern China and East Asia.
Revisiting the Chinese Empire under the Qing
This book defines the Qing as an empire and as a Chinese empire. As I explain below, this empire included Chosŏn in a politico-cultural sense. The term empire as a European concept that was always traced back to the Romans did not exist in the Chinese political lexicon until 1895, when the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Shimonoseki addressed the Qing as the Great Qing Empire in Chinese characters (Da Qing diguo), as a counterpart to the Great Japanese Empire (Dai Nippon teikoku).²¹ None of the ruling dynasties before the end of the Qing ever claimed to hold an empire, either in Chinese or, when the ruling house was not Han Chinese, in any other language. Even nowadays, describing a Chinese dynasty as an empire remains rare among historians in China. Nevertheless, if we define an empire broadly as a political entity in which different peoples are governed differently, Chinese history from 221 BC, when the Qin Dynasty (221–207 BC) unified China as a multiethnic polity, to the present is clearly a history of empires.²² In this book, the Chinese empire (Ch., Zhonghua diguo) refers to a multiethnic and multicultural polity in which the Middle Kingdom represented the political and cultural core against the background of the civilized–barbarian distinction and for which the concepts of Mandate of Heaven and all-under-Heaven served as constitutional ideologies to establish its political orthodox legitimacy and Confucian orthodox legitimacy (Ch., daotong). This definition may not fit all the dynasties that claimed the name of the Middle Kingdom, because, as R. Bin Wong observes, the ideas and institutions of this empire were neither constant over time nor uniform through space.²³ But it applies to the dynasties in Chinese history such as the Tang, the Northern and Southern Song (960–1279), the Liao (907–1125), the Xixia (1038–1227), the Jin (1115–1234), the Yuan, the Ming, and the Qing.
The Manchu ethnicity of the imperial house was not a barrier to the Qing’s presentation of itself as a Chinese empire, in particular after 1644, when the term Chinese (Ch., Zhongguo ren) took on a multiethnic character. The Qing had presented itself as a Chinese empire as early as 1689 in the Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia. The original treaty text, written in Latin by the French Jesuit Jean-François Gerbillon (1654–1707), who was serving the Manchu court, called the Qing Sinicum Imperium (Chinese Empire) as a counterpart to Ruthenicum Imperium (Russian Empire). The French version of the treaty rendered the term as l’Empire de la Chine (Empire of China) as a counterpart to l’Empire de Moscovie (Empire of Muscovy).²⁴ In the Manchu translation of the treaty, the Qing court used the term Dulimbai gurun to define itself as China/Zhongguo; this term is equivalent to Chinese Empire in the other versions of the text.²⁵
When Chinese became a multiethnic descriptor, the Qing also became the representative of Chinese culture, in particular the Confucianism that lay at the core of imperial political discourse. In 1712 Emperor Kangxi instructed the Manchu official Tulišen (1667–1740), an envoy to the Turgūt Mongols in Russia, that if the khan of Russia (Ma., Cagan han) asked what was esteemed in China, Tulišen should respond that our country takes fidelity, filial piety, benevolence, justice, and sincerity as fundamentals.²⁶ All of these concepts came from Confucianism, not from Manchu ideologies. After all, it was this Confucian identity and politico-cultural discourse informed by Confucianism, not the Qing’s Manchu characteristics or its realpolitik practiced along the newly conquered frontiers in Inner Asia, that determined the Qing’s political orthodox legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom and enabled it to obtain and justify Confucian orthodox legitimacy. This Confucian identity on the state level later helped the Qing display its Chineseness and win strong support from Han Chinese scholars, who assisted the dynasty in weathering the storm of anti-Manchu rebellions in the nineteenth century. This book broadly defines Chineseness as the state of being the legitimate Middle Kingdom, thus referring to statecraft, not ethnicity.
I interpret the Chinese empire under the Qing in two dimensions: the territorial empire and the politico-cultural empire. The territorial Chinese empire was equal to the Great Qing, composed primarily of the Manchu court, the inner provinces (Ch., zhisheng, directly controlled provinces), and the first group of outer fan, which were under the management of the central institution of Lifan yuan. These outer fan included regions and groups such as the Cahar Mongols, Tibet, and Mongol and Muslim tribes in Xinjiang. The Chinese name Lifan yuan means "the ministry of managing the affairs of the fan," and it differs from the organization’s Manchu name, Tulergi golo be dasara jurgan, which means the institution in charge of the outer provinces. Scholars have generally translated it as "Court of
Colonial Affairs or Mongolian Superintendency." This book adopts the latter rendering. The politico-cultural Chinese empire encompassed not only these political entities but also the second group of outer fan, whose contacts with China took place via the Ministry of Rites and whose shared characteristic was their identification of the Son of Heaven in China as the highest sovereign in the world (see figure I.1).
FIGURE I.1. The structure of the Chinese empire during the Qing. A = the court; B = inner provinces; C = outer fan under the Mongolian Superintendency (MS); D = outer fan under the Ministry of Rites (MOR), primarily Chosŏn, Ryukyu, and Annam; E = Western countries listed by the Qing as outer fan; AB = inner China, or China proper; ABC = the Great Qing, or the territorial Chinese empire; ABCD = the politico-cultural Chinese empire; ABCDE = all-under-Heaven.
Three key issues in the relationship between China and its outer fan within the politico-cultural Chinese empire invite elaboration: sovereignty, borders, and subjects. These issues were woven together in imperial times by the cosmopolitan idea of all-under-Heaven and were critically questioned within the context of the nation-state order of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. China, or Zhongguo, had historically always been mutually defined by its relations with the countries on its periphery—that is, by a combination of the country’s own perception of itself and the devotion of its neighbors to Chinese civilization. The nebulous dual nature of China’s identity posed a challenge to Chinese scholars who sought to define China anew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by comparing it to European states. These scholars could not find an established and consistent name for their homeland in history. For example, Huang Zunxian (1848–1905), a distinguished diplomat and scholar, reviewed the conventional civilized–barbarian discourse and preferred to call China the central civilized country (Ch., Huaxia). In his treatise exploring the reasons for China’s weakness, Liang Qichao (1873–1929), an intellectual leader of China’s modernization, pointed out that for a long time the Chinese had seen no difference between state and all-under-Heaven or between state and court.²⁷ Huang’s and Liang’s arguments reflected the cosmopolitan nature of the Chinese world, in which sovereignty, borders, and subjects manifested themselves in ways distinct from those of its Western counterpart.
The nature of the sovereignty of an outer fan in the Chinese world was twofold: it was fully independent in terms of the territorial Chinese empire but fully dependent in relation to the politico-cultural Chinese empire. An outer fan enjoyed the right of independence, that is, autonomy or self-rule—zizhu in Chinese—within its boundaries. As Jean-Baptiste Grosier (1743–1823) in the 1780s and George N. Curzon (1859–1925) in the 1890s observed, the king of Chosŏn was an independent and supreme sovereign in his own lands.²⁸ The kings of the Nguyễn Dynasty (1802–1945) of Vietnam went even further, claiming to be emperors and calling Vietnam the Middle Kingdom in the first half of the nineteenth century.²⁹ The kingship of the fan, however, was ultimately subjugated to the emperorship of China. As demonstrated by Emperor Qianlong’s deposition of the king of Vietnam, Lê Duy Kỳ (1765–93), and his investment of a new king in 1789, the emperor possessed absolute patriarchal power over the kings. This was particularly true for the Confucian kingship of Chosŏn.³⁰ What determined this relationship was not China’s military power or geopolitical gravity or its suzerainty, as Western and Japanese diplomats understood it in the nineteenth century, but the mutually constitutive legitimacy of each side of the bilateral arrangement that was undergirded by Zongfan tenets and Confucian ethos. As a consequence, in the 1830s and the 1870s, the king of Chosŏn refused to negotiate with Western representatives on the grounds that "subordinates of a fan have no right to conduct diplomacy" (Ch., fanchen wu waijiao).³¹ Vietnam adhered to the same ideology until the early 1880s.³² Within this system, a Korean king did not have his own regnal title during his lifetime but gained a posthumous title or temple name, which is why I tend to refer to Korean kings as, simply, the king, or to use their names (Yi Chong, for example) rather than their temple names (Injo, Yi Chong’s temple name). Although the awarding of temple names to the kings could suggest a portrayal of Korea as independent of China in an abstract sense and in an intellectual sense, in practice China’s patriarchal and divine imperial power was always real and effective.³³
The differences between peoples on either side of the borders that separated Qing China and its outer fan were clear, but these distinctions were not translated into the language of nation-states, as illustrated by the Qing’s cartographic survey in the Kangxi period and the Qing’s juridical negotiations with Annam and Chosŏn over legal cases.³⁴ The territorial border between China and the outer fan could be diluted and blurred by the shared ideology of all-under-Heaven within
the Zongfan framework. In this cultural context, the Qing court treated fan such as Chosŏn as a part—even an indispensable part—of the imperial dynasty (Ch., huangchao) or the Heavenly Dynasty. For the most part, scholars do not consider countries such as Chosŏn to have been components of the Chinese empire during the Qing. This view results from the dissemination of nationalist historiography in East Asia since the late nineteenth century and cleaves closely to a territorial definition of the Chinese empire. The Chinese empire as a politico-cultural unit, however, encompassed its outer fan beyond China’s borders, where China’s centrality was further constructed by local manifestations of the divine authority of the Chinese sovereign. Believing that all lands of the outer fan were under his rule in this sense, Emperor Yongzheng demarcated a new border with Annam in 1727 that allowed Annam to extend its territory 12.45 miles (40 Chinese li) farther into China in order to end the territorial disputes between the two sides.
Chosŏn never ceased trying to redraw its borders, as reflected in its prolonged negotiations with China over border demarcation in the Tumen River area from the 1710s to the 1880s, yet the Korean court had endorsed the Chinese imperial discourse of all-under-Heaven since the Ming period.³⁵ In 1593, for example, the king of Chosŏn (Sŏnjo, r. 1567–1608) claimed that Chosŏn was a vassal (K., chehu) of China and had been regarded by the Chinese dynasties as an inner subordinate (K., naebok; Ch., neifu) since Jizi. The king further emphasized that Chosŏn is actually China’s land and China lets our country manage it.³⁶ In the 1730s the Qing historians in History of the Ming commented that "Chosŏn was the Ming’s subordinate country, but it was not different from an inner part of China [Ch., yunei]."³⁷ The position of Chosŏn as part of the Chinese empire remained unchanged during the Qing in terms of imperial norms. In 1784 and 1788, Emperor Qianlong noted that Korea was almost the peer of the Qing’s inner subordinates.³⁸ In the rituals that marked imperial edicts, the Qing imperial ritual code made it clear that the local officials of Chosŏn should perform the same rituals as did those in directly controlled provinces (Ch., ru zhisheng zhi yi).³⁹
Another indicator of Chosŏn’s position was the annual calendar of the Qing (Ch., Shixian li or Shixian shu; Ma., Erin forgon i ton i bithe), issued every year by the Imperial Astronomical Bureau (Ch., Qintian jian; Ma., Abka be ginggulere yamun), which Korean emissaries had to retrieve from Beijing. The calendar included charts of the sunrise and sunset times and charts of the solar terms in each province (Ch., gesheng; Ma., yaya golo) and each Mongol and Muslim tribe (Ch., ge menggu huibu; Ma., geren monggo be, hoise i aiman) under Qing jurisdiction. From 1645, when the Qing inaugurated the calendar, Chosŏn was included in the list of inner provinces such as Shanxi and Shandong and later showed up alongside Mukden, Nerchinsk (Ma., Nibcu), Sanxing (Ma., Ilan hala), Bodune (Ma., Bedune), Heilongjiang (Ma., Sahaliyan ula), and Jilin. Following Chosŏn, Annam was added to the lists in 1789 and Ryukyu in 1810.⁴⁰ As Johan Elverskog has pointed out, A fundamental role of the emperor was to control the flow of time properly by creating the calendar and propitiating its cultural force through ritual and ceremony.⁴¹ Many maps of the known world produced by the cartographers of the Qing and Chosŏn in the eighteenth century, such as the Huangyu quanlan tu (Map of a complete view of the imperial lands, known as the Kangxi Atlas), also presented and substantiated this cosmopolitan ideology by including Chosŏn as part of the empire.⁴² The Qing thus subtly but unmistakably incorporated the group of outer fan into the Chinese empire.
Cosmopolitan ideas strongly shaped the Qing’s understanding of the subjects within and beyond its borders, even after international law reached China in the 1860s. In 1643, for instance, the Qing emphasized to Chosŏn that the two countries have become one family (Ch., liangguo yijia) and that the people of Chosŏn are also ours.⁴³ In 1882, when the Chinese governors in Manchuria reported to Beijing that many poor Korean peasants had crossed the border to cultivate Chinese lands, Emperor Guangxu noted, "In the eyes of the local officials, there is certainly a line between them and us [Ch., bici zhi fen], but in the eyes of the court, there is originally no difference between the inside and the outside [Ch., neiwai zhi bie]."⁴⁴ A group of Korean students learning Western technologies in Tianjin in 1882 were also treated by Chinese officials as loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao zhi chizi) and were granted free tuition.⁴⁵ In 1886 the Guangxu emperor emphasized that Chosŏn was close to Beijing and had no particular difference from other provinces in the inner land (Ch., you yu neidi
xingsheng wuyi).⁴⁶ For Qing China, Chosŏn was equal to a domestic subordinate (Ch., neichen), which might have been the impetus behind the proposals made by a large number of Chinese officials in the 1880s to convert Chosŏn into prefectures and counties of China—an approach I call provincialization—in order to save our Chosŏn (Ch., wo Chaoxian).
Within the Zongfan framework, these factors—sovereignty, borders, and subjects—were not complex issues between Qing China and its outer fan. But when international law and the norms embedded in it, such as sovereignty and suzerainty, reached East Asia in the 1860s and acted as a catalyst for the independence (Ch., duli; K., t’ŭngnip; J., dokuritsu) of the outer fan, these issues became controversial and began to be reconsidered and redefined in accordance with the imported legal terms in both China and its outer fan. Nevertheless, as part 2 of this book shows, the politico-cultural Chinese empire connecting the Middle Kingdom and its outer fan remained unchanged at that time, because international law could not endow the two sides with the necessary political orthodox legitimacy.
What drew China into the wars with France in Vietnam in 1883 and with Japan in Chosŏn in 1894, therefore, was not the territorial Chinese empire but the politico-cultural one. Similarly, what Japan defeated in 1895 was the tangible former rather than the invisible latter. In this regard, this book reveals the complexity of the dual presentation of the Chinese empire under the Qing, in particular in the late nineteenth century, when China and Korea tried to deliver a legal definition of their relationship to Japan and Western states. After 1895 the politico-cultural empire began to draw back from its extended frontier in its subordinate countries to China’s geographical borders, eventually becoming identical to the territorial empire. Through the decline of the politico-cultural empire emerged a modern Chinese state.
In his study of empires and states, Frederick Cooper argued that France only became a nation-state in 1962, when it gave up the last vital element of its imperial structure, Algeria.⁴⁷ Although China is not France and Korea is not Algeria, Korea had served for centuries as a key part of the politico-cultural Chinese empire, and under the Qing it acted as an outlying province of the empire in the Qing imperial norms.⁴⁸ It is thus not an exaggeration to say that China became a modern nation-state only once it recognized the absolute independence and sovereignty of the Korean state after World War II, especially after the Korean War in the 1950s. It was also in the 1950s that the People’s Republic of China officially endorsed the independence of the Mongolian People’s Republic, which had been part of the Chinese empire under the Qing, while at the same time integrating the northwestern region of the empire—Xinjiang and Tibet—into the territory of New China. At that point, the Korean side finally accomplished the prolonged process of decentering China and became equal to its Chinese counterpart.⁴⁹ Within this conceptual framework, this book traces the historical process through which both China and Korea detached themselves from the Chinese empire and moved toward modern state building in the postimperial era.
Renegotiating Qing Imperialism
Scholars of China and East Asia have commonly identified imperialism (Ch., Diguo zhuyi) with the West or Japan. As a concept, imperialism refers to a system that was underpinned by a series of aggressive political, economic, or diplomatic policies carried out by Western and Japanese powers against other states. Through these policies, the imperial powers attempted to reap the highest possible profits from the countries they subjugated via unequal treaties, while competing with each other for primacy. Imperialism is thus seen as a holdover of Western capitalism (Ch., Ziben zhuyi) and colonialism (Ch., Zhimin zhuyi) that reached the Chinese world aggressively after 1800.⁵⁰ This interpretation also reflects a phenomenon that scholars have called the great divergence between China and the West in world economic history.⁵¹ The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 marks the rise of imperialism in East Asia, a regime under which Qing China, too, suffered heavily. Historical narratives along these lines have promoted a Chinese victim mentality and nourished Chinese nationalism in the twentieth century, in particular after the Leninist definition of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism became popular in scholarship.⁵²
Since the second half of the twentieth century, two groups of scholars have questioned and complicated this received wisdom. The first group comprises students of the High Qing (that is, from the Kangxi to the Qianlong period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), who have promulgated the paradigm of New Qing history that is characterized by an Inner Asian and ethnic approach to interpreting the multiethnic and multicultural Qing.⁵³ The second group consists of students of Sino-Korean relations who have depicted Qing China’s policy toward Chosŏn in the late nineteenth century as imperialism. The approach of the first group might be called High Qing imperialism, and that of the second group Late Qing imperialism.
The High Qing imperialism school describes the High Qing as an institutional agent of imperialism, a system of coercive instruments aimed at extending the core area of the empire and keeping the empire functioning. This Qing imperialism manifested itself in geopolitical and global competitions between the Qing, the Mongol khanates and Muslim tribes in Inner Asia, the indigenous and cross-border tribes in southwestern China, the Russian Empire, and the British Empire.⁵⁴ Chinese and European colonialism and capitalism found their place in these intense competitions.⁵⁵ What fundamentally supports this argument of Qing imperialism is the fact of the Qing’s territorial expansion by force, followed by the political and cultural hegemony that it introduced to the newly conquered borderlands. However, if the High Qing was an agent of imperialism, all Chinese regimes that extended China’s borders would fall into the same category, including the Han, the Tang, the Yuan, the Ming, and the People’s Republic of China. In this sense, the thesis of High Qing imperialism risks detaching its interpretations of the Qing Empire from the pre-Qing Chinese historical context and being construed as a complement to Eurocentric narratives of imperialism in the broader context.
The argument of Late Qing imperialism, by contrast, distinguishes the Qing from its predecessors in Chinese history by asserting that the Late Qing exercised imperialism through coercive means characterized by power politics and economic expansion in the late nineteenth century. The leading proponents of this approach concede that the Late Qing was a victim of Western and Japanese imperialism but claim that it simultaneously practiced its own imperialism over weaker countries. This overseas imperialism fits the general definition that historians have drawn from the history of the Roman Empire: an unequal power relationship between two states in which the dominant state exercises various forms of control, often forcibly, over the weaker state.⁵⁶ Whereas the theory of High Qing imperialism does not take the Manchu conquest of Chosŏn in 1637 into consideration and leaves Chosŏn largely off the list of victims of that imperialism, Chosŏn is typically the only identified victim of Late Qing imperialism, which was embodied by activities such as sending troops to Chosŏn and obtaining treaty ports and settlements through unequal treaties that granted the Chinese extraterritoriality. The concept of informal empire, originally coined to refer to the powerful economic expansion of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, provides this argument with further intellectual support.⁵⁷ In retrospect, the argument of Late Qing imperialism bears a remarkable resemblance to the interpretation of China’s behavior in Chosŏn put forward by Western diplomats and observers in the nineteenth century. As M. Frederick Nelson has pointed out, "Under the assumption that China had nothing but a religious and ceremonial connection with Korea, Westerners viewed her growing de facto control of Korea as pure and unjustified power politics directed against an independent state."⁵⁸ By likening the Qing to its Western imperial counterparts, the thesis of Late Qing imperialism homogenizes Qing China as a major participant and a powerful predator in Eurocentric global history, therefore strengthening the approach of interpreting the histories of others with reference to that of the West instead of contextualizing these histories in their local milieus. As this book shows, the Qing activities in Korea in the late nineteenth century were a manifestation not of imperialism, but of Zongfan empiricism.
The argument of Qing imperialism, including both High Qing imperialism and Late Qing imperialism, serves as a normative tool for interpreting the constant changes undergone by China in its various forms. In order to explain those changes, this book renegotiates Qing imperialism by presenting the Qing as an empire that used ideological tools—the Chosŏn model and a set of imperial norms embodied by the model—to establish and consolidate its political authority and
cultural superiority in the Chinese world. What I call Zongfanism in this book can provide us with a different perspective for observing the rise and fall of the Eurasian Chinese empire under the Qing Dynasty and the rise of modern sovereign states in China and its neighboring countries. Zongfanism refers to a Chinese system of political and diplomatic communication conducted between, on the one hand, a political entity that culturally identified itself as the exclusive civilized center of the world, and, on the other hand, the political entities on its periphery that the center considered less civilized or even barbarian. The sovereign of the center possessed absolute patriarchal authority over the monarchs of the subordinate entities, while the two sides enjoyed mutually constitutive legitimacy informed by their shared politico-cultural norms.
Zongfanism transcends the entrenched divide between premodern and modern Chinese history. Historians have generally identified the Opium War of 1839–42 as the twilight of premodern China and the dawn of modern China. Along these lines, the mainstream narrative of Qing China holds that the pre-modern system of China’s foreign relations was incompatible with the modern treaty system, with which it was finally replaced. The principal problem with this paradigm lies not in its Eurocentrism per se (indeed, modern is a criterion rooted in European history) but rather in its neglect of constant factors within China’s foreign policy that bridged the premodern and modern periods without conspicuous changes. In other words, the factors that historians have widely identified as having led to the stagnation of China before it encountered the industrialized West constitute the very key to understanding late imperial China.⁵⁹ The Chinese empire lived with its indigenous norms, not imported ones.
The Zongfan perspective does not aim to replace that of Qing imperialism, nor can it completely account for the Qing’s activities during the high tide of the Manchu conquest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from Manchuria to the Korean peninsula and from Xinjiang to Tibet.⁶⁰ It instead aims to reveal the crucial relationships between the construction and dissemination of imperial ideology from the center to the periphery on the one hand, and imperial top-down statecraft in practice on the other. In the early twenty-first century, China has begun to exploit sophisticated ideas drawn from its recent history to preserve the legitimacy and unity of the multiethnic and multicultural Chinese state and to manage its relations with neighboring countries and the world. In this contemporary context, it may be helpful to examine the trajectory of changes in the Chinese world from an inside perspective, and the following chapters seek to do just that.
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Part I KOWTOWING TO OUR GREAT EMPEROR
Part I
KOWTOWING TO OUR GREAT EMPEROR
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1 CONQUERING CHOSŎN The Rise of the Manchu Regime as the Middle Kingdom, 1616–43 As the Manchu regime consolidated its power in Manchuria between the late 1610s and the early 1640s, it reshaped the perceptions of other polities and eradi- cated its longstanding barbarian image. The regime derived its political and cultural resources in large part from its relations with Chosŏn, which validated and reinforced the Manchu dynasty’s position as the Middle Kingdom within the newly established multistate hierarchical system. In this process, the Manchus appropriated the Ming’s Zongfan discourse to designate other political entities as barbarians, initiating a prolonged process that I call the barbarianization of oth- ers. By crossing the Great Wall in 1644, the Manchu regime had fundamentally reconceptualized its own identity and position in the Chinese world. Barbarians, Rebellions, and Wars The Jurchen Uprising in Manchuria On February 17, 1616, the lunar New Year and the first day of the Forty-Fourth Year of Wanli of the Ming Dynasty, a number of high-ranking Chinese officials assembled at the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City with tributary emissaries from Chosŏn and China’s other outer fan. They waited to enter the imperial hall to present the emperor with their congratulations on the New Year. Finally, realizing the emperor had no desire to grant them an audience, the officials and emis- saries carried out their ceremonies in front of the gate.¹ This scene was not surprising, as the emperor had long been uninterested in such ceremonies. Many high-ranking officials in Beijing had not seen the hermit-like Son of Heaven for almost thirty years.² The Middle Kingdom and its lethargic human agent seemed to have fallen asleep. The day was significant, however, in Hetuala, a small Manchurian town about seven hundred miles northeast of Beijing, where a tribe called the Jianzhou Ju- rchens announced the establishment of its own country under the leadership of Nurhaci (1559–1626; r. 1616–26). Proclaiming himself the “brilliant khan caring for all countries/peoples” (Ma., abka geren gurun be ujikini seme sindaha genggiyen han), Nurhaci accepted the congratulations of Jurchen and Mongol officials and generals, took the regnal title of Tianming (“mandate of Heaven”; Ma., Abkai fulingga), and named his country Houjin (“the later Jin”).³ He thus defined his regime as the successor to the Jin Dynasty established by the Jurchen ancestors.⁴ Nurhaci’s political ambitions extended far beyond unifying the local tribes. In May 1618 he attacked the Ming forces after announcing the “Seven Grievances” (Ma., Nadan amba koro; Ch., Qi dahen). Nurhaci had visited Beijing three times to present tribute and had been appointed by the Ming court to govern the Jianzhou Jurchens, whom the Ming considered “northeastern barbarians” (Ch., dongbei yi).⁵ In the Seven Grievances, Nurhaci identified the Jianzhou as a subor- dinate that had guarded the Ming’s border for generations, and declared that various conflicts between his tribe, other tribes, and the Ming’s local leaders had led to his rebellion. The Ming was confident about suppressing Nurhaci. To do so it enlisted the aid of the tribe of Yehe, an old and powerful enemy of the Jurchens, as well as the support of Chosŏn. As a loyal fan, Chosŏn had followed the policy of “serving the great” (K., sadae) for more than two centuries. It regarded Nurhaci’s rebellion as intolerable and its military assistance to the Ming as a “legal and moral duty” (K., ŭibun). Although the king, Yi Hon (Kwanghaegun), was worried that his men would be defeated, he nonetheless ordered Gen. Kang Hong-rip in early 1619 to lead thirteen thousand soldiers across the Yalu River to join forces with the Ming
army in Manchuria.⁶ In the battle of Sarhū on April 17, 1619, more than six thousand Korean soldiers were killed, and General Kang surrendered to Nurhaci. Ending Chosŏn’s military engagement in the war, the surrender provided Nurhaci with a golden opportunity to open an official channel of communication with the Korean sovereign. In addition to seeking a peace agreement with Chosŏn to reduce the military threat on his eastern flank, Nurhaci wanted to change his relationship with Chosŏn by identifying his newly founded regime as a state equal to Chosŏn rather than as a state of lower status, as presupposed by the longstanding framework of Jurchen- Chosŏn relations.⁷ This political ambition posed a grave challenge to Chosŏn in the context of the civilized–barbarian distinction and initiated an invisible but intensive struggle of political discourse between the two sides. Chosŏn’s Role in the Jurchen-Ming War The bilateral communications between the Jurchens and Chosŏn started with an exchange of letters. In May 1619 Nurhaci sent a captured officer to Chosŏn to present a “sovereign letter” (Ch., guoshu; K., kuksŏ) and a copy of the Seven Grievances to the king. After explaining why he fought against the “big country” (Ch., daguo; Ma., amba gurun), that is, the Ming, Nurhaci asked the king to make common cause with him against the Ming. Chosŏn had contacted Nurhaci by letter in the 1600s through a local officer in the town of Manpo on the northern border, but now Nurhaci’s “barbarian letter” (K., hosŏ) reached the court directly and posed a thorny problem for the king.⁸ After fierce debate among officials, the king appointed Pak Yŏp, governor of P’yŏngan Province, to write back to Nurhaci, but the format of the reply, and in par- ticular the question of how to address Nurhaci, remained a challenge. In Nurhaci’s letter, the Mongolian characters of his stamp read “Emperor Tianming of the Houjin” (K., Hugŭm ch’ŏnmyŏng hwangje), which greatly shocked the king and the Border Defense Council (K., Pibyŏnsa) because they believed the Ming em- peror to be the sole emperor in the known universe. It was highly likely that the characters defined Nurhaci as a “khan” in the Mongol sense, rather than as an “emperor” (Ch., huangdi; K., hwangje) in the Chinese and Korean sense. Chosŏn had always called Nurhaci “old chieftain” (K., roch’u), “barbarian chieftain” (K., ich’u), “chieftain of slaves” (K., noch’u), or “chieftain of thieves” (K., chŏkch’u), so endorsing Nurhaci’s self-proclaimed imperial title was out of the question. The king, pretending he could not understand the characters on Nurhaci’s seal, instructed Pak to send a letter to the “assistant general of the Jianzhou garrison” (K., Kŏnjuwi mabŏp; Ch., Jianzhouwei mafa).⁹ The Border Defense Council had learned the word mabŏp from previous letters sent by the Jurchens and assumed that it referred to an assistant general (K., p’ŏnbi). In fact, it came from the Manchu word mafa, which means “grandfather.” In addition, the letter addressed its recipient in the second person using the form of “you” (K., chokha) that officials who were equal to each other used among themselves, not for sovereigns.¹⁰ Finally, the letter bore Pak’s official stamp instead of the king’s. In this way, the king downgraded the communication with the Houjin to a provincial level and sidestepped the sensitive issue of the political legitimacy of the Jurchen regime. The Korean letter noted that Chosŏn and the Houjin had been subjects (K., sin) of the “Heavenly Dynasty” for two hundred years and suggested that Nurhaci pledge allegiance to the “Imperial Ming,” an action that would also yield reconciliation between Chosŏn and Nurhaci. This strong pro-Ming stance made the Hou- jin bristle.¹¹ In his reply, calling himself gu, a Chinese term used only by a sovereign to refer to himself, Nurhaci inferred that the Heavenly Dynasty to which Chosŏn referred must be the “southern dynasty”—the Jurchen appellation for the Ming, which indicated that the Houjin no longer endorsed the divine position of the Ming. Nurhaci clearly asked the king to form an alliance with him and suggested that the two countries kill a white horse and a black bull to offer to Heaven and Earth and burn incense to swear an oath.¹² Nurhaci had conducted this ritual with the Yehe, Hada, Ula, and Hūifa tribes in 1597 and with the Ming in 1608 and later started wars with these entities on account of their reneging on the oath.
Chosŏn was uninterested in Nurhaci’s offer, particularly in light of the Ming’s potential reaction to Korean-Jurchen contacts. Ming officials such as Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), a close friend of the Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), suspected that Chosŏn would join the Jurchen rebellion against the Ming and con- sidered it advisable to rein Chosŏn in. In August 1619 he proposed a new policy toward Chosŏn in a memorial to Emperor Wanli. Xu argued that Beijing should follow historical precedents set by the Zhou and Han Dynasties by sending a commissioner to Chosŏn to “supervise and protect” (Ch., jianhu) the country. Xu enthusiastically volunteered to take up this position, but the emperor, who had sent Chinese forces to Chosŏn to defend the country against Japanese invasions in the 1590s, did not grant his request.¹³ As a matter of fact, Chosŏn was not collaborating with the Jurchens, whom it still called “barbarians” (K., orangk’ae), but maintaining its political and moral allegiance to Beijing would not alleviate the risk of a Jurchen attack. Under the circumstances, the king took a practical ap- proach by tactically maintaining connections with the Houjin but confining them to the local level. In the meantime, the outlook for the Ming-Chosŏn alliance was not sanguine. Two Ming emperors died within two months in 1620, and the new emperor, Tian- qi, showed more interest in carpentry than he did in statecraft. On the battlefield, the Ming was losing more lands to the Houjin. In May 1621 the Jurchens occu- pied Liaoyang, a key military fortress in Manchuria, and made it the Houjin’s new capital, cutting off the overland route of communications between Chosŏn and the Ming. Facing a series of dramatic changes, the king made the risky move of sending Nurhaci his first sovereign letter in October 1622 through a civil official of the Ministry of Rites in Hansŏng (today’s Seoul). In the letter, he referred to Houjin as “a neighboring country” and Nurhaci as “khan of the Houjin country” (K., Hugŭmguk kahan). The letter adopted the same format as letters sent to Japan in accordance with Chosŏn’s policy of kyorin, communicating with a neighboring country.¹⁴ By acknowledging the statehood of the Jurchen regime, the king elevated his communications with Nurhaci to the level of a sovereign addressing an- other sovereign. The pragmatism of this policy called into question the king’s loyalty to the Ming, which the king’s nephew, Yi Chong, used to justify a bloody coup that he launched in May 1623 to dethrone the king. Assuming power as the new king (King Injo), Yi Chong blamed his uncle for failing to embrace his monarch- subordinate and father-son relationship with the Ming. He himself took a different tack: in addition to ending the exchange of messengers with Nurhaci and imposing trade sanctions on the Houjin, Yi Chong mobilized his followers to prepare for a war with the Houjin and even planned to lead an army himself to at- tack the Jurchens.¹⁵ Being a usurper, Yi Chong used his fervent pro-Ming attitude to obtain the Ming investiture that legitimized his rulership. The new king also helped Mao Wenlong (1576–1629), a Ming general who had escaped to Chosŏn after the Jurchens’ occupation of Liaoyang and had stationed his forces on Ka Is- land, close to mainland Chosŏn, carry out a guerrilla war to prevent the Jurchens from entering Shanhai Pass. Chosŏn’s new policy posed a considerable military and economic threat to the Jurchens, but it did not stop the Jurchen expansion. In 1625 the Jurchens occupied Shenyang, the political heart and economic center of Manchuria, and made it their new capital. After Nurhaci died in 1626, his son Hongtaiji became the new khan with the regnal title Tiancong (“Heavenly wis- dom”; Ma., Abkai sure) and quickly decided to invade Chosŏn. Becoming the Elder Brother of Chosŏn: The Jin and the First Manchu Invasion In the spring of 1627 Hongtaiji launched an attack on Chosŏn. The forces of the Jin, as the Jurchen regime now styled itself, swept into northern Chosŏn and cap- tured P’yŏngyang within two weeks, forcing the king, who had escaped to Kanghwa Island, to sue for peace. As a precondition of withdrawal, the Jin commander, Amin (?–1640), required the king to swear an oath to Heaven to sever Chosŏn’s relations with the Ming and establish an elder brother–younger brother rela- tionship with the Jin, the latter taking on the dominant role. In Chosŏn, many Confucian officials and students pleaded with the king to stop negotiating with the barbarous invaders, kill their messengers, and fight to the death. Although the king told his subjects that the peace talks with the “Jurchen clowns” were only a
stalling tactic, or a conventional “loose rein” (K., kimi) policy, he had no choice but to continue the negotiations. In his letters to Hongtaiji, the king endorsed Hongtaiji’s political position by addressing him as “Khan of the Country of the Jin,” but he purposely selected neu- tral terms for the Jin and Chosŏn. While he called the Jin “your honorable country,” the king referred to Chosŏn as “our country,” instead of “our humble country” or “our small country,” as he would say in his palace memorials to the Ming. No honorific expressions for Hongtaiji appeared at the beginning of the letter.¹⁶ The king conveyed that Chosŏn would follow the policy of “communicating with a neighboring country” vis-à-vis the Jin and that of “serving the great country” vis-à- vis the Ming. By deliberately using the Ming regnal title “Tianqi” to express the date in his letter, the king implied that he would not betray the Ming. This act of adhering to Ming time led to a deadlock in the negotiations. The king later switched to a “notice” format for his communications, since this format did not require a regnal title. The new format helped the two sides reach an agreement regarding Chosŏn’s oath. The oath-swearing ceremony occurred at the palace on Kanghwa Island on April 18, 1627. The king burned incense and swore the oaths to Heaven after one of his officials read them aloud. Despite the king’s reluctance, the substance of oaths was what Hongtaiji had demanded. The nine highest Chosŏn officials and eight high-ranking Jin officials also read their own oaths. However, the performance of these ceremonies between the king and the Jurchen officials was not men- tioned in either Manchu or Korean records.¹⁷ Another oath-swearing ceremony took place later in P’yŏngyang between Amin and a brother of the king. The P’yŏngyang oath included several additional terms imposed by the Jurchen invaders, emphasizing that the king should present gifts to the khan, host the Jin’s emissaries as he did those of the Ming, and not reinforce the city walls or conduct military drills.¹⁸ The two ceremonies ushered in a decade of peace between the two countries. In political and ideological terms the Jurchens benefited substantially from their invasion of Chosŏn. Chosŏn officially endorsed the Jurchen regime as a coun- try with a supreme sovereign, helping to foster the regime’s political legitimacy in the geopolitical arena. With the support of Chosŏn, the “Little China” that now regarded the Jin as its elder brother, the Jin’s politico-cultural self-identity changed from that of a barbarian, imposed by the discourse of the Ming-centered cos- mopolitan order, to that of the civilized. Although resentment of the Jurchen “barbarians” soared in Chosŏn after the war, the Korean court was unable to escape the newly established brotherhood. Economically, too, Chosŏn yielded to the Jurchens’ terms by opening markets in several towns on its northern border and paying “annual tribute” (K., sep’ye) to the Jurchen court. Constructing a Jin-Centric, Quasi-Zongfan System: The Jin’s New Position The Rise of the Jin-Chosŏn Quasi-Zongfan Order As he withdrew from Chosŏn, Hongtaiji sent the king a letter, explaining why he fought with the “southern dynasty”—the Ming—and attacked Chosŏn. He said, “The southern dynasty regards only itself as Son of Heaven and views people of other countries as inferior servants. … The Mandate of Heaven is truly righteous by assisting us with punishing the southern dynasty…. In the future, our two countries should be brothers forever and never bully others as the southern dynasty does.”¹⁹ By quoting the theory of the Mandate of Heaven, the khan challenged the Ming’s centrality in the universe and justified his war with the Ming. Over the following decade, his construction of a Jin-centric, quasi-Zongfan system in the Jin’s contacts with Chosŏn and other neighboring entities gradually changed the Jin’s position. In the face of serious economic difficulties brought on by the war, the Jin required Chosŏn to open markets for trade in a border city, Ŭiju. Chosŏn yielded to the Jin’s pressure but agreed to hold the markets only twice a year, in the spring and the autumn, rather than three times per year, as the Jin had wished. On March
31, 1628, the Ŭiju market opened for the first time, and the Jin emissary Inggūldai (1596–1648) came to Ŭiju accompanied by eight generals and more than a thou- sand people. As the Ŭiju market fell short of the Jin’s needs, Hongtaiji urged Chosŏn to open another one in Hoeryŏng, a northeastern border city.²⁰ In the midst of the shortage, the Jin relied heavily on the yearly gifts provided by Chosŏn and conveyed to Shenyang by one emissary in the spring and another in the autumn. From 1627 to 1636, the required gift comprised up to eighty-five categories of goods, but the amounts in each category kept changing to reflect the Jin’s needs or Chosŏn’s concerns, becoming a barometer of their relations.²¹ The Korean emissaries brought commercial opportunities to Shenyang. In 1631 the Border Defense Council of Chosŏn complained to the king that “the dispatch of emissaries to Shenyang was no different from opening markets there.”²² On the other hand, the development of the market in Shenyang, like that of the markets in Ŭiju and Hoeryŏng, suffered from significant differentials in the prices of the consumer prod- ucts offered by the two sides. The black cotton cloth and ginseng sold by the Koreans were expensive, whereas the animal skins and furs that the Jurchens traded were not. This difference made it difficult for the Jurchen side to turn a profit. The Jin’s military hegemony could not subordinate Korean capital, which contrib- uted to the Jin’s second invasion of Chosŏn. Given the military and economic situation, the Jin did not force Chosŏn to end its contacts with Beijing. Hongtaiji had the option of concluding a peace agree- ment with the Ming through which he could win the latter’s political endorsement. In a memorial to Hongtaiji in 1630, Gao Hongzhong, a Han Chinese scholar serving the Jin, suggested that the Jin “follow the Chosŏn model to receive the [Ming] investiture with kingship and to use the regnal title [of the Ming] to count the date” (Ch., bi Chaoxian shili, qingfeng wangwei, cong zhengshuo).²³ This proposal reflected a popular perception among the Chinese about Chosŏn’s exemplary tributary position in the Ming-centric world. Had the Ming agreed to negotiate for a Chosŏn-like status for the Jurchen regime, the Jin could have followed Chosŏn to become an outer fan of the Ming. Nevertheless, the war persisted, and the Jin moved toward a broader objective of replacing the Ming. For that purpose, the Jin started to transform its hierarchical relationship with Chosŏn. After 1627 Chosŏn continued to embrace the centrality of the Ming in its contacts with the Jin by applying its kyorin policy to the Jin; this put the Jin on an equal footing with Chosŏn. The king called his emissaries to the Jin “messengers” (K., sinsa), not “tributary emissaries” (K., kongsa), as he did those dispatched to Bei- jing. The goods brought annually to Shenyang were “gifts” (K., yemul) rather than “tributes” (K., kongmul) like those presented to Beijing. As the king noted in 1633 to Hongtaiji, “It is the proper principle [K., ye; Ch., li] that our two countries give each other local products in communications via emissaries.”²⁴ These terms reflected befitting modesty and suggested that Chosŏn treated the Jin as a country lower than the Ming. In stark contrast, the Jin developed a new discourse to nourish its self-identity as a political entity superior to Chosŏn. In documents written in the Manchu lan- guage beginning in 1627, the Jin downgraded the Korean monarch from “khan of Chosŏn” (Ma., Solgoi kan) to “king of Chosŏn” (Ma., Solgo i wang, or Coohiyan gurun i wang).²⁵ With the steady rise of the Jin’s military power, especially after its triumph in the battle at Dalinghe in late 1631 and early 1632, Hongtaiji enacted considerable reforms to the Jin political structure, abolishing the power-sharing system at the highest level of the court and making himself the exclusive sovereign.²⁶ From 1632, in his letters to the Ming and Chosŏn, Hongtaiji began to call himself “brilliant khan of the Manchu country” (Ma., Manju gurun i sure han) rather than “khan of the Jin country” (Ma., Aisin gurun i han), the title he had used before.²⁷ More importantly, he imitated the Ming bureaucracy by estab- lishing a six-ministry system in Shenyang and instructing Manchu officials such as Dahai (1595– 1632) to translate Chinese classics into the Manchu language.²⁸ From then on, the regime substantially accelerated the Sinicization of its imperial norms from the top down, a process carried out through the institution-building efforts of a group of Han Chinese officials and scholars such as Ning Wanwo (1593–1665), Fan Wencheng (1597–1666), Gao Hongzhong, and Bao Chengxian (?–1645). One of the most significant acts of these elites was to persuade Hongtaiji to produce the annals of the monarch and the regime in both the Chinese and
Manchu languages. The Chinese terms that these Han Chinese savants adopted to describe the exchanges of emissaries and diplomatic relations between the Jin and Chosŏn were crucial to revising the Jin’s political identity. According to the Manchu-language records written by the Manchu scholars, the emissaries of Chosŏn (Ma., Solho i elcin) “arrived and delivered the local products as gifts” (Ma., baci tucire doroi jaka benjime isinjiha) in Shenyang. When they left, the khan “gave” (Ma., unggihe) or “awarded” (Ma., šangnaha) them and the king gifts.²⁹ Although these Manchu terms were largely vernacular and had no strong political meaning, their counter- parts in the Chinese-language records offered a very different portrayal. The visit of the “tributary emissaries” (Ch., gongshi), who brought “tribute” (Ch., gongwu) or “local products” (Ch., fangwu), was described as “the coming to the court to present themselves before the sovereign” (Ch., laichao), suggesting that the emis- saries’ visit was prompted not by the Jin’s formidable military might but by its outstanding merits.³⁰ These terms invoked a hierarchical relationship between the sovereign—an emperor in the Chinese sense—and his subjects, which in this case included Chosŏn, Vietnam, Ryukyu, other fan of the Ming, and the Central Asian political entities.³¹ Meanwhile, the Jin applied the political and diplomatic discourse it had developed toward Chosŏn to forces and political entities that sought shelter with or surrendered to the Jin, such as Bar Baturu, Nomun Dalai, Coir Jamsu from Alakcot of Cahar, and the Ming general Kong Youde (?–1652).³² In 1634 Hongtaiji changed the name of Shenyang to Mukden in Manchu and Shengjing (lit. “prosperous capital”) in Chinese, and the following year he in- structed his people to call the country “Manzhou” (M., Manju; “the Manchu state”), not “Jurchen” or other names. The regime’s institutional construction was thus facilitated by a clear ethnic identification, but the rationale behind this framework focused more on politico-cultural factors than on ethnic ones. In this pe- riod, Jin officials, particularly those who were Han Chinese, started to address Hongtaiji as “emperor” (Ch., huangshang, or huangdi). Some suggested that Hong- taiji perform conventional rituals established by the Han Dynasty, through which he would claim to be the Son of Heaven in the Chinese sense. More signif- icantly, these officials invoked the principles of the civilized–barbarian distinction to brand the Ming “southern barbarians” (Ch., manzi) and those Chinese who surrendered to the Jin “Han Chinese barbarians” (Ch., hanyi), thereby appropriating and completely reversing the Ming’s language regarding the center of the world.³³ With this change in its worldview, the Manchu regime began to play the role of the exclusive institutional agent of the Mandate of Heaven, to which “all barbar- ians in the four quarters of the world willingly come in submission” (Ch., siyi xianfu). When the Ming generals Kong Youde and Geng Zhongming (1604–49) sur- rendered to Hongtaiji in 1633, the Jin jubilantly described the event as “people from afar willingly coming to our court for civilization” (Ch., yuanren laigui).³⁴ The euphoric adoption of this phrase demonstrated that the Manchu regime was purposely constructing its identity as the center of the world, with cultural superiority over “barbarians from afar” or on its periphery, which now included the Ming.³⁵ These momentous changes in the Jin’s political discourse were rooted in ortho- dox Chinese political theory as articulated in Confucian classics, such as Analects of Confucius (Ch., Lunyu) and Doctrine of the Mean (Ch., Zhongyong), and they demonstrate the deep significance of both the Sinicization of the Manchu regime and the barbarianization of others by the regime. The use of Chinese political rhetoric of this sort was no mere imitation of the Ming’s discourse to please Hongtaiji. Rather, it was aimed at achieving a political goal by transforming the regime into a new center of gravity in a Jin-dominated world, a goal that the young and vernacular Manchu language—including the New Manchu (Ma., ice manju hergen) developed in 1632—was incapable of securing. The Manchu regime conducted its relations with Chosŏn in accordance with hierarchical principles within a quasi-Zongfan system. Some historians have ar- gued that at this time the Manchus derived their political concepts of imperial rule mainly from their Mongol allies rather than from the Chinese.³⁶ Yet the transformation of the Manchu regime’s understanding of its relations with neighboring nomadic and Confucian states, which took place concurrently
with the transformation of the Manchu-Chosŏn relationship, indicates that the regime was enthusiastically constructing a new politico-cultural self-identity by appropriating and exploiting the Chinese politico-cultural discourse. Scholars have also long debated the theory of the Sinicization or Sinification of the Manchus. The mainstream explorations of this issue so far have focused either on how the Han Chinese culturally assimilated the Manchus or on how the Manchus tried to retain their ethnic identity.³⁷ What this chapter explores is how the Manchu regime, rather than the ethnic Manchus, promoted itself as the exclusively civilized Middle Kingdom—Zhongguo—and it is in this sense that I use the term “Sinicization” in this book. The Manchu Regime’s Strategic Goal of Transforming into Zhongguo While the quasi-Zongfan discourse helped to refashion the self-image of the Manchu regime along Chinese lines, the Manchu language offered an international setting for this reconstruction by framing the Jin’s relations with other political entities as state-to-state interactions. In Manchu records the Jin, the Ming, Chosŏn, and such Mongol polities as Korcin were all defined as gurun. The term gurun has several meanings, including “country,” “tribe,” “people of a tribe,” and “race.” Two of these meanings are primary: “people” and “country.” For instance, amba gurun could mean “big country” or “adults,” and ajige gurun could mean “small country” or “children,” while haha gurun refers to “men” and hehe gurun refers to “women.”³⁸ In political contexts, gurun denoted primarily “country,” as in Aisin gurun (the country of the Jin), Nikan gurun (the country of the Han Chinese, that is, the Ming), Daiming gurun (the country of the Great Ming), Solho gurun or Coohiyan gurun (the country of Chosŏn), Korcin gurun (the country of the Korcin Mongols), and Cahar gurun (the country of the Cahar Mongols).³⁹ The Mongolian equivalent of the term in the Mongol records of the day is ulus (country).⁴⁰ The Manchu rulers drew clear geographical, social, and cultural lines between the Manchu regime and other countries, even as they emphasized common- alities. Nurhaci underlined to the Kalka Mongols in 1619 that “the Ming and Chosŏn have different languages, but they share the same styles in clothing and hair, so the two countries look like a single country; similarly, our two countries look like a single country.”⁴¹ The consciousness of being a state became progressively more transparent in the regime’s political norms, in particular in the Chinese-language records. In 1628, for instance, Hongtaiji called the Cahar Mongols a “dif- ferent country” (Ma., encu gurun; Ch., yiguo) and a “far country” (Ch., yuanguo).⁴² The following year Hongtaiji treated the prince of “the country of Korcin” to the music and dances of “four countries,” including the Jin, the Korcin Mongols, the Ming, and Chosŏn.⁴³ In a letter to Ming officials in 1632, Hongtaiji named his country and the Cahar Mongols as two “countries outside of the border [of the Ming]” (Ma., jasei tulergi gurun; Ch., bianwai zhi guo).⁴⁴ The new political discourse fundamentally transformed the worldview of the Manchu regime from within by representing the regime as a state at the center of a multistate community. The strategic goal of this transformation, as Ning Wanwo indicated in 1633 when he suggested that the Jin compose an institutional code (Ch., Jindian) by modifying that of the Ming, was to break with Ming conventions and “gradually develop the institutions of Zhongguo” (Ch., jianjiu Zhongguo zhi zhi). In other words, the Jin intended to develop its own “institutions of Zhongguo” to replace those of the Ming. According to Ning, only in this way could the regime manage its great enterprise after conquering the “place of the southern barbarians” (Ch., manzi difang), that is, the Ming. Ning justified his proposal by stressing that “a new monarch and his officials must have their own institutional works.”⁴⁵ This strategic plan shows that Zhongguo, as a politico-cultural identity, was available for the Manchu regime to embrace and claim. What is more, it suggests that control over the central plain (Ch., Zhongyuan) was not necessarily a prerequisite for a regime to claim to be Zhongguo, as has been assumed. Nurhaci wished to preserve the ways of his ethnic nation, or Manchuness, by enshrining Shanhai Pass and the Liao River as the border between “the Chinese and Jurchen countries” (Ma., nikan, jušen meni meni gurun). He tried to avoid “turning to the Chinese way” (Ma., nikan i doro de dosimbi; Ch., xiao hansu)—or becoming Sinicized—as the Liao, the Jin, and the Yuan Dynasties had done after their founders left their own homelands for the “Chinese inner land” (Ma., nikan
i dorgi bade; Ch., handi); they had “changed ways and all became Chinese” (Ma., doro forgošoro jakade, gemu nikan ohobi).⁴⁶ Although the Manchu leaders exhorted their ethnic cohorts to keep to the “old way” (Ma., fe doro) in daily life by wearing traditional garb and practicing Manchu archery and horseback riding, the regime was unavoidably following the “Chinese way” in its rapid transformation in the 1630s. The Manchu regime could have become Zhongguo even if it had remained in Manchuria and not crossed the Great Wall in 1644. By employing the newly adopted Chinese political discourse, the Manchu regime gradually absorbed the Chinese political philosophy of the Zongfan order into its understanding of its place within the constellation of polities. Aside from the Ming, other countries served as the Jin’s outer fan by presenting tribute to the khan, who occupied a position akin to that of a Chinese emperor. This quasi-Zongfan system matured to the point that in 1636, in their Chinese letter to Chosŏn, forty-nine princes of sixteen countries of Mongols under the Jin’s leadership termed themselves “Mongols as the outer fan of the Jin” (Ch., Jinguo waifan menggu), equivalent to the Manchu term tulergi goloi monggo (“Mongols as the outer fan ”).⁴⁷ In the same year, the Jin founded Menggu yamen (M., Monggo jurgan, lit. “the ministry of Mongolian affairs”) on the basis of Chinese civil administrational concepts. As an institution parallel to the Ministry of Rites, this ministry enabled the regime to transform its relations with the Mongols and to build and govern an emerging empire. The construction of this quasi-Zongfan discourse occurred primarily within the Jin’s borders, but the Jin found Chosŏn the best external resource to support its discursive revolution. Within the bilateral relationship, the Jin held the role of the supreme power, and it converted Chosŏn from a younger brother into a subor- dinate or outer fan. Students of Sino-Korean relations tend to assume that the Manchus adopted hierarchical discourse in 1637 after the second Manchu invasion, when the Manchu side imposed clear Zongfan terms on Chosŏn. However, in practice the process had begun much earlier. In the 1630s the scholars of the Jin had mined Chinese history for intellectual resources with which to manipulate the civilized–barbarian distinction in order to establish the centrality of the Jin. Within the Zongfan framework, the “central civilized country” (Ch., Huaxia) and its counterpart, “barbarians,” were the two key concepts addressing the status of the Middle Kingdom and that of its outer fan. The two terms were derived from the notion of all-under-Heaven, developed in the Xia (ca. 2070–1600 BC), Shang (1600–1046 BC), and Zhou periods, through which the three dynasties sought to legitimize their rule as divine. At the same time, the political entities spanning China’s lands identified xia (referring not to the Xia Dynasty but to a larger area in which the regime once resided) as the symbol of a civilized commu- nity possessing the Mandate of Heaven, namely, Zhongguo, Zhongyuan (the central plain), or Zhongtu (the central lands). At that time, the term “barbarians” re- ferred primarily to groups that resided along the periphery of the central plain and were reluctant to identify and embrace the concept of “civilized China,” as exemplified by the state relationship between the Qin and the Chu in the third century BC.⁴⁸ The originally geographic notion of “barbarian” became an instrument used by political forces to deprecate their antagonists during the movement of “revering the court of the Zhou and expelling the barbarians” (Ch., zunzhou rangyi) in the Eastern Zhou (770–256 BC), a chaotic time that led Confucius (551–479 BC) to call for restoring the ideal order of “proper conduct” (Ch., li) of the Western Zhou. Due to the fierce interstate rivalries, the civilized– barbarian distinction evolved into a politico-cultural ideology that the dynastic regimes of China contin- uously reinterpreted for the next two thousand years, until 1911. After the Han Dynasty, with the official institutionalization of Confucianism and the expansion of the concept of all-under-Heaven, the civilized–barbarian dis- tinction became a critical theoretical framework for the Chinese court’s management of its foreign relations. As “northern barbarians” gained ascendancy in the Northern Song (960–1127), the distinction presented itself as an essential cultural instrument with which Chinese elites endowed certain regimes with the pedi- gree of “legitimate historical narratives” (Ch., zhengshi) by expelling competing polities from these narratives.⁴⁹ Some scholars, such as Shi Jie (1005–45), the au- thor of A Treatise on the Middle Kingdom (Ch., Zhongguo lun), and Ouyang Xiu (1007–72), the author of A Treatise on Orthodox Legitimacy (Ch., Zhengtong lun),
depicted the Song as the exclusive civilized center of the world and the polities on the Song’s northern border as uncivilized. One of the most influential histories, A Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government (Ch., Zizhi tongjian), edited by Sima Guang (1019–86), drew a clear lineage connecting states identified as “China” from 403 BC to AD 959. The efforts of these scholars to conceptualize the narrative of orthodox legitimacy eventually paid off, for their rhetoric triumphed over that of the northern regimes, especially when Neo-Confucianism, created and elaborated by such Song intellectual vanguards as Cheng Hao (1032–85), Cheng Yi (1033–1107), and Zhu Xi (1130–1200), became China’s official ideology under the Yuan Dynasty. This intellectual history can help explain why the official historical narrative of the People’s Republic of China still celebrates the Song for its legitimate status as Zhongguo and marginalizes the Liao, the Xixia, and the Jin as regimes established by “ethnic minorities” (Ch., shaoshu minzu). It was against this historical back- drop that the scholars of the Manchu regime in the 1630s began to construct the regime’s orthodox legitimacy, which laid the foundation for the Manchu enter- prise of governing a vast empire as the legitimate Middle Kingdom, Zhongguo. The Practices of the Manchu-Chosŏn Quasi-Zongfan Order The Manchu regime implemented its quasi-Zongfan discourse through the rituals that accompanied the exchange of emissaries with Chosŏn by imitating Ming- Chosŏn contacts. In Mukden, the Korean emissaries kowtowed five times to Hongtaiji. They were comfortably lodged in the city and enjoyed a welcome banquet (K., hama yŏn, lit. “banquet for getting off a horse”) and a farewell banquet (K., sangma yŏn, lit. “banquet for getting on a horse”). Hongtaiji dispensed gifts to the Korean king, emissaries, interpreters, and servants.⁵⁰ In exchange, the Jin sent Manchu emissaries to Hansŏng in the spring and autumn of every year. Before they entered the Korean capital, the Manchu emissaries were housed at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country (K., Mohwa gwan), a place that had previ- ously accommodated Ming emissaries. The emissaries also had an audience with the king in the palace and were treated to official welcome and farewell ban- quets. Although Chosŏn did not want to treat the Manchu representatives like those of the Ming, the general ritual procedures of greeting were practically iden- tical. The Manchu emissaries lacked only their Ming counterparts’ standing as “imperial envoy” or “Heavenly envoy.” This de facto Zongfan relationship conflicted with the de jure one of equality between the two brothers, a contradiction strikingly manifested in the different for- mats of their sovereign letters to each other. In its letters to the Jin, Chosŏn placed the two sides on a fully equal political plane, which was hierarchically lower than the status of the Ming. According to the Chinese convention, whenever the characters for Heaven or the Ming emperor appeared, they were placed at the top of a new line, two character spaces higher than the characters for Chosŏn and the first characters of other lines. This honorific elevation acknowledged the em- peror as the supreme human agent of Heaven with the highest spiritual position in the world. Hongtaiji also used honorific elevation in his letters, but he adopted a different arrangement of the hierarchy, as shown by his letters to the Ming general Yuan Chonghuan (1584–1630). Hongtaiji divided the hierarchy into four lev- els, among which his position was lower than that of Heaven and the Ming emperor but higher than that of Ming officials (see figure 1.1). For his part, General Yuan followed Ming custom in his letters to Hongtaiji (see figure 1.2). Frustrated by Yuan’s usage, Hongtaiji exclaimed that he was “the monarch or the khan of another country” (Ma., encu gurun i ejen han) and “son of Heaven and the Buddha” (Ma., abka fucihi i jui). He declared that he would not accept any letters from the Ming that addressed him with a status lower than or even equal to that of the Ming officials.⁵¹ Nevertheless, in his communications with the king of Chosŏn, Hongtaiji was more pragmatic, addressing the king as a near equal in order to avoid offending the Korean monarch (see figure 1.3). The king followed the same format in his responses to Hongtaiji but avoided mention of the imposed brotherhood (see figure 1.4). Although Hongtaiji called the king “younger brother,” the king never referred to Hongtaiji as “elder brother.” When Hongtaiji questioned the king about this discrepancy in 1629, the king shifted to friend-to-friend expressions: “The king of the country of Chosŏn,” he wrote, “presents this letter to the khan of the country of the Jin” (K., Chosŏn
kugwang pongsŏ Kŭmguk han; Ma., Coohiyan gurun i wang ni bithe, Aisin gurun i han de unggimbi). This usage matched Hongtaiji’s wording: “The khan of the country of the Jin sends this letter to the king of the country of Chosŏn” (Ma., Aisin gurun i han i bithe, Coohiyan gurun i wang de unggimbi). Later, the king changed the verb “present” (K., pong; Ma., jafambi) to “send” (K., ch’i; Ma., unggimbi), eliminating the hierarchical connotations of the former term. This subtle change provoked the Jin, but Chosŏn explained that both terms were used between “neighboring countries.”⁵² To the Jin, Chosŏn’s pronounced pro-Ming attitude meant that the brotherhood was unstable. The Jin’s security would not be guaranteed so long as Chosŏn was a loyal subject of the Ming. The only way to solve this problem, the Jin believed, was with another war against Chosŏn.
FIGURE 1.1. The format of Hongtaiji’s letters to Yuan Chonghuan in 1627. In this and the three figures that follow, the Arabic numerals represent horizontal lines from the top down, the English letters represent vertical lines, and the direction of the writing is from right to left. “X” represents a Chinese character. MWLD, 821, 847; MBRT, 4:28, 72.
FIGURE 1.2. The format of Yuan Chonghuan’s letters to Hongtaiji in 1627. MWLD, 821; MBRT, 4:28. 
FIGURE 1.3. The format of Hongtaiji’s letters to the king of Chosŏn, 1627–36. Kakyu gobu .
FIGURE 1.4. The format of the letters of the king of Chosŏn to Hongtaiji, 1627–36. Chosŏnguk raesoȈ bu, vol. 1. From Elder Brother to Father of Chosŏn: The Second Manchu Invasion Manchu-Chosŏn Conflicts over Orthodox Legitimacy In the middle of the 1630s, many Han Chinese and Manchu officials of the Jin sought to persuade Hongtaiji to take the title of emperor. On February 4, 1636, these officials presented memorials to prompt Hongtaiji to follow the Mandate of Heaven by claiming the emperorship. Following Chinese ritual conventions, Hongtaiji ostensibly declined and suggested his officials send emissaries to Chosŏn to discuss the matter with the king, his younger brother.⁵³ Hongtaiji’s true motivation, as the Korean official Hong Ik-han (1586–1637) shrewdly recognized, was to use Chosŏn’s identity as Little China to assert before other countries that Chosŏn revered him as the Son of Heaven. The Manchu officials Inggūldai and Mafuta (?–1640) arrived in Hansŏng on March 30, along with forty-seven Mongol princes, thirty generals, and ninety-eight soldiers. They brought with them five letters. The first three letters extended Hongtaiji’s condolences on the death of the queen of Chosŏn. The fourth letter, writ- ten by eight Manchu princes (Ma., hošoi beile) and seventeen high-ranking Manchu ministers (Ma., gūsai amban), and the fifth letter, by forty-nine Mongol princes under the Chinese name Jinguo waifan menggu (Mongols as the outer fan of the Jin), aimed to persuade the king to submit a memorial urging Hongtaiji to follow the Mandate of Heaven (Ma., Abkai gūnin) and to claim the “great title” (Ma., amba gebu)—namely, that of emperor. The letters emphasized that the Jin now pos- sessed “virtues” (Ma., erdemu) that enabled it to manage the world.⁵⁴ But on March 31, 139 Korean Confucian students presented the king with a petition, calling
on him “to kill the barbarian emissaries and burn the barbarian letters.” Inggūldai and his followers were thrown into panic and fled the city.⁵⁵ Chosŏn’s stance was strengthened when the king dispatched Na Tŏk-hŏn as the spring emissary and Yi Kwak as the response emissary to Mukden in late April. On May 15 the Jin held a grand ceremony in which Hongtaiji assumed the title “emperor of lenience, kindheartedness, beneficence, and brilliance” (Ma., gosin onco huwaliyasun enduringge han; Ch., kuan wen ren sheng huangdi) and adopted the regnal title Chongde (Ma., Wesihun erdemungge, lit. “worshiping virtues”). The Jin renamed itself the “Country of the Great Qing” (Ma., Daicing gurun; Ch., Da Qing guo). Gathering on Hongtaiji’s left and right flanks, the Jin’s Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese officials knelt down three times, each time making three prostrations (Ma., ilan jergi niyakūrafi uyun jergi hengkilembi; Ch., san gui jiu koutou)—the highest level of kowtow during the Qing period. Although Na and Yi had performed a ceremony of four kowtows before Hongtaiji upon their arrival, they called this second ceremony a “usurpation of the imperial title” (K., ch’amho) and refused to perform it, expressing their strong opposition to Hongtaiji’s political ambitions.⁵⁶ Chosŏn was the only Confucian country that lay beyond the Manchu regime’s political control but maintained regular and official diplomatic communications with it. Since Hongtaiji had made his claim to be the Son of Heaven in observance of proper Chinese conduct, he desperately needed the sup- port of Chosŏn to counteract the designation of the Manchus as barbarians and to legitimize his emperorship in the Chinese sense. The ritual conflict with the Korean emissaries thus posed a grave identity crisis for him. Without endorsement from Chosŏn, the Manchu regime’s political transformation would remain largely confined to its borders and would not significantly influence regional politics. Hongtaiji sent Na and Yi back to Chosŏn with two Chinese-language letters to the king. In the letters Hongtaiji called himself “emperor of the country of the Great Qing” (Ch., Da Qing guo huangdi) rather than “khan of the Jin” and referred to Chosŏn as “your country” (Ch., erguo) instead of “your honorable country” (Ch., guiguo), signaling the end of the bilateral brotherly relationship. Invoking the time-honored notion that “the Heaven does not belong to one person, but to all people under the Heaven” (Ma., abkai fejergi emu niyalmai abkai fejergi waka, abkai fejergi niyalmai abkai fejergi), Hongtaiji sought to demonstrate that his regime could govern the space of all-under-Heaven (Ch., tianxia; Ma., abkai fejergi) by following the precedent set by previous dynasties: namely, the Liao, which had been founded by the “northeastern barbarians” (Ch., dongbei yi; Ma., dergi amargi jušen); the Jin, founded by the “eastern barbarians” (Ch., dongyi; Ma., dergi jušen); and the Yuan, established by the “northern barbarians” (Ch., beiyi; Ma., amargi monggo, “northern Mongols”). By chronicling the rise and fall of these dynasties, Hongtaiji located the Qing, the dynasty of the Manchu “barbarians,” within this lineage of rulership, with himself as the Son of Heaven. The Qing’s rule was justified, he argued, because the Qing possessed the virtue that the Ming had lost.⁵⁷ This assertion was based on the Chinese political view that “the Great Heaven has no partial affections and it helps only the virtuous” (Ch., huangtian wu qin, wei de shi fu), a theory articulated in The Classic of History (Ch., Shangshu), which had endowed more than thirty dynasties with legitimacy. In short, Hongtaiji hoped that Chosŏn would become the Great Qing’s outer fan, just as it had served the previous dynasties of China. Chosŏn became the first external target of the Qing’s new, Qing-centric Zongfan doctrine. Yet Hongtaiji’s position was unpopular in Chosŏn because it con- flicted with the orthodox legitimacy on which the Confucian country based its political and social principles. With the exception of several high-ranking officials who preferred the Manchus, the majority of the ruling elite resolutely called for “revering China and expelling the barbarians” (K., chon Chungguk, yang yichŏk) in accordance with “the doctrine of revering the Zhou Dynasty” (K., chonju ŭiri).⁵⁸ In the face of tremendous pressure, the king reaffirmed that Chosŏn would not en- dorse Hongtaiji’s emperorship. The Qing thus declared war for the sake of its name and legitimacy. The Establishment of Manchu-Chosŏn Zongfan Relations On December 28, 1636, Qing troops attacked Chosŏn. They captured Hansŏng on January 9, 1637, without encountering strong resistance. The king had escaped
to Namhan Mountain Fortress with the crown prince (K., seja; Ch., shizi; Ma., šidz) and some officials, while the remaining royal family members and other offi- cials fled to Kanghwa Island. The Qing forces surrounded the Namhan Fortress and, as their precondition for negotiations, demanded that the king send the crown prince as hostage. The king refused and mobilized his forces to resist the invasion and protect the “great justice under Heaven” (K., ch’ŏnha taeŭi). While Hongtaiji marched on the fortress with reinforcements on January 19, the king and his officials performed ceremonies to celebrate the birthday of Emperor Chongzhen of the Ming. Yet the king realized that Chosŏn’s fate was now at a crossroads. Ch’oe Myŏng-gil (1586–1647), a minister who had assisted the king in assuming the throne in the coup of 1623 and served as the king’s close adviser since that time, argued for peaceful negotiation with the Qing as he had done in 1627, when the Manchus invaded Chosŏn for the first time. Ch’oe’s approach was not welcomed by the majority of his colleagues, but it was undeniably prag- matic. On January 26, the lunar New Year, the king, fulfilling Chosŏn’s duty as a subject of the Ming, performed vested rituals in the direction of Beijing. Once the ceremony was over, the king sent two officials to negotiate with the Qing. Two days later the king presented a letter to Hongtaiji in which he called Hongtaiji “the emperor of lenience, kindheartedness, beneficence, and brilliance of the country of the Great Qing” and referred to the Qing as the “big country” (K., taeguk) and to Chosŏn as the “small country” (K., sobang). The presentation of the letter was defined as “submitting the letter to the higher authority” (K., songsŏ).⁵⁹ Hongtaiji insisted that the king should surrender to him in person, so the two sides negotiated for two more weeks, during which the Qing troops shelled the fortress and defeated Chosŏn reinforcements sent from provinces. On February 15 the king presented another letter, in which he called Hongtaiji “Your Majesty” and himself a “subordinate” (see figure 1.5). He dated the letter using the Qing reg- nal title “Chongde.”⁶⁰ His letter suggested that the king had decided to surrender before Kanghwa Island was conquered.⁶¹ On February 17 the king submitted a sovereign letter to Hongtaiji, declaring that Chosŏn would “present the humble palace memorial [K., p’yo; Ch., biao] as the subordinate and serve as a fan [K., pŏnbang; Ch., fanbang] of the Great Qing forever,” while “all rituals about serving the big country would be performed in the vested format.”⁶² On February 22, 1637, Inggūldai brought an imperial edict to the king and asked the Korean officials to perform the same rituals that they had done when receiv- ing edicts from the “southern dynasty” (the Ming). This occasion marked the first time that the Qing replaced the Ming in ritual exchanges with Chosŏn on Ko- rean territory. In his edict, Hongtaiji listed ten terms of submission, among which two stood out. First, the king had to surrender to the Qing the book of imperial investiture and the seal that he had received from the Ming, stop communicating with the Ming, and begin to use the regnal title of the Qing instead of that of the Ming to indicate dates in all documents. Second, the king had to dispatch officials to the Qing every year to bring “humble palace memorials,” present gifts, and perform rituals to celebrate occasions such as the winter solstice, the New Year, the birthdays of the emperor, empress, and crown prince, and any good news for the Qing, and to extend condolences on the loss of members of the Qing’s royal house. The format of these memorials was required to follow the established for- mat of Chosŏn’s memorials to the Ming. The rituals of receiving imperial decrees, accommodating imperial envoys in Chosŏn, and paying formal visits to the Qing emperor through tributary emissaries were to dovetail precisely with the “established way of the Ming country” (Ch., Mingguo jiuli). Hongtaiji also listed the items and amounts of the tributes required of Chosŏn and specified that tribute submissions ought to begin in 1639.⁶³
FIGURE 1.5. The format of the king’s letters to Hongtaiji in February 1637. The Arabic numerals represent horizontal lines from the top down, the English letters represent vertical lines, and the direction of the writing is from right to left. X represents a Chinese character. Chosŏnguk raesoȈ bu, 2:26–38. The king unconditionally accepted all of Hongtaiji’s terms. On February 24, 1637, he presented himself before Hongtaiji at Samjŏndo (lit. “three fields ferry”), near the Hangang River, where the Qing had built a massive altar for Hongtaiji to receive the king’s surrender. During the ceremony, presided over by the Qing’s Ministry of Rites, the king knelt down three times, each time bowing his head three times before the emperor, after which he handed in his seal issued by the Ming. This ceremony marked the official establishment of the Zongfan relationship between the Qing and Chosŏn, as the king confirmed in his palace memorial to Hongtaiji on December 16, 1637.⁶⁴ The Qing’s forces soon returned to Mukden, taking the crown prince of Chosŏn, Yi Wang (1612–45), and the king’s second son, Yi Ho (King Hyojong, 1619–59), as hostages. Beginning on March 24, 1637, Chosŏn used the regnal title of the Qing to express the date, thus incorporating the country into the Qing’s temporal realm.⁶⁵ Chosŏn became the Qing’s outer fan . The establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship, which replaced the Ming-Chosŏn relationship that had been officially institutionalized in 1401, was extremely significant for the Qing. The Ming’s passionate endorsement of the Zhou Zongfan system meant that under the Qing, the system was likewise di- rectly connected with the classical and ideal tenets of the Zhou. As its political rhetoric developed after 1644, the Manchu court began to define its relationship with Chosŏn’s court by using more sophisticated terms that were associated with the Zhou Zongfan system. As early as 1649, Emperor Shunzhi, in his imperial mandate to invest King Hyojong, emphasized that Chosŏn served as an “outer fan ” for the “central court” (Ch., wangshi).⁶⁶ In 1659 Emperor Shunzhi began his imperial mandate to invest King Hyŏngjong with the traditional term “dividing cogongrass” (Ch., fenmao), a metaphor for the Zhou’s Zongfan investiture.⁶⁷ Meanwhile, the Manchu court came to define Chosŏn as a “princely submission” (Ch., houfu; Ma., jecen i golo) according to the conventional theory of the “five submissions” (Ch., wufu) of the Zhou.⁶⁸ This definition equated the status of the king with that of China’s princely minister, governor-general, and governor.⁶⁹
Along the same lines, the Qing side, emperors and officials alike, regarded Korean emissaries as “ministers of ministers of the outer fan ” (Ch., waifan peichen).⁷⁰ These established Zongfan tenets determined the familistic nature of the Qing-Chosŏn relationship, which crystallized in a crisis of kingship in 1768. In August of that year, Yi Gŭm (King Yŏngjo) asked Emperor Qianlong to invest his grandson Yi San (later known as Chŏngjo) as the crown successor to the Chosŏn king- ship in the wake of the deaths of Yi Gŭm’s two sons, including the crown prince. Because the Qing court had never before encountered this situation, Emperor Qianlong instructed the Grand Secretariat (Ch., Neige) and the Ministry of Rites to consult Confucian books and historical records in search of appropriate prece- dents for the title of “crown grandson” (Ch., shisun). The ministry cited Confucius’s interpretations in The Book of Rites (Ch., Liji) and historical precedents ranging from the Liu Song Dynasty (420–79) to the Ming Dynasty pertaining to the investment of a vassal’s grandson as crown grandson. Stressing that “the outer fan is fundamentally the same as Zongfan,” the ministry recommended that the emperor invest Yi San as the crown grandson, and the emperor did so.⁷¹ As the Ming had done, the Qing regarded Chosŏn as an extended royal family member of the Middle Kingdom where the patriarch—the Son of Heaven—resided. This ideology continued to exert profound influence over Qing-Chosŏn relations in the nineteenth century. In 1882, under the Qing’s supervision and medi- ation, Chosŏn signed a treaty with the United States that portrayed Chosŏn as an independent state with a sovereign equal to the American president. But regard- less of the treaty’s legal implications based on international law, in 1883 the Chinese official Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), who had negotiated the 1882 treaty with the United States on Chosŏn’s behalf as governor-general of Zhili, superintendent of trade for the northern ports of China (Ch., Beiyang tongshang dachen, here- after “Beiyang superintendent”), and China’s de facto foreign minister, cited the Western Zhou’s Zongfan tenets to declare that the king was an “outer vassal” (Ch., wai zhuhou) of the Son of Heaven in China. Li further pointed out that the king was equal to China’s governors-general and provincial governors, who were “inner vassals” (Ch., nei zhuhou), while the status of lower-ranking Korean officials corresponded to that of their Chinese counterparts.⁷² In 1886, when Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), Li’s protégé, who resided in Chosŏn as the Chinese imperial resident, asked Li what level of ritual he should perform in front of the king, Li replied that it would be courteous enough for Yuan to follow the rituals used by Chinese provincial officials when visiting first-degree princes (Ch., qinjunwang).⁷³ On the Korean side, the king, in a pre-1894 humble memorial to Emperor Guangxu, still referred to Chosŏn as China’s “princely submission.”⁷⁴ In their dealings with each other in the late nineteenth century, both China and Korea looked to Zongfan precedents from the Western Zhou down through the Ming, and their country-to-country contacts were subordinate to their familistic court-to-court hierarchy. All of these stories started in 1637, when the Qing formalized its Zongfan relationship with Chosŏn. At this point it is necessary to explain further why this book prefers the Chinese term “Zongfan” over the oft-used English renderings “tribute system” or “trib- utary system.” In the twentieth century, the promulgation of the term “tribute system,” together with the concepts “suzerain” and “vassal,” owed a great debt to the popularity of a more neutral phrase, “Chinese world order,” proposed by the American historian John King Fairbank. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, Fair- bank prompted a constellation of historians and political scientists to explore the rationale behind China’s foreign relations in the late imperial period. Although Fairbank was aware of the complexity of Sinocentric cosmopolitanism, or “Sinocentrism,” the term “Chinese world order,” which he used broadly to denote this system and to highlight its diversity, became a rough equivalent of “tribute system.” Acceptance of this English rendering has allowed scholars in a variety of fields to treat it as a counterpart to “treaty system” or “treaty port system.” Some scholars have questioned the appositeness of the terms “tributary system” and “suzerain-vassal relations” and criticized them as “a nineteenth- and twentieth-century reinterpretation of an older form of symbolically asymmetric interstate rela- tions,” while others, likewise seeking to avoid the possible misunderstandings caused by English terminology, have proposed new terms, such as “Pax Sinica,” in a world history context.⁷⁵ But their combined efforts have not changed the entrenched renderings or paradigm, and the conventional English parlance still
profoundly influences scholars’ understanding of late imperial China’s foreign relations.⁷⁶ An underlying problem with the term “tribute system,” as chapter 2 shows, is that it can convey only some of the connotations of the comprehensive Zongfan system—namely, chaogong, or sending emissaries to pay tribute to China, the perennial activity that was the most sensational and visible part of the regular ritual contacts between Qing China and its fan. The term “tribute system” thus trims the entire mechanism down to a Sinocentric trade structure. As Peter C. Perdue points out in his study of Qing-Zunghar relations, “Overly simplistic generalizations about the Qing ‘tribute system’ tend to single out one trading relationship as the orthodox, normative one, neglecting the great diversity of ritual, economic, and diplomatic conditions found in the Qing trading regime as a whole.”⁷⁷ The submission of tribute should not be used loosely as a master concept to represent the entire structure and its core nature. This is not to suggest, however, that the term “tribute system” has no analytical utility as a conceptual interpretive tool. This is clear in the debate over the question of when the practices of the Sinocentric order became as mature, institutional, and systematic as they were in the Ming and Qing periods.⁷⁸ Cherishing the Small Country: The Qing’s Construction of Its Zhongguo Identity The Qing’s Transformation into the “Big Country” Within the new Zongfan relationship, the Qing was Chosŏn’s monarch and the patriarch of the big family principally consisting of the Qing, Chosŏn, and the Mongol states. Given its supreme authority, the Qing could use the subordination of Chosŏn to its advantage. The first and most direct effect of the relationship was the formation of a new military alliance between the two countries. By conquering Chosŏn, the Qing reinforced its home front in the war with the Ming by eliminating the potential military threat on its eastern flank. It also gained material assistance from Chosŏn in the form of warhorses, grain, warships, cannons, and soldiers. Two months after Chosŏn’s subordination, the Manchu forces conquered Ka Island, destroying the last Ming military base in Chosŏn. In the next few years, a number of Korean soldiers, particularly gunners, were forced to join the Manchus in their fight against the Ming and to garrison Jinzhou and other cities newly conquered by the Qing in Manchuria.⁷⁹ By transforming its relationship with Chosŏn into one between a monarch and a subordinate, or between a father and a son, the Qing obtained political legit- imacy from Chosŏn, a Confucian country beyond the Qing’s geographical borders but within its political and cultural realm. Given that the Chinese perceived their Zongfan relationships with other countries or political entities within a model centered on China as the Middle Kingdom, the establishment of the Qing- Chosŏn Zongfan relationship defined the Qing as the Middle Kingdom. In other words, the identities of both China and the countries on its periphery within the Zongfan framework were mutually dependent and constitutive. This rationale provided the Qing with the political and cultural foundations that it desperately needed to legitimize its centrality in the Chinese world. In practice, the change of the Qing’s position was materially corroborated by the intensive bilateral exchange of missions between 1637 and 1643. On May 13, 1637, Chosŏn sent its first tributary mission to Mukden, and in the documents submitted to the Qing the Korean side called the city “capital” (K., Kyŏngsa), a term previously reserved for Beijing. This terminological choice indicated that, at least on the surface, Chosŏn acknowledged Mukden as the new political center of the world.⁸⁰ The mission had 315 members, including three primary members: an envoy, an associate envoy, and a secretary. After traveling 517 miles along the con- ventional overland tributary route between Hansŏng and Beijing, the mission arrived in Mukden on July 8.⁸¹ The next day the Korean officials appeared before Hongtaiji to perform the highest level of kowtow. During the imperial audience, the Qing’s officials read the king’s humble memorials, written in the hierarchical format once used for the Ming emperor. By praising the admirable virtues of the “big country” that “brought Chosŏn to life again,” the text of the humble
memorials endowed the Qing with the position of the Middle Kingdom, adding that “all far countries on the periphery [of the Qing] have willingly subordinated themselves” (K., hwangbok hambin) and lauding the Qing for its virtuous act of “cherishing the small.” The Qing’s position was confirmed by the Qing itself in the emperor’s edict to the king, which defined the relationship clearly with reference to orthodox Zongfan principles such as “serving the great” and “cherishing the small.” Chosŏn became a “far country,” a “small country,” and the “remote land” on the periphery of the new civilized center.⁸² This framing of the two coun- tries’ mutually constitutive identities consigned Chosŏn to the category of barbarians surrounding the civilized Middle Kingdom of the Qing. At the same time, the frequent visits to Mukden by tributary emissaries from the Mongols and other ethnic-minority polities whose affairs were under the man- agement of the Mongolian Superintendency highlighted the spread of the Qing-centric Zongfan circle. For the previous two decades, the Manchu regime had gradually eroded the Ming’s Zongfan network at the periphery and used the dislodged parts to construct a similar model with itself at the center. After establishing the Zongfan relationship with Chosŏn, the Qing sought to institutionalize its Zongfan mechanism by imitating the Ming’s policies and improving them to meet the Qing’s needs. The institutionalization of the system took place through the Ministry of Rites. Although the Ministries of Revenue, War, and Justice also ex- changed official notes with the king over cases involving financial and military assistance or illegal border crossings, the Ministry of Rites constituted the most important channel between the emissaries and the Qing court. It forwarded the king’s humble memorials to the emperor, directed the emissaries’ visits, treated the emissaries to banquets, accommodated them at a dedicated residence in Mukden for forty days, forwarded imperial edicts to them, and issued official re- sponse notes to the king. With the ministry’s guidance, the Korean emissaries performed the highest level of kowtow to the emperor, presented tributes, and re- ceived imperial edicts and gifts. These highly programmed ritual practices demonstrated, institutionalized, and consolidated the two sides’ bilateral relationship and strict hierarchy. To formalize the Zongfan relationship, the Qing sent ethnic Manchu emissaries to Chosŏn to invest the king and other core members of the royal family with certain titles. On January 4, 1638, the first imperial mission led by Inggūldai, Mafuta, and Daiyun arrived in Hansŏng to officially invest the king. The king greeted the envoys at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country outside the West Gate of the capital.⁸³ Later, in the palace, the king received the imperial edicts of investiture, a gold seal, and gifts, and performed established rituals for the occasion. The edicts stated that, with the establishment of “investiture-subordinate” (Ch., fanfeng) relations between the Qing and Chosŏn, the latter was expected to serve as a “ fan and fence” (Ch., fanping) of the Great Qing “until the Yellow River becomes as narrow as a belt and Mount Tai becomes as small as a grindstone” (Ch., daihe lishan). The emperor’s mandate noted that both sides “have an estab- lished name and status, which will regulate the relationship and hierarchy for ten thousand years” (Ch., li yishi zhi mingfen, ding wanzai zhi gangchang).⁸⁴ Fol- lowing the ceremony, the king visited the envoys at their residence, the South Palace Annex (K., Nambyŏl gung), where he treated them to banquets. All of these ritual procedures were identical to those that had been performed between Chosŏn and the Ming. The Qing’s investiture legitimatized the bilateral Zongfan rela- tionship between the two countries, an arrangement that would last for 258 years. The Establishment of the Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing In the precise spot in Samjŏndo where the Korean king had subordinated himself to Hongtaiji in 1637, the Qing forced Chosŏn to erect a stele to commemorate Hongtaiji’s achievements. Despite the Koreans’ reluctance to memorialize the humiliating invasion, the Qing continued to advance the project, and the Korean official Yi Kyŏng-sŏk (1595–1671) eventually drafted a Chinese-language inscription based on the Korean letters to the Qing side during the war.⁸⁵ After the Chinese official Fan Wencheng approved the inscription, the Qing sent interpreters to Hansŏng to translate it into Manchu and Mongolian. In 1639 the stele, inscribed in three languages, was erected as the Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing (Ma., Daicing gurun i enduringge han i gung erdemui bei; Ch.,
Da Qing huangdi gongde bei) (see figure 1.6). The inscription reviewed the history between the two countries from 1619 to 1637 from Chosŏn’s perspective and exalted the Qing’s great virtues in “bringing Chosŏn to life again.” It claimed that the king had surrendered in 1637 “not to[the Qing’s] might but to [its] virtues” (Ma., horon de gelere teile waka, erdemu de dahahangge kai), given that those virtues made “all the far [people] subordinate themselves willingly” (Ma., goroki ci aname gemu dahambi). The stele also stated that the bilateral relationship would last for ten thousand years under “the emperor’s goodness.” The most significant aspect was the official transformation of the identity of the Manchu regime as manifested in certain terms. The inscription called the Qing the “big country” (Ch., dabang, dachao; Ma., amba gurun) or the “upper country” (Ch., shangguo; Ma., dergi gurun), while terming Chosŏn the “small country” (Ch., xiaobang; Ma., ajige gurun) as well as “a faraway country.” The fact that the two countries geographically bordered each other did not prevent the Qing from redefining Chosŏn as “faraway” in the politico-cultural sense.
FIGURE 1.6. The Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing. The stele is now located in a small park next to Lotte World in Seoul. Photo taken by the author in 2015. Among these terms, which had been used between Chosŏn and the Ming and were now grafted onto the Qing-Chosŏn relationship, the Manchu phrase amba gurun (big country) was particularly significant. As a literal translation of the Chinese dabang or dachao, the term had once referred exclusively to the Ming. More importantly, as chapter 2 shows, after 1644 the Qing adopted amba gurun as a key equivalent of the Chinese terms Zhongguo (Ma., Dulimbai gurun) and Tianchao (“the Heavenly Dynasty”; Ma., abkai gurun). The inscription of the Samjŏndo stele was probably the first instance in which the Qing publicly and officially called itself amba gurun; over the following two and a half centuries, this term would refer solely to Qing China. “Cherishing Men from Afar”: Publicizing Qing Centrality, 1637–43 The Manchu invasion of 1636 and the king’s surrender to Hongtaiji, known in Chosŏn as Pyŏngja horan (lit. “the invasion of the northern barbarians in the year of Pyŏngja”), were humiliating to the Koreans and stimulated widespread anti-Manchu feeling in the country. Korean resentment is evident, for example, in an inci- dent that took place in December 1637, when the Manchu envoys visiting Chosŏn asked Korean local officials to procure courtesans (K., panggi), but the women “killed themselves to show their resistance” (K., yisa kŏchi).⁸⁶ In order to win Chosŏn’s loyalty beyond mere lip service, the Qing quickly adopted the traditional Chinese policies of “cherishing the small” and “cherishing men from afar” (Ch., huairou yuanren; Ma., goroki niyalma be bilume gosimbi).⁸⁷ In addition to providing Chosŏn’s delegation with better accommodations in Mukden and bestowing more gifts on the king and his emissaries, the Qing pro- gressively reduced the tribute required of Chosŏn beginning in the early 1640s, when the Qing controlled more resources as a result of its military triumphs over the Ming. In 1640, for instance, the Qing lowered the number of sacks of rice that Chosŏn was expected to offer as tribute from ten thousand to just one thou- sand. In 1643 the Qing further reduced the annual tribute and furthermore cut by more than half the gifts that Chosŏn gave to the Manchu envoys. Proclaiming that “the two countries have become one family,” the Shunzhi emperor also permanently abolished many tributary conventions, such as the requirement that Chosŏn provide the imperial envoys with official courtesans. These exemptions, the emperor suggested, embodied the Qing policy of “cherishing the small with benevolence.”⁸⁸ Compared with the late Ming, which tried to extract the maximum economic and military benefits from Chosŏn, the Qing took a deliberately placatory approach toward its outer fan, represented by the many exemptions. This benign policy substantially facilitated the Qing’s historical transformation into Zhongguo. The Qing was characterized more by its actions than by its pronouncements. Its policy of appealing to the subordinate country was manifested above all in its frequent contacts with Chosŏn. From 1637 to 1643, the Qing sent twelve missions and twenty-eight emissaries to Chosŏn, an average of one and a half missions per year, while Chosŏn sent fifty-six missions and 102 emissaries to the Qing, an average of seven missions per year.⁸⁹ In this context, some Koreans changed their established understandings of the Qing. In the spring of 1643, for example, Yi Chŏng-hae from Kyŏngsang Province submitted a letter to the Qing envoys in Hansŏng, volunteering to go to Mukden to serve the Qing and “our emperor” (K., a hwangje).⁹⁰ The Qing used its intensive contacts with Chosŏn as a powerful tool to manage its relations with other political entities. In 1638, a year after it converted Chosŏn from a younger brother into an outer fan, the Qing changed the Chinese name of the Mongolian Superintendency from Menggu yamen to Lifan yuan, applying the Chosŏn precedent to add the Mongols, too, to the Qing-centric family of nations as a fan. This move was part of the Manchu leaders’ project of steadily transforming Mongol conceptualizations of their position in the Qing-dominated world.⁹¹ In this sense, it could be argued that the dramatic change in the
Manchu-Mongol relationship had deep roots in the Zongfan concepts promulgated by Han Chinese officials of the Manchu regime since the early 1630s. This shift could also indicate that the Qing was streamlining the administration of its outer fan in order to strengthen its centrality and pursue an imperial enterprise beyond Manchuria.
1
CONQUERING CHOSŎN
The Rise of the Manchu Regime as the Middle Kingdom, 1616–43
As the Manchu regime consolidated its power in Manchuria between the late 1610s and the early 1640s, it reshaped the perceptions of other polities and eradicated its longstanding barbarian image. The regime derived its political and cultural resources in large part from its relations with Chosŏn, which validated and reinforced the Manchu dynasty’s position as the Middle Kingdom within the newly established multistate hierarchical system. In this process, the Manchus appropriated the Ming’s Zongfan discourse to designate other political entities as barbarians, initiating a prolonged process that I call the barbarianization of others. By crossing the Great Wall in 1644, the Manchu regime had fundamentally reconceptualized its own identity and position in the Chinese world.
Barbarians, Rebellions, and Wars
The Jurchen Uprising in Manchuria
On February 17, 1616, the lunar New Year and the first day of the Forty-Fourth Year of Wanli of the Ming Dynasty, a number of high-ranking Chinese officials assembled at the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City with tributary emissaries from Chosŏn and China’s other outer fan. They waited to enter the imperial hall to present the emperor with their congratulations on the New Year. Finally, realizing the emperor had no desire to grant them an audience, the officials and emissaries carried out their ceremonies in front of the gate.¹ This scene was not surprising, as the emperor had long been uninterested in such ceremonies. Many high-ranking officials in Beijing had not seen the hermit-like Son of Heaven for almost thirty years.² The Middle Kingdom and its lethargic human agent seemed to have fallen asleep.
The day was significant, however, in Hetuala, a small Manchurian town about seven hundred miles northeast of Beijing, where a tribe called the Jianzhou Jurchens announced the establishment of its own country under the leadership of Nurhaci (1559–1626; r. 1616–26). Proclaiming himself the brilliant khan caring for all countries/peoples (Ma., abka geren gurun be ujikini seme sindaha genggiyen han), Nurhaci accepted the congratulations of Jurchen and Mongol officials and generals, took the regnal title of Tianming (mandate of Heaven; Ma., Abkai fulingga), and named his country Houjin (the later Jin).³ He thus defined his regime as the successor to the Jin Dynasty established by the Jurchen ancestors.⁴
Nurhaci’s political ambitions extended far beyond unifying the local tribes. In May 1618 he attacked the Ming forces after announcing the Seven Grievances (Ma., Nadan amba koro; Ch., Qi dahen). Nurhaci had visited Beijing three times to present tribute and had been appointed by the Ming court to govern the Jianzhou Jurchens, whom the Ming considered northeastern barbarians (Ch., dongbei yi).⁵ In the Seven Grievances, Nurhaci identified the Jianzhou as a subordinate that had guarded the Ming’s border for generations, and declared that various conflicts between his tribe, other tribes, and the Ming’s local leaders had led to his rebellion.
The Ming was confident about suppressing Nurhaci. To do so it enlisted the aid of the tribe of Yehe, an old and powerful enemy of the Jurchens, as well as the support of Chosŏn. As a loyal fan, Chosŏn had followed the policy of serving the great (K., sadae) for more than two centuries. It regarded Nurhaci’s rebellion as intolerable and its military assistance to the Ming as a legal and moral duty (K., ŭibun). Although the king, Yi Hon (Kwanghaegun), was worried that his men would be defeated, he nonetheless ordered Gen. Kang Hong-rip in early 1619 to lead thirteen thousand soldiers across the Yalu River to join forces with the Ming
army in Manchuria.⁶
In the battle of Sarhū on April 17, 1619, more than six thousand Korean soldiers were killed, and General Kang surrendered to Nurhaci. Ending Chosŏn’s military engagement in the war, the surrender provided Nurhaci with a golden opportunity to open an official channel of communication with the Korean sovereign. In addition to seeking a peace agreement with Chosŏn to reduce the military threat on his eastern flank, Nurhaci wanted to change his relationship with Chosŏn by identifying his newly founded regime as a state equal to Chosŏn rather than as a state of lower status, as presupposed by the longstanding framework of Jurchen-Chosŏn relations.⁷ This political ambition posed a grave challenge to Chosŏn in the context of the civilized–barbarian distinction and initiated an invisible but intensive struggle of political discourse between the two sides.
Chosŏn’s Role in the Jurchen-Ming War
The bilateral communications between the Jurchens and Chosŏn started with an exchange of letters. In May 1619 Nurhaci sent a captured officer to Chosŏn to present a sovereign letter (Ch., guoshu; K., kuksŏ) and a copy of the Seven Grievances to the king. After explaining why he fought against the big country (Ch., daguo; Ma., amba gurun), that is, the Ming, Nurhaci asked the king to make common cause with him against the Ming. Chosŏn had contacted Nurhaci by letter in the 1600s through a local officer in the town of Manpo on the northern border, but now Nurhaci’s barbarian letter (K., hosŏ) reached the court directly and posed a thorny problem for the king.⁸
After fierce debate among officials, the king appointed Pak Yŏp, governor of P’yŏngan Province, to write back to Nurhaci, but the format of the reply, and in particular the question of how to address Nurhaci, remained a challenge. In Nurhaci’s letter, the Mongolian characters of his stamp read Emperor Tianming of the Houjin (K., Hugŭm ch’ŏnmyŏng hwangje), which greatly shocked the king and the Border Defense Council (K., Pibyŏnsa) because they believed the Ming emperor to be the sole emperor in the known universe. It was highly likely that the characters defined Nurhaci as a khan in the Mongol sense, rather than as an emperor (Ch., huangdi; K., hwangje) in the Chinese and Korean sense. Chosŏn had always called Nurhaci old chieftain (K., roch’u), barbarian chieftain (K., ich’u), chieftain of slaves (K., noch’u), or chieftain of thieves (K., chŏkch’u), so endorsing Nurhaci’s self-proclaimed imperial title was out of the question. The king, pretending he could not understand the characters on Nurhaci’s seal, instructed Pak to send a letter to the assistant general of the Jianzhou garrison (K., Kŏnjuwi mabŏp; Ch., Jianzhouwei mafa).⁹ The Border Defense Council had learned the word mabŏp from previous letters sent by the Jurchens and assumed that it referred to an assistant general (K., p’ŏnbi). In fact, it came from the Manchu word mafa, which means grandfather. In addition, the letter addressed its recipient in the second person using the form of you (K., chokha) that officials who were equal to each other used among themselves, not for sovereigns.¹⁰ Finally, the letter bore Pak’s official stamp instead of the king’s. In this way, the king downgraded the communication with the Houjin to a provincial level and sidestepped the sensitive issue of the political legitimacy of the Jurchen regime.
The Korean letter noted that Chosŏn and the Houjin had been subjects (K., sin) of the Heavenly Dynasty for two hundred years and suggested that Nurhaci pledge allegiance to the Imperial Ming, an action that would also yield reconciliation between Chosŏn and Nurhaci. This strong pro-Ming stance made the Houjin bristle.¹¹ In his reply, calling himself gu, a Chinese term used only by a sovereign to refer to himself, Nurhaci inferred that the Heavenly Dynasty to which Chosŏn referred must be the southern dynasty—the Jurchen appellation for the Ming, which indicated that the Houjin no longer endorsed the divine position of the Ming. Nurhaci clearly asked the king to form an alliance with him and suggested that the two countries kill a white horse and a black bull to offer to Heaven and Earth and burn incense to swear an oath.¹² Nurhaci had conducted this ritual with the Yehe, Hada, Ula, and Hūifa tribes in 1597 and with the Ming in 1608 and later started wars with these entities on account of their reneging on the oath.
Chosŏn was uninterested in Nurhaci’s offer, particularly in light of the Ming’s potential reaction to Korean-Jurchen contacts. Ming officials such as Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), a close friend of the Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), suspected that Chosŏn would join the Jurchen rebellion against the Ming and considered it advisable to rein Chosŏn in. In August 1619 he proposed a new policy toward Chosŏn in a memorial to Emperor Wanli. Xu argued that Beijing should follow historical precedents set by the Zhou and Han Dynasties by sending a commissioner to Chosŏn to supervise and protect (Ch., jianhu) the country. Xu enthusiastically volunteered to take up this position, but the emperor, who had sent Chinese forces to Chosŏn to defend the country against Japanese invasions in the 1590s, did not grant his request.¹³ As a matter of fact, Chosŏn was not collaborating with the Jurchens, whom it still called barbarians (K., orangk’ae), but maintaining its political and moral allegiance to Beijing would not alleviate the risk of a Jurchen attack. Under the circumstances, the king took a practical approach by tactically maintaining connections with the Houjin but confining them to the local level.
In the meantime, the outlook for the Ming-Chosŏn alliance was not sanguine. Two Ming emperors died within two months in 1620, and the new emperor, Tianqi, showed more interest in carpentry than he did in statecraft. On the battlefield, the Ming was losing more lands to the Houjin. In May 1621 the Jurchens occupied Liaoyang, a key military fortress in Manchuria, and made it the Houjin’s new capital, cutting off the overland route of communications between Chosŏn and the Ming. Facing a series of dramatic changes, the king made the risky move of sending Nurhaci his first sovereign letter in October 1622 through a civil official of the Ministry of Rites in Hansŏng (today’s Seoul). In the letter, he referred to Houjin as a neighboring country and Nurhaci as khan of the Houjin country (K., Hugŭmguk kahan). The letter adopted the same format as letters sent to Japan in accordance with Chosŏn’s policy of kyorin, communicating with a neighboring country.¹⁴ By acknowledging the statehood of the Jurchen regime, the king elevated his communications with Nurhaci to the level of a sovereign addressing another sovereign.
The pragmatism of this policy called into question the king’s loyalty to the Ming, which the king’s nephew, Yi Chong, used to justify a bloody coup that he launched in May 1623 to dethrone the king. Assuming power as the new king (King Injo), Yi Chong blamed his uncle for failing to embrace his monarch-subordinate and father-son relationship with the Ming. He himself took a different tack: in addition to ending the exchange of messengers with Nurhaci and imposing trade sanctions on the Houjin, Yi Chong mobilized his followers to prepare for a war with the Houjin and even planned to lead an army himself to attack the Jurchens.¹⁵ Being a usurper, Yi Chong used his fervent pro-Ming attitude to obtain the Ming investiture that legitimized his rulership. The new king also helped Mao Wenlong (1576–1629), a Ming general who had escaped to Chosŏn after the Jurchens’ occupation of Liaoyang and had stationed his forces on Ka Island, close to mainland Chosŏn, carry out a guerrilla war to prevent the Jurchens from entering Shanhai Pass. Chosŏn’s new policy posed a considerable military and economic threat to the Jurchens, but it did not stop the Jurchen expansion. In 1625 the Jurchens occupied Shenyang, the political heart and economic center of Manchuria, and made it their new capital. After Nurhaci died in 1626, his son Hongtaiji became the new khan with the regnal title Tiancong (Heavenly wisdom; Ma., Abkai sure) and quickly decided to invade Chosŏn.
Becoming the Elder Brother of Chosŏn: The Jin and the First Manchu Invasion
In the spring of 1627 Hongtaiji launched an attack on Chosŏn. The forces of the Jin, as the Jurchen regime now styled itself, swept into northern Chosŏn and captured P’yŏngyang within two weeks, forcing the king, who had escaped to Kanghwa Island, to sue for peace. As a precondition of withdrawal, the Jin commander, Amin (?–1640), required the king to swear an oath to Heaven to sever Chosŏn’s relations with the Ming and establish an elder brother–younger brother relationship with the Jin, the latter taking on the dominant role. In Chosŏn, many Confucian officials and students pleaded with the king to stop negotiating with the barbarous invaders, kill their messengers, and fight to the death. Although the king told his subjects that the peace talks with the Jurchen clowns were only a
stalling tactic, or a conventional loose rein (K., kimi) policy, he had no choice but to continue the negotiations.
In his letters to Hongtaiji, the king endorsed Hongtaiji’s political position by addressing him as Khan of the Country of the Jin, but he purposely selected neutral terms for the Jin and Chosŏn. While he called the Jin your honorable country, the king referred to Chosŏn as our country, instead of our humble country or our small country, as he would say in his palace memorials to the Ming. No honorific expressions for Hongtaiji appeared at the beginning of the letter.¹⁶ The king conveyed that Chosŏn would follow the policy of communicating with a neighboring country vis-à-vis the Jin and that of serving the great country vis-à-vis the Ming. By deliberately using the Ming regnal title Tianqi to express the date in his letter, the king implied that he would not betray the Ming. This act of adhering to Ming time led to a deadlock in the negotiations. The king later switched to a notice format for his communications, since this format did not require a regnal title. The new format helped the two sides reach an agreement regarding Chosŏn’s oath.
The oath-swearing ceremony occurred at the palace on Kanghwa Island on April 18, 1627. The king burned incense and swore the oaths to Heaven after one of his officials read them aloud. Despite the king’s reluctance, the substance of oaths was what Hongtaiji had demanded. The nine highest Chosŏn officials and eight high-ranking Jin officials also read their own oaths. However, the performance of these ceremonies between the king and the Jurchen officials was not mentioned in either Manchu or Korean records.¹⁷ Another oath-swearing ceremony took place later in P’yŏngyang between Amin and a brother of the king. The P’yŏngyang oath included several additional terms imposed by the Jurchen invaders, emphasizing that the king should present gifts to the khan, host the Jin’s emissaries as he did those of the Ming, and not reinforce the city walls or conduct military drills.¹⁸ The two ceremonies ushered in a decade of peace between the two countries.
In political and ideological terms the Jurchens benefited substantially from their invasion of Chosŏn. Chosŏn officially endorsed the Jurchen regime as a country with a supreme sovereign, helping to foster the regime’s political legitimacy in the geopolitical arena. With the support of Chosŏn, the Little China that now regarded the Jin as its elder brother, the Jin’s politico-cultural self-identity changed from that of a barbarian, imposed by the discourse of the Ming-centered cosmopolitan order, to that of the civilized. Although resentment of the Jurchen barbarians soared in Chosŏn after the war, the Korean court was unable to escape the newly established brotherhood. Economically, too, Chosŏn yielded to the Jurchens’ terms by opening markets in several towns on its northern border and paying annual tribute (K., sep’ye) to the Jurchen court.
Constructing a Jin-Centric, Quasi-Zongfan System: The Jin’s New Position
The Rise of the Jin-Chosŏn Quasi-Zongfan Order
As he withdrew from Chosŏn, Hongtaiji sent the king a letter, explaining why he fought with the southern dynasty—the Ming—and attacked Chosŏn. He said, The southern dynasty regards only itself as Son of Heaven and views people of other countries as inferior servants. … The Mandate of Heaven is truly righteous by assisting us with punishing the southern dynasty…. In the future, our two countries should be brothers forever and never bully others as the southern dynasty does.¹⁹ By quoting the theory of the Mandate of Heaven, the khan challenged the Ming’s centrality in the universe and justified his war with the Ming. Over the following decade, his construction of a Jin-centric, quasi-Zongfan system in the Jin’s contacts with Chosŏn and other neighboring entities gradually changed the Jin’s position.
In the face of serious economic difficulties brought on by the war, the Jin required Chosŏn to open markets for trade in a border city, Ŭiju. Chosŏn yielded to the Jin’s pressure but agreed to hold the markets only twice a year, in the spring and the autumn, rather than three times per year, as the Jin had wished. On March
31, 1628, the Ŭiju market opened for the first time, and the Jin emissary Inggūldai (1596–1648) came to Ŭiju accompanied by eight generals and more than a thousand people. As the Ŭiju market fell short of the Jin’s needs, Hongtaiji urged Chosŏn to open another one in Hoeryŏng, a northeastern border city.²⁰ In the midst of the shortage, the Jin relied heavily on the yearly gifts provided by Chosŏn and conveyed to Shenyang by one emissary in the spring and another in the autumn. From 1627 to 1636, the required gift comprised up to eighty-five categories of goods, but the amounts in each category kept changing to reflect the Jin’s needs or Chosŏn’s concerns, becoming a barometer of their relations.²¹ The Korean emissaries brought commercial opportunities to Shenyang. In 1631 the Border Defense Council of Chosŏn complained to the king that the dispatch of emissaries to Shenyang was no different from opening markets there.²² On the other hand, the development of the market in Shenyang, like that of the markets in Ŭiju and Hoeryŏng, suffered from significant differentials in the prices of the consumer products offered by the two sides. The black cotton cloth and ginseng sold by the Koreans were expensive, whereas the animal skins and furs that the Jurchens traded were not. This difference made it difficult for the Jurchen side to turn a profit. The Jin’s military hegemony could not subordinate Korean capital, which contributed to the Jin’s second invasion of Chosŏn.
Given the military and economic situation, the Jin did not force Chosŏn to end its contacts with Beijing. Hongtaiji had the option of concluding a peace agreement with the Ming through which he could win the latter’s political endorsement. In a memorial to Hongtaiji in 1630, Gao Hongzhong, a Han Chinese scholar serving the Jin, suggested that the Jin follow the Chosŏn model to receive the [Ming] investiture with kingship and to use the regnal title [of the Ming] to count the date (Ch., bi Chaoxian shili, qingfeng wangwei, cong zhengshuo).²³ This proposal reflected a popular perception among the Chinese about Chosŏn’s exemplary tributary position in the Ming-centric world. Had the Ming agreed to negotiate for a Chosŏn-like status for the Jurchen regime, the Jin could have followed Chosŏn to become an outer fan of the Ming. Nevertheless, the war persisted, and the Jin moved toward a broader objective of replacing the Ming. For that purpose, the Jin started to transform its hierarchical relationship with Chosŏn.
After 1627 Chosŏn continued to embrace the centrality of the Ming in its contacts with the Jin by applying its kyorin policy to the Jin; this put the Jin on an equal footing with Chosŏn. The king called his emissaries to the Jin messengers (K., sinsa), not tributary emissaries (K., kongsa), as he did those dispatched to Beijing. The goods brought annually to Shenyang were gifts (K., yemul) rather than tributes (K., kongmul) like those presented to Beijing. As the king noted in 1633 to Hongtaiji, "It is the proper principle [K., ye; Ch., li] that our two countries give each other local products in communications via emissaries."²⁴ These terms reflected befitting modesty and suggested that Chosŏn treated the Jin as a country lower than the Ming.
In stark contrast, the Jin developed a new discourse to nourish its self-identity as a political entity superior to Chosŏn. In documents written in the Manchu language beginning in 1627, the Jin downgraded the Korean monarch from khan of Chosŏn (Ma., Solgoi kan) to king of Chosŏn (Ma., Solgo i wang, or Coohiyan gurun i wang).²⁵ With the steady rise of the Jin’s military power, especially after its triumph in the battle at Dalinghe in late 1631 and early 1632, Hongtaiji enacted considerable reforms to the Jin political structure, abolishing the power-sharing system at the highest level of the court and making himself the exclusive sovereign.²⁶ From 1632, in his letters to the Ming and Chosŏn, Hongtaiji began to call himself brilliant khan of the Manchu country (Ma., Manju gurun i sure han) rather than khan of the Jin country (Ma., Aisin gurun i han), the title he had used before.²⁷ More importantly, he imitated the Ming bureaucracy by establishing a six-ministry system in Shenyang and instructing Manchu officials such as Dahai (1595– 1632) to translate Chinese classics into the Manchu language.²⁸ From then on, the regime substantially accelerated the Sinicization of its imperial norms from the top down, a process carried out through the institution-building efforts of a group of Han Chinese officials and scholars such as Ning Wanwo (1593–1665), Fan Wencheng (1597–1666), Gao Hongzhong, and Bao Chengxian (?–1645). One of the most significant acts of these elites was to persuade Hongtaiji to produce the annals of the monarch and the regime in both the Chinese and
Manchu languages.
The Chinese terms that these Han Chinese savants adopted to describe the exchanges of emissaries and diplomatic relations between the Jin and Chosŏn were crucial to revising the Jin’s political identity. According to the Manchu-language records written by the Manchu scholars, the emissaries of Chosŏn (Ma., Solho i elcin) arrived and delivered the local products as gifts (Ma., baci tucire doroi jaka benjime isinjiha) in Shenyang. When they left, the khan gave (Ma., unggihe) or awarded (Ma., šangnaha) them and the king gifts.²⁹ Although these Manchu terms were largely vernacular and had no strong political meaning, their counterparts in the Chinese-language records offered a very different portrayal. The visit of the tributary emissaries (Ch., gongshi), who brought tribute (Ch., gongwu) or local products (Ch., fangwu), was described as the coming to the court to present themselves before the sovereign (Ch., laichao), suggesting that the emissaries’ visit was prompted not by the Jin’s formidable military might but by its outstanding merits.³⁰ These terms invoked a hierarchical relationship between the sovereign—an emperor in the Chinese sense—and his subjects, which in this case included Chosŏn, Vietnam, Ryukyu, other fan of the Ming, and the Central Asian political entities.³¹ Meanwhile, the Jin applied the political and diplomatic discourse it had developed toward Chosŏn to forces and political entities that sought shelter with or surrendered to the Jin, such as Bar Baturu, Nomun Dalai, Coir Jamsu from Alakcot of Cahar, and the Ming general Kong Youde (?–1652).³²
In 1634 Hongtaiji changed the name of Shenyang to Mukden in Manchu and Shengjing (lit. prosperous capital) in Chinese, and the following year he instructed his people to call the country Manzhou (M., Manju; the Manchu state), not Jurchen or other names. The regime’s institutional construction was thus facilitated by a clear ethnic identification, but the rationale behind this framework focused more on politico-cultural factors than on ethnic ones. In this period, Jin officials, particularly those who were Han Chinese, started to address Hongtaiji as emperor (Ch., huangshang, or huangdi). Some suggested that Hongtaiji perform conventional rituals established by the Han Dynasty, through which he would claim to be the Son of Heaven in the Chinese sense. More significantly, these officials invoked the principles of the civilized–barbarian distinction to brand the Ming southern barbarians (Ch., manzi) and those Chinese who surrendered to the Jin Han Chinese barbarians (Ch., hanyi), thereby appropriating and completely reversing the Ming’s language regarding the center of the world.³³
With this change in its worldview, the Manchu regime began to play the role of the exclusive institutional agent of the Mandate of Heaven, to which all barbarians in the four quarters of the world willingly come in submission (Ch., siyi xianfu). When the Ming generals Kong Youde and Geng Zhongming (1604–49) surrendered to Hongtaiji in 1633, the Jin jubilantly described the event as people from afar willingly coming to our court for civilization (Ch., yuanren laigui).³⁴ The euphoric adoption of this phrase demonstrated that the Manchu regime was purposely constructing its identity as the center of the world, with cultural superiority over barbarians from afar or on its periphery, which now included the Ming.³⁵ These momentous changes in the Jin’s political discourse were rooted in orthodox Chinese political theory as articulated in Confucian classics, such as Analects of Confucius (Ch., Lunyu) and Doctrine of the Mean (Ch., Zhongyong), and they demonstrate the deep significance of both the Sinicization of the Manchu regime and the barbarianization of others by the regime. The use of Chinese political rhetoric of this sort was no mere imitation of the Ming’s discourse to please Hongtaiji. Rather, it was aimed at achieving a political goal by transforming the regime into a new center of gravity in a Jin-dominated world, a goal that the young and vernacular Manchu language—including the New Manchu (Ma., ice manju hergen) developed in 1632—was incapable of securing.
The Manchu regime conducted its relations with Chosŏn in accordance with hierarchical principles within a quasi-Zongfan system. Some historians have argued that at this time the Manchus derived their political concepts of imperial rule mainly from their Mongol allies rather than from the Chinese.³⁶
Yet the transformation of the Manchu regime’s understanding of its relations with neighboring nomadic and Confucian states, which took place concurrently
with the transformation of the Manchu-Chosŏn relationship, indicates that the regime was enthusiastically constructing a new politico-cultural self-identity by appropriating and exploiting the Chinese politico-cultural discourse. Scholars have also long debated the theory of the Sinicization or Sinification of the Manchus. The mainstream explorations of this issue so far have focused either on how the Han Chinese culturally assimilated the Manchus or on how the Manchus tried to retain their ethnic identity.³⁷ What this chapter explores is how the Manchu regime, rather than the ethnic Manchus, promoted itself as the exclusively civilized Middle Kingdom—Zhongguo—and it is in this sense that I use the term Sinicization in this book.
The Manchu Regime’s Strategic Goal of Transforming into Zhongguo
While the quasi-Zongfan discourse helped to refashion the self-image of the Manchu regime along Chinese lines, the Manchu language offered an international setting for this reconstruction by framing the Jin’s relations with other political entities as state-to-state interactions. In Manchu records the Jin, the Ming, Chosŏn, and such Mongol polities as Korcin were all defined as gurun. The term gurun has several meanings, including country, tribe, people of a tribe, and race. Two of these meanings are primary: people and country. For instance, amba gurun could mean big country or adults, and ajige gurun could mean small country or children, while haha gurun refers to men and hehe gurun refers to women.³⁸ In political contexts, gurun denoted primarily country, as in Aisin gurun (the country of the Jin), Nikan gurun (the country of the Han Chinese, that is, the Ming), Daiming gurun (the country of the Great Ming), Solho gurun or Coohiyan gurun (the country of Chosŏn), Korcin gurun (the country of the Korcin Mongols), and Cahar gurun (the country of the Cahar Mongols).³⁹ The Mongolian equivalent of the term in the Mongol records of the day is ulus (country).⁴⁰
The Manchu rulers drew clear geographical, social, and cultural lines between the Manchu regime and other countries, even as they emphasized commonalities. Nurhaci underlined to the Kalka Mongols in 1619 that the Ming and Chosŏn have different languages, but they share the same styles in clothing and hair, so the two countries look like a single country; similarly, our two countries look like a single country.⁴¹ The consciousness of being a state became progressively more transparent in the regime’s political norms, in particular in the Chinese-language records. In 1628, for instance, Hongtaiji called the Cahar Mongols a different country (Ma., encu gurun; Ch., yiguo) and a far country (Ch., yuanguo).⁴² The following year Hongtaiji treated the prince of the country of Korcin to the music and dances of four countries, including the Jin, the Korcin Mongols, the Ming, and Chosŏn.⁴³ In a letter to Ming officials in 1632, Hongtaiji named his country and the Cahar Mongols as two countries outside of the border [of the Ming] (Ma., jasei tulergi gurun; Ch., bianwai zhi guo).⁴⁴
The new political discourse fundamentally transformed the worldview of the Manchu regime from within by representing the regime as a state at the center of a multistate community. The strategic goal of this transformation, as Ning Wanwo indicated in 1633 when he suggested that the Jin compose an institutional code (Ch., Jindian) by modifying that of the Ming, was to break with Ming conventions and gradually develop the institutions of Zhongguo (Ch., jianjiu Zhongguo zhi zhi). In other words, the Jin intended to develop its own institutions of Zhongguo to replace those of the Ming. According to Ning, only in this way could the regime manage its great enterprise after conquering the place of the southern barbarians (Ch., manzi difang), that is, the Ming. Ning justified his proposal by stressing that a new monarch and his officials must have their own institutional works.⁴⁵ This strategic plan shows that Zhongguo, as a politico-cultural identity, was available for the Manchu regime to embrace and claim. What is more, it suggests that control over the central plain (Ch., Zhongyuan) was not necessarily a prerequisite for a regime to claim to be Zhongguo, as has been assumed.
Nurhaci wished to preserve the ways of his ethnic nation, or Manchuness, by enshrining Shanhai Pass and the Liao River as the border between the Chinese and Jurchen countries (Ma., nikan, jušen meni meni gurun). He tried to avoid turning to the Chinese way (Ma., nikan i doro de dosimbi; Ch., xiao hansu)—or becoming Sinicized—as the Liao, the Jin, and the Yuan Dynasties had done after their founders left their own homelands for the Chinese inner land (Ma., nikan
i dorgi bade; Ch., handi); they had changed ways and all became Chinese (Ma., doro forgošoro jakade, gemu nikan ohobi).⁴⁶ Although the Manchu leaders exhorted their ethnic cohorts to keep to the old way (Ma., fe doro) in daily life by wearing traditional garb and practicing Manchu archery and horseback riding, the regime was unavoidably following the Chinese way in its rapid transformation in the 1630s. The Manchu regime could have become Zhongguo even if it had remained in Manchuria and not crossed the Great Wall in 1644.
By employing the newly adopted Chinese political discourse, the Manchu regime gradually absorbed the Chinese political philosophy of the Zongfan order into its understanding of its place within the constellation of polities. Aside from the Ming, other countries served as the Jin’s outer fan by presenting tribute to the khan, who occupied a position akin to that of a Chinese emperor. This quasi-Zongfan system matured to the point that in 1636, in their Chinese letter to Chosŏn, forty-nine princes of sixteen countries of Mongols under the Jin’s leadership termed themselves "Mongols as the outer fan of the Jin" (Ch., Jinguo waifan menggu), equivalent to the Manchu term tulergi goloi monggo ("Mongols as the outer fan ").⁴⁷ In the same year, the Jin founded Menggu yamen (M., Monggo jurgan, lit. the ministry of Mongolian affairs) on the basis of Chinese civil administrational concepts. As an institution parallel to the Ministry of Rites, this ministry enabled the regime to transform its relations with the Mongols and to build and govern an emerging empire.
The construction of this quasi-Zongfan discourse occurred primarily within the Jin’s borders, but the Jin found Chosŏn the best external resource to support its discursive revolution. Within the bilateral relationship, the Jin held the role of the supreme power, and it converted Chosŏn from a younger brother into a subordinate or outer fan. Students of Sino-Korean relations tend to assume that the Manchus adopted hierarchical discourse in 1637 after the second Manchu invasion, when the Manchu side imposed clear Zongfan terms on Chosŏn. However, in practice the process had begun much earlier. In the 1630s the scholars of the Jin had mined Chinese history for intellectual resources with which to manipulate the civilized–barbarian distinction in order to establish the centrality of the Jin.
Within the Zongfan framework, the central civilized country (Ch., Huaxia) and its counterpart, barbarians, were the two key concepts addressing the status of the Middle Kingdom and that of its outer fan. The two terms were derived from the notion of all-under-Heaven, developed in the Xia (ca. 2070–1600 BC), Shang (1600–1046 BC), and Zhou periods, through which the three dynasties sought to legitimize their rule as divine. At the same time, the political entities spanning China’s lands identified xia (referring not to the Xia Dynasty but to a larger area in which the regime once resided) as the symbol of a civilized community possessing the Mandate of Heaven, namely, Zhongguo, Zhongyuan (the central plain), or Zhongtu (the central lands). At that time, the term barbarians referred primarily to groups that resided along the periphery of the central plain and were reluctant to identify and embrace the concept of civilized China, as exemplified by the state relationship between the Qin and the Chu in the third century BC.⁴⁸ The originally geographic notion of barbarian became an instrument used by political forces to deprecate their antagonists during the movement of revering the court of the Zhou and expelling the barbarians (Ch., zunzhou rangyi) in the Eastern Zhou (770–256 BC), a chaotic time that led Confucius (551–479 BC) to call for restoring the ideal order of proper conduct (Ch., li) of the Western Zhou. Due to the fierce interstate rivalries, the civilized– barbarian distinction evolved into a politico-cultural ideology that the dynastic regimes of China continuously reinterpreted for the next two thousand years, until 1911.
After the Han Dynasty, with the official institutionalization of Confucianism and the expansion of the concept of all-under-Heaven, the civilized–barbarian distinction became a critical theoretical framework for the Chinese court’s management of its foreign relations. As northern barbarians gained ascendancy in the Northern Song (960–1127), the distinction presented itself as an essential cultural instrument with which Chinese elites endowed certain regimes with the pedigree of legitimate historical narratives (Ch., zhengshi) by expelling competing polities from these narratives.⁴⁹ Some scholars, such as Shi Jie (1005–45), the author of A Treatise on the Middle Kingdom (Ch., Zhongguo lun), and Ouyang Xiu (1007–72), the author of A Treatise on Orthodox Legitimacy (Ch., Zhengtong lun),
depicted the Song as the exclusive civilized center of the world and the polities on the Song’s northern border as uncivilized. One of the most influential histories, A Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government (Ch., Zizhi tongjian), edited by Sima Guang (1019–86), drew a clear lineage connecting states identified as China from 403 BC to AD 959. The efforts of these scholars to conceptualize the narrative of orthodox legitimacy eventually paid off, for their rhetoric triumphed over that of the northern regimes, especially when Neo-Confucianism, created and elaborated by such Song intellectual vanguards as Cheng Hao (1032–85), Cheng Yi (1033–1107), and Zhu Xi (1130–1200), became China’s official ideology under the Yuan Dynasty.
This intellectual history can help explain why the official historical narrative of the People’s Republic of China still celebrates the Song for its legitimate status as Zhongguo and marginalizes the Liao, the Xixia, and the Jin as regimes established by ethnic minorities (Ch., shaoshu minzu). It was against this historical backdrop that the scholars of the Manchu regime in the 1630s began to construct the regime’s orthodox legitimacy, which laid the foundation for the Manchu enterprise of governing a vast empire as the legitimate Middle Kingdom, Zhongguo.
The Practices of the Manchu-Chosŏn Quasi-Zongfan Order
The Manchu regime implemented its quasi-Zongfan discourse through the rituals that accompanied the exchange of emissaries with Chosŏn by imitating Ming-Chosŏn contacts. In Mukden, the Korean emissaries kowtowed five times to Hongtaiji. They were comfortably lodged in the city and enjoyed a welcome banquet (K., hama yŏn, lit. banquet for getting off a horse) and a farewell banquet (K., sangma yŏn, lit. banquet for getting on a horse). Hongtaiji dispensed gifts to the Korean king, emissaries, interpreters, and servants.⁵⁰ In exchange, the Jin sent Manchu emissaries to Hansŏng in the spring and autumn of every year. Before they entered the Korean capital, the Manchu emissaries were housed at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country (K., Mohwa gwan), a place that had previously accommodated Ming emissaries. The emissaries also had an audience with the king in the palace and were treated to official welcome and farewell banquets. Although Chosŏn did not want to treat the Manchu representatives like those of the Ming, the general ritual procedures of greeting were practically identical. The Manchu emissaries lacked only their Ming counterparts’ standing as imperial envoy or Heavenly envoy.
This de facto Zongfan relationship conflicted with the de jure one of equality between the two brothers, a contradiction strikingly manifested in the different formats of their sovereign letters to each other. In its letters to the Jin, Chosŏn placed the two sides on a fully equal political plane, which was hierarchically lower than the status of the Ming. According to the Chinese convention, whenever the characters for Heaven or the Ming emperor appeared, they were placed at the top of a new line, two character spaces higher than the characters for Chosŏn and the first characters of other lines. This honorific elevation acknowledged the emperor as the supreme human agent of Heaven with the highest spiritual position in the world. Hongtaiji also used honorific elevation in his letters, but he adopted a different arrangement of the hierarchy, as shown by his letters to the Ming general Yuan Chonghuan (1584–1630). Hongtaiji divided the hierarchy into four levels, among which his position was lower than that of Heaven and the Ming emperor but higher than that of Ming officials (see figure 1.1). For his part, General Yuan followed Ming custom in his letters to Hongtaiji (see figure 1.2). Frustrated by Yuan’s usage, Hongtaiji exclaimed that he was the monarch or the khan of another country (Ma., encu gurun i ejen han) and son of Heaven and the Buddha (Ma., abka fucihi i jui). He declared that he would not accept any letters from the Ming that addressed him with a status lower than or even equal to that of the Ming officials.⁵¹ Nevertheless, in his communications with the king of Chosŏn, Hongtaiji was more pragmatic, addressing the king as a near equal in order to avoid offending the Korean monarch (see figure 1.3).
The king followed the same format in his responses to Hongtaiji but avoided mention of the imposed brotherhood (see figure 1.4). Although Hongtaiji called the king younger brother, the king never referred to Hongtaiji as elder brother. When Hongtaiji questioned the king about this discrepancy in 1629, the king shifted to friend-to-friend expressions: The king of the country of Chosŏn, he wrote, presents this letter to the khan of the country of the Jin (K., Chosŏn
kugwang pongsŏ Kŭmguk han; Ma., Coohiyan gurun i wang ni bithe, Aisin gurun i han de unggimbi). This usage matched Hongtaiji’s wording: The khan of the country of the Jin sends this letter to the king of the country of Chosŏn (Ma., Aisin gurun i han i bithe, Coohiyan gurun i wang de unggimbi). Later, the king changed the verb present (K., pong; Ma., jafambi) to send (K., ch’i; Ma., unggimbi), eliminating the hierarchical connotations of the former term. This subtle change provoked the Jin, but Chosŏn explained that both terms were used between neighboring countries.⁵² To the Jin, Chosŏn’s pronounced pro-Ming attitude meant that the brotherhood was unstable. The Jin’s security would not be guaranteed so long as Chosŏn was a loyal subject of the Ming. The only way to solve this problem, the Jin believed, was with another war against Chosŏn.
FIGURE 1.1. The format of Hongtaiji’s letters to Yuan Chonghuan in 1627. In this and the three figures that follow, the Arabic numerals represent horizontal lines from the top down, the English letters represent vertical lines, and the direction of the writing is from right to left. X represents a Chinese character. MWLD, 821, 847; MBRT, 4:28, 72.
FIGURE 1.2. The format of Yuan Chonghuan’s letters to Hongtaiji in 1627. MWLD, 821; MBRT, 4:28.
FIGURE 1.3. The format of Hongtaiji’s letters to the king of Chosŏn, 1627–36. Kakyu gobu .
FIGURE 1.4. The format of the letters of the king of Chosŏn to Hongtaiji, 1627–36. Chosŏnguk raesoȈ bu, vol. 1.
From Elder Brother to Father of Chosŏn: The Second Manchu Invasion
Manchu-Chosŏn Conflicts over Orthodox Legitimacy
In the middle of the 1630s, many Han Chinese and Manchu officials of the Jin sought to persuade Hongtaiji to take the title of emperor. On February 4, 1636, these officials presented memorials to prompt Hongtaiji to follow the Mandate of Heaven by claiming the emperorship. Following Chinese ritual conventions, Hongtaiji ostensibly declined and suggested his officials send emissaries to Chosŏn to discuss the matter with the king, his younger brother.⁵³ Hongtaiji’s true motivation, as the Korean official Hong Ik-han (1586–1637) shrewdly recognized, was to use Chosŏn’s identity as Little China to assert before other countries that Chosŏn revered him as the Son of Heaven.
The Manchu officials Inggūldai and Mafuta (?–1640) arrived in Hansŏng on March 30, along with forty-seven Mongol princes, thirty generals, and ninety-eight soldiers. They brought with them five letters. The first three letters extended Hongtaiji’s condolences on the death of the queen of Chosŏn. The fourth letter, written by eight Manchu princes (Ma., hošoi beile) and seventeen high-ranking Manchu ministers (Ma., gūsai amban), and the fifth letter, by forty-nine Mongol princes under the Chinese name Jinguo waifan menggu (Mongols as the outer fan of the Jin), aimed to persuade the king to submit a memorial urging Hongtaiji to follow the Mandate of Heaven (Ma., Abkai gūnin) and to claim the great title (Ma., amba gebu)—namely, that of emperor. The letters emphasized that the Jin now possessed virtues (Ma., erdemu) that enabled it to manage the world.⁵⁴ But on March 31, 139 Korean Confucian students presented the king with a petition, calling
on him to kill the barbarian emissaries and burn the barbarian letters. Inggūldai and his followers were thrown into panic and fled the city.⁵⁵
Chosŏn’s stance was strengthened when the king dispatched Na Tŏk-hŏn as the spring emissary and Yi Kwak as the response emissary to Mukden in late April. On May 15 the Jin held a grand ceremony in which Hongtaiji assumed the title emperor of lenience, kindheartedness, beneficence, and brilliance (Ma., gosin onco huwaliyasun enduringge han; Ch., kuan wen ren sheng huangdi) and adopted the regnal title Chongde (Ma., Wesihun erdemungge, lit. worshiping virtues). The Jin renamed itself the Country of the Great Qing (Ma., Daicing gurun; Ch., Da Qing guo). Gathering on Hongtaiji’s left and right flanks, the Jin’s Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese officials knelt down three times, each time making three prostrations (Ma., ilan jergi niyakūrafi uyun jergi hengkilembi; Ch., san gui jiu koutou)—the highest level of kowtow during the Qing period. Although Na and Yi had performed a ceremony of four kowtows before Hongtaiji upon their arrival, they called this second ceremony a usurpation of the imperial title (K., ch’amho) and refused to perform it, expressing their strong opposition to Hongtaiji’s political ambitions.⁵⁶ Chosŏn was the only Confucian country that lay beyond the Manchu regime’s political control but maintained regular and official diplomatic communications with it. Since Hongtaiji had made his claim to be the Son of Heaven in observance of proper Chinese conduct, he desperately needed the support of Chosŏn to counteract the designation of the Manchus as barbarians and to legitimize his emperorship in the Chinese sense. The ritual conflict with the Korean emissaries thus posed a grave identity crisis for him. Without endorsement from Chosŏn, the Manchu regime’s political transformation would remain largely confined to its borders and would not significantly influence regional politics.
Hongtaiji sent Na and Yi back to Chosŏn with two Chinese-language letters to the king. In the letters Hongtaiji called himself emperor of the country of the Great Qing (Ch., Da Qing guo huangdi) rather than khan of the Jin and referred to Chosŏn as your country (Ch., erguo) instead of your honorable country (Ch., guiguo), signaling the end of the bilateral brotherly relationship. Invoking the time-honored notion that the Heaven does not belong to one person, but to all people under the Heaven (Ma., abkai fejergi emu niyalmai abkai fejergi waka, abkai fejergi niyalmai abkai fejergi), Hongtaiji sought to demonstrate that his regime could govern the space of all-under-Heaven (Ch., tianxia; Ma., abkai fejergi) by following the precedent set by previous dynasties: namely, the Liao, which had been founded by the northeastern barbarians (Ch., dongbei yi; Ma., dergi amargi jušen); the Jin, founded by the eastern barbarians (Ch., dongyi; Ma., dergi jušen); and the Yuan, established by the northern barbarians (Ch., beiyi; Ma., amargi monggo, northern Mongols). By chronicling the rise and fall of these dynasties, Hongtaiji located the Qing, the dynasty of the Manchu barbarians, within this lineage of rulership, with himself as the Son of Heaven. The Qing’s rule was justified, he argued, because the Qing possessed the virtue that the Ming had lost.⁵⁷ This assertion was based on the Chinese political view that the Great Heaven has no partial affections and it helps only the virtuous (Ch., huangtian wu qin, wei de shi fu), a theory articulated in The Classic of History (Ch., Shangshu), which had endowed more than thirty dynasties with legitimacy. In short, Hongtaiji hoped that Chosŏn would become the Great Qing’s outer fan, just as it had served the previous dynasties of China.
Chosŏn became the first external target of the Qing’s new, Qing-centric Zongfan doctrine. Yet Hongtaiji’s position was unpopular in Chosŏn because it conflicted with the orthodox legitimacy on which the Confucian country based its political and social principles. With the exception of several high-ranking officials who preferred the Manchus, the majority of the ruling elite resolutely called for revering China and expelling the barbarians (K., chon Chungguk, yang yichŏk) in accordance with the doctrine of revering the Zhou Dynasty (K., chonju ŭiri).⁵⁸ In the face of tremendous pressure, the king reaffirmed that Chosŏn would not endorse Hongtaiji’s emperorship. The Qing thus declared war for the sake of its name and legitimacy.
The Establishment of Manchu-Chosŏn Zongfan Relations
On December 28, 1636, Qing troops attacked Chosŏn. They captured Hansŏng on January 9, 1637, without encountering strong resistance. The king had escaped
to Namhan Mountain Fortress with the crown prince (K., seja; Ch., shizi; Ma., šidz) and some officials, while the remaining royal family members and other officials fled to Kanghwa Island. The Qing forces surrounded the Namhan Fortress and, as their precondition for negotiations, demanded that the king send the crown prince as hostage. The king refused and mobilized his forces to resist the invasion and protect the great justice under Heaven (K., ch’ŏnha taeŭi). While Hongtaiji marched on the fortress with reinforcements on January 19, the king and his officials performed ceremonies to celebrate the birthday of Emperor Chongzhen of the Ming. Yet the king realized that Chosŏn’s fate was now at a crossroads. Ch’oe Myŏng-gil (1586–1647), a minister who had assisted the king in assuming the throne in the coup of 1623 and served as the king’s close adviser since that time, argued for peaceful negotiation with the Qing as he had done in 1627, when the Manchus invaded Chosŏn for the first time. Ch’oe’s approach was not welcomed by the majority of his colleagues, but it was undeniably pragmatic. On January 26, the lunar New Year, the king, fulfilling Chosŏn’s duty as a subject of the Ming, performed vested rituals in the direction of Beijing. Once the ceremony was over, the king sent two officials to negotiate with the Qing.
Two days later the king presented a letter to Hongtaiji in which he called Hongtaiji the emperor of lenience, kindheartedness, beneficence, and brilliance of the country of the Great Qing and referred to the Qing as the big country (K., taeguk) and to Chosŏn as the small country (K., sobang). The presentation of the letter was defined as submitting the letter to the higher authority (K., songsŏ).⁵⁹ Hongtaiji insisted that the king should surrender to him in person, so the two sides negotiated for two more weeks, during which the Qing troops shelled the fortress and defeated Chosŏn reinforcements sent from provinces. On February 15 the king presented another letter, in which he called Hongtaiji Your Majesty and himself a subordinate (see figure 1.5). He dated the letter using the Qing regnal title Chongde.⁶⁰ His letter suggested that the king had decided to surrender before Kanghwa Island was conquered.⁶¹ On February 17 the king submitted a sovereign letter to Hongtaiji, declaring that Chosŏn would "present the humble palace memorial [K., p’yo; Ch., biao] as the subordinate and serve as a fan [K., pŏnbang; Ch., fanbang] of the Great Qing forever, while all rituals about serving the big country would be performed in the vested format."⁶²
On February 22, 1637, Inggūldai brought an imperial edict to the king and asked the Korean officials to perform the same rituals that they had done when receiving edicts from the southern dynasty (the Ming). This occasion marked the first time that the Qing replaced the Ming in ritual exchanges with Chosŏn on Korean territory. In his edict, Hongtaiji listed ten terms of submission, among which two stood out. First, the king had to surrender to the Qing the book of imperial investiture and the seal that he had received from the Ming, stop communicating with the Ming, and begin to use the regnal title of the Qing instead of that of the Ming to indicate dates in all documents. Second, the king had to dispatch officials to the Qing every year to bring humble palace memorials, present gifts, and perform rituals to celebrate occasions such as the winter solstice, the New Year, the birthdays of the emperor, empress, and crown prince, and any good news for the Qing, and to extend condolences on the loss of members of the Qing’s royal house. The format of these memorials was required to follow the established format of Chosŏn’s memorials to the Ming. The rituals of receiving imperial decrees, accommodating imperial envoys in Chosŏn, and paying formal visits to the Qing emperor through tributary emissaries were to dovetail precisely with the established way of the Ming country (Ch., Mingguo jiuli). Hongtaiji also listed the items and amounts of the tributes required of Chosŏn and specified that tribute submissions ought to begin in 1639.⁶³
FIGURE 1.5. The format of the king’s letters to Hongtaiji in February 1637. The Arabic numerals represent horizontal lines from the top down, the English letters represent vertical lines, and the direction of the writing is from right to left. X represents a Chinese character. Chosŏnguk raesoȈ bu, 2:26–38.
The king unconditionally accepted all of Hongtaiji’s terms. On February 24, 1637, he presented himself before Hongtaiji at Samjŏndo (lit. three fields ferry), near the Hangang River, where the Qing had built a massive altar for Hongtaiji to receive the king’s surrender. During the ceremony, presided over by the Qing’s Ministry of Rites, the king knelt down three times, each time bowing his head three times before the emperor, after which he handed in his seal issued by the Ming. This ceremony marked the official establishment of the Zongfan relationship between the Qing and Chosŏn, as the king confirmed in his palace memorial to Hongtaiji on December 16, 1637.⁶⁴ The Qing’s forces soon returned to Mukden, taking the crown prince of Chosŏn, Yi Wang (1612–45), and the king’s second son, Yi Ho (King Hyojong, 1619–59), as hostages. Beginning on March 24, 1637, Chosŏn used the regnal title of the Qing to express the date, thus incorporating the country into the Qing’s temporal realm.⁶⁵ Chosŏn became the Qing’s outer fan .
The establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship, which replaced the Ming-Chosŏn relationship that had been officially institutionalized in 1401, was extremely significant for the Qing. The Ming’s passionate endorsement of the Zhou Zongfan system meant that under the Qing, the system was likewise directly connected with the classical and ideal tenets of the Zhou. As its political rhetoric developed after 1644, the Manchu court began to define its relationship with Chosŏn’s court by using more sophisticated terms that were associated with the Zhou Zongfan system. As early as 1649, Emperor Shunzhi, in his imperial mandate to invest King Hyojong, emphasized that Chosŏn served as an "outer fan for the central court" (Ch., wangshi).⁶⁶ In 1659 Emperor Shunzhi began his imperial mandate to invest King Hyŏngjong with the traditional term dividing cogongrass (Ch., fenmao), a metaphor for the Zhou’s Zongfan investiture.⁶⁷ Meanwhile, the Manchu court came to define Chosŏn as a princely submission (Ch., houfu; Ma., jecen i golo) according to the conventional theory of the five submissions (Ch., wufu) of the Zhou.⁶⁸ This definition equated the status of the king with that of China’s princely minister, governor-general, and governor.⁶⁹
Along the same lines, the Qing side, emperors and officials alike, regarded Korean emissaries as "ministers of ministers of the outer fan " (Ch., waifan peichen).⁷⁰
These established Zongfan tenets determined the familistic nature of the Qing-Chosŏn relationship, which crystallized in a crisis of kingship in 1768. In August of that year, Yi Gŭm (King Yŏngjo) asked Emperor Qianlong to invest his grandson Yi San (later known as Chŏngjo) as the crown successor to the Chosŏn kingship in the wake of the deaths of Yi Gŭm’s two sons, including the crown prince. Because the Qing court had never before encountered this situation, Emperor Qianlong instructed the Grand Secretariat (Ch., Neige) and the Ministry of Rites to consult Confucian books and historical records in search of appropriate precedents for the title of crown grandson (Ch., shisun). The ministry cited Confucius’s interpretations in The Book of Rites (Ch., Liji) and historical precedents ranging from the Liu Song Dynasty (420–79) to the Ming Dynasty pertaining to the investment of a vassal’s grandson as crown grandson. Stressing that "the outer fan is fundamentally the same as Zongfan," the ministry recommended that the emperor invest Yi San as the crown grandson, and the emperor did so.⁷¹ As the Ming had done, the Qing regarded Chosŏn as an extended royal family member of the Middle Kingdom where the patriarch—the Son of Heaven—resided.
This ideology continued to exert profound influence over Qing-Chosŏn relations in the nineteenth century. In 1882, under the Qing’s supervision and mediation, Chosŏn signed a treaty with the United States that portrayed Chosŏn as an independent state with a sovereign equal to the American president. But regardless of the treaty’s legal implications based on international law, in 1883 the Chinese official Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), who had negotiated the 1882 treaty with the United States on Chosŏn’s behalf as governor-general of Zhili, superintendent of trade for the northern ports of China (Ch., Beiyang tongshang dachen, hereafter Beiyang superintendent), and China’s de facto foreign minister, cited the Western Zhou’s Zongfan tenets to declare that the king was an outer vassal (Ch., wai zhuhou) of the Son of Heaven in China. Li further pointed out that the king was equal to China’s governors-general and provincial governors, who were inner vassals (Ch., nei zhuhou), while the status of lower-ranking Korean officials corresponded to that of their Chinese counterparts.⁷² In 1886, when Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), Li’s protégé, who resided in Chosŏn as the Chinese imperial resident, asked Li what level of ritual he should perform in front of the king, Li replied that it would be courteous enough for Yuan to follow the rituals used by Chinese provincial officials when visiting first-degree princes (Ch., qinjunwang).⁷³ On the Korean side, the king, in a pre-1894 humble memorial to Emperor Guangxu, still referred to Chosŏn as China’s princely submission.⁷⁴ In their dealings with each other in the late nineteenth century, both China and Korea looked to Zongfan precedents from the Western Zhou down through the Ming, and their country-to-country contacts were subordinate to their familistic court-to-court hierarchy. All of these stories started in 1637, when the Qing formalized its Zongfan relationship with Chosŏn.
At this point it is necessary to explain further why this book prefers the Chinese term Zongfan over the oft-used English renderings tribute system or tributary system. In the twentieth century, the promulgation of the term tribute system, together with the concepts suzerain and vassal, owed a great debt to the popularity of a more neutral phrase, Chinese world order, proposed by the American historian John King Fairbank. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, Fairbank prompted a constellation of historians and political scientists to explore the rationale behind China’s foreign relations in the late imperial period. Although Fairbank was aware of the complexity of Sinocentric cosmopolitanism, or Sinocentrism, the term Chinese world order, which he used broadly to denote this system and to highlight its diversity, became a rough equivalent of tribute system. Acceptance of this English rendering has allowed scholars in a variety of fields to treat it as a counterpart to treaty system or treaty port system. Some scholars have questioned the appositeness of the terms tributary system and suzerain-vassal relations and criticized them as a nineteenth- and twentieth-century reinterpretation of an older form of symbolically asymmetric interstate relations, while others, likewise seeking to avoid the possible misunderstandings caused by English terminology, have proposed new terms, such as Pax Sinica, in a world history context.⁷⁵ But their combined efforts have not changed the entrenched renderings or paradigm, and the conventional English parlance still
profoundly influences scholars’ understanding of late imperial China’s foreign relations.⁷⁶
An underlying problem with the term tribute system, as chapter 2 shows, is that it can convey only some of the connotations of the comprehensive Zongfan system—namely, chaogong, or sending emissaries to pay tribute to China, the perennial activity that was the most sensational and visible part of the regular ritual contacts between Qing China and its fan. The term tribute system thus trims the entire mechanism down to a Sinocentric trade structure. As Peter C. Perdue points out in his study of Qing-Zunghar relations, Overly simplistic generalizations about the Qing ‘tribute system’ tend to single out one trading relationship as the orthodox, normative one, neglecting the great diversity of ritual, economic, and diplomatic conditions found in the Qing trading regime as a whole.⁷⁷ The submission of tribute should not be used loosely as a master concept to represent the entire structure and its core nature. This is not to suggest, however, that the term tribute system has no analytical utility as a conceptual interpretive tool. This is clear in the debate over the question of when the practices of the Sinocentric order became as mature, institutional, and systematic as they were in the Ming and Qing periods.⁷⁸
Cherishing the Small Country: The Qing’s Construction of Its Zhongguo Identity
The Qing’s Transformation into the Big Country
Within the new Zongfan relationship, the Qing was Chosŏn’s monarch and the patriarch of the big family principally consisting of the Qing, Chosŏn, and the Mongol states. Given its supreme authority, the Qing could use the subordination of Chosŏn to its advantage. The first and most direct effect of the relationship was the formation of a new military alliance between the two countries. By conquering Chosŏn, the Qing reinforced its home front in the war with the Ming by eliminating the potential military threat on its eastern flank. It also gained material assistance from Chosŏn in the form of warhorses, grain, warships, cannons, and soldiers. Two months after Chosŏn’s subordination, the Manchu forces conquered Ka Island, destroying the last Ming military base in Chosŏn. In the next few years, a number of Korean soldiers, particularly gunners, were forced to join the Manchus in their fight against the Ming and to garrison Jinzhou and other cities newly conquered by the Qing in Manchuria.⁷⁹
By transforming its relationship with Chosŏn into one between a monarch and a subordinate, or between a father and a son, the Qing obtained political legitimacy from Chosŏn, a Confucian country beyond the Qing’s geographical borders but within its political and cultural realm. Given that the Chinese perceived their Zongfan relationships with other countries or political entities within a model centered on China as the Middle Kingdom, the establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship defined the Qing as the Middle Kingdom. In other words, the identities of both China and the countries on its periphery within the Zongfan framework were mutually dependent and constitutive. This rationale provided the Qing with the political and cultural foundations that it desperately needed to legitimize its centrality in the Chinese world.
In practice, the change of the Qing’s position was materially corroborated by the intensive bilateral exchange of missions between 1637 and 1643. On May 13, 1637, Chosŏn sent its first tributary mission to Mukden, and in the documents submitted to the Qing the Korean side called the city capital (K., Kyŏngsa), a term previously reserved for Beijing. This terminological choice indicated that, at least on the surface, Chosŏn acknowledged Mukden as the new political center of the world.⁸⁰ The mission had 315 members, including three primary members: an envoy, an associate envoy, and a secretary. After traveling 517 miles along the conventional overland tributary route between Hansŏng and Beijing, the mission arrived in Mukden on July 8.⁸¹ The next day the Korean officials appeared before Hongtaiji to perform the highest level of kowtow. During the imperial audience, the Qing’s officials read the king’s humble memorials, written in the hierarchical format once used for the Ming emperor. By praising the admirable virtues of the big country that brought Chosŏn to life again, the text of the humble
memorials endowed the Qing with the position of the Middle Kingdom, adding that all far countries on the periphery [of the Qing] have willingly subordinated themselves (K., hwangbok hambin) and lauding the Qing for its virtuous act of cherishing the small. The Qing’s position was confirmed by the Qing itself in the emperor’s edict to the king, which defined the relationship clearly with reference to orthodox Zongfan principles such as serving the great and cherishing the small. Chosŏn became a far country, a small country, and the remote land on the periphery of the new civilized center.⁸² This framing of the two countries’ mutually constitutive identities consigned Chosŏn to the category of barbarians surrounding the civilized Middle Kingdom of the Qing.
At the same time, the frequent visits to Mukden by tributary emissaries from the Mongols and other ethnic-minority polities whose affairs were under the management of the Mongolian Superintendency highlighted the spread of the Qing-centric Zongfan circle. For the previous two decades, the Manchu regime had gradually eroded the Ming’s Zongfan network at the periphery and used the dislodged parts to construct a similar model with itself at the center. After establishing the Zongfan relationship with Chosŏn, the Qing sought to institutionalize its Zongfan mechanism by imitating the Ming’s policies and improving them to meet the Qing’s needs. The institutionalization of the system took place through the Ministry of Rites. Although the Ministries of Revenue, War, and Justice also exchanged official notes with the king over cases involving financial and military assistance or illegal border crossings, the Ministry of Rites constituted the most important channel between the emissaries and the Qing court. It forwarded the king’s humble memorials to the emperor, directed the emissaries’ visits, treated the emissaries to banquets, accommodated them at a dedicated residence in Mukden for forty days, forwarded imperial edicts to them, and issued official response notes to the king. With the ministry’s guidance, the Korean emissaries performed the highest level of kowtow to the emperor, presented tributes, and received imperial edicts and gifts. These highly programmed ritual practices demonstrated, institutionalized, and consolidated the two sides’ bilateral relationship and strict hierarchy.
To formalize the Zongfan relationship, the Qing sent ethnic Manchu emissaries to Chosŏn to invest the king and other core members of the royal family with certain titles. On January 4, 1638, the first imperial mission led by Inggūldai, Mafuta, and Daiyun arrived in Hansŏng to officially invest the king. The king greeted the envoys at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country outside the West Gate of the capital.⁸³ Later, in the palace, the king received the imperial edicts of investiture, a gold seal, and gifts, and performed established rituals for the occasion. The edicts stated that, with the establishment of investiture-subordinate (Ch., fanfeng) relations between the Qing and Chosŏn, the latter was expected to serve as a " fan and fence" (Ch., fanping) of the Great Qing until the Yellow River becomes as narrow as a belt and Mount Tai becomes as small as a grindstone (Ch., daihe lishan). The emperor’s mandate noted that both sides have an established name and status, which will regulate the relationship and hierarchy for ten thousand years (Ch., li yishi zhi mingfen, ding wanzai zhi gangchang).⁸⁴ Following the ceremony, the king visited the envoys at their residence, the South Palace Annex (K., Nambyŏl gung), where he treated them to banquets. All of these ritual procedures were identical to those that had been performed between Chosŏn and the Ming. The Qing’s investiture legitimatized the bilateral Zongfan relationship between the two countries, an arrangement that would last for 258 years.
The Establishment of the Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing
In the precise spot in Samjŏndo where the Korean king had subordinated himself to Hongtaiji in 1637, the Qing forced Chosŏn to erect a stele to commemorate Hongtaiji’s achievements. Despite the Koreans’ reluctance to memorialize the humiliating invasion, the Qing continued to advance the project, and the Korean official Yi Kyŏng-sŏk (1595–1671) eventually drafted a Chinese-language inscription based on the Korean letters to the Qing side during the war.⁸⁵ After the Chinese official Fan Wencheng approved the inscription, the Qing sent interpreters to Hansŏng to translate it into Manchu and Mongolian. In 1639 the stele, inscribed in three languages, was erected as the Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing (Ma., Daicing gurun i enduringge han i gung erdemui bei; Ch.,
Da Qing huangdi gongde bei) (see figure 1.6).
The inscription reviewed the history between the two countries from 1619 to 1637 from Chosŏn’s perspective and exalted the Qing’s great virtues in bringing Chosŏn to life again. It claimed that the king had surrendered in 1637 not to[the Qing’s] might but to [its] virtues (Ma., horon de gelere teile waka, erdemu de dahahangge kai), given that those virtues made all the far [people] subordinate themselves willingly (Ma., goroki ci aname gemu dahambi). The stele also stated that the bilateral relationship would last for ten thousand years under the emperor’s goodness. The most significant aspect was the official transformation of the identity of the Manchu regime as manifested in certain terms. The inscription called the Qing the big country (Ch., dabang, dachao; Ma., amba gurun) or the upper country (Ch., shangguo; Ma., dergi gurun), while terming Chosŏn the small country (Ch., xiaobang; Ma., ajige gurun) as well as a faraway country. The fact that the two countries geographically bordered each other did not prevent the Qing from redefining Chosŏn as faraway in the politico-cultural sense.
FIGURE 1.6. The Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing. The stele is now located in a small park next to Lotte World in Seoul. Photo taken by the author in 2015.
Among these terms, which had been used between Chosŏn and the Ming and were now grafted onto the Qing-Chosŏn relationship, the Manchu phrase amba gurun (big country) was particularly significant. As a literal translation of the Chinese dabang or dachao, the term had once referred exclusively to the Ming. More importantly, as chapter 2 shows, after 1644 the Qing adopted amba gurun as a key equivalent of the Chinese terms Zhongguo (Ma., Dulimbai gurun) and Tianchao (the Heavenly Dynasty; Ma., abkai gurun). The inscription of the Samjŏndo stele was probably the first instance in which the Qing publicly and officially called itself amba gurun; over the following two and a half centuries, this term would refer solely to Qing China.
Cherishing Men from Afar: Publicizing Qing Centrality, 1637–43
The Manchu invasion of 1636 and the king’s surrender to Hongtaiji, known in Chosŏn as Pyŏngja horan (lit. the invasion of the northern barbarians in the year of Pyŏngja), were humiliating to the Koreans and stimulated widespread anti-Manchu feeling in the country. Korean resentment is evident, for example, in an incident that took place in December 1637, when the Manchu envoys visiting Chosŏn asked Korean local officials to procure courtesans (K., panggi), but the women killed themselves to show their resistance (K., yisa kŏchi).⁸⁶ In order to win Chosŏn’s loyalty beyond mere lip service, the Qing quickly adopted the traditional Chinese policies of cherishing the small and cherishing men from afar (Ch., huairou yuanren; Ma., goroki niyalma be bilume gosimbi).⁸⁷
In addition to providing Chosŏn’s delegation with better accommodations in Mukden and bestowing more gifts on the king and his emissaries, the Qing progressively reduced the tribute required of Chosŏn beginning in the early 1640s, when the Qing controlled more resources as a result of its military triumphs over the Ming. In 1640, for instance, the Qing lowered the number of sacks of rice that Chosŏn was expected to offer as tribute from ten thousand to just one thousand. In 1643 the Qing further reduced the annual tribute and furthermore cut by more than half the gifts that Chosŏn gave to the Manchu envoys. Proclaiming that the two countries have become one family, the Shunzhi emperor also permanently abolished many tributary conventions, such as the requirement that Chosŏn provide the imperial envoys with official courtesans. These exemptions, the emperor suggested, embodied the Qing policy of cherishing the small with benevolence.⁸⁸ Compared with the late Ming, which tried to extract the maximum economic and military benefits from Chosŏn, the Qing took a deliberately placatory approach toward its outer fan, represented by the many exemptions. This benign policy substantially facilitated the Qing’s historical transformation into Zhongguo.
The Qing was characterized more by its actions than by its pronouncements. Its policy of appealing to the subordinate country was manifested above all in its frequent contacts with Chosŏn. From 1637 to 1643, the Qing sent twelve missions and twenty-eight emissaries to Chosŏn, an average of one and a half missions per year, while Chosŏn sent fifty-six missions and 102 emissaries to the Qing, an average of seven missions per year.⁸⁹ In this context, some Koreans changed their established understandings of the Qing. In the spring of 1643, for example, Yi Chŏng-hae from Kyŏngsang Province submitted a letter to the Qing envoys in Hansŏng, volunteering to go to Mukden to serve the Qing and our emperor (K., a hwangje).⁹⁰
The Qing used its intensive contacts with Chosŏn as a powerful tool to manage its relations with other political entities. In 1638, a year after it converted Chosŏn from a younger brother into an outer fan, the Qing changed the Chinese name of the Mongolian Superintendency from Menggu yamen to Lifan yuan, applying the Chosŏn precedent to add the Mongols, too, to the Qing-centric family of nations as a fan. This move was part of the Manchu leaders’ project of steadily transforming Mongol conceptualizations of their position in the Qing-dominated world.⁹¹ In this sense, it could be argued that the dramatic change in the
Manchu-Mongol relationship had deep roots in the Zongfan concepts promulgated by Han Chinese officials of the Manchu regime since the early 1630s. This shift could also indicate that the Qing was streamlining the administration of its outer fan in order to strengthen its centrality and pursue an imperial enterprise beyond Manchuria.
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1 CONQUERING CHOSŎN The Rise of the Manchu Regime as the Middle Kingdom, 1616–43 As the Manchu regime consolidated its power in Manchuria between the late 1610s and the early 1640s, it reshaped the perceptions of other polities and eradi- cated its longstanding barbarian image. The regime derived its political and cultural resources in large part from its relations with Chosŏn, which validated and reinforced the Manchu dynasty’s position as the Middle Kingdom within the newly established multistate hierarchical system. In this process, the Manchus appropriated the Ming’s Zongfan discourse to designate other political entities as barbarians, initiating a prolonged process that I call the barbarianization of oth- ers. By crossing the Great Wall in 1644, the Manchu regime had fundamentally reconceptualized its own identity and position in the Chinese world. Barbarians, Rebellions, and Wars The Jurchen Uprising in Manchuria On February 17, 1616, the lunar New Year and the first day of the Forty-Fourth Year of Wanli of the Ming Dynasty, a number of high-ranking Chinese officials assembled at the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City with tributary emissaries from Chosŏn and China’s other outer fan. They waited to enter the imperial hall to present the emperor with their congratulations on the New Year. Finally, realizing the emperor had no desire to grant them an audience, the officials and emis- saries carried out their ceremonies in front of the gate.¹ This scene was not surprising, as the emperor had long been uninterested in such ceremonies. Many high-ranking officials in Beijing had not seen the hermit-like Son of Heaven for almost thirty years.² The Middle Kingdom and its lethargic human agent seemed to have fallen asleep. The day was significant, however, in Hetuala, a small Manchurian town about seven hundred miles northeast of Beijing, where a tribe called the Jianzhou Ju- rchens announced the establishment of its own country under the leadership of Nurhaci (1559–1626; r. 1616–26). Proclaiming himself the “brilliant khan caring for all countries/peoples” (Ma., abka geren gurun be ujikini seme sindaha genggiyen han), Nurhaci accepted the congratulations of Jurchen and Mongol officials and generals, took the regnal title of Tianming (“mandate of Heaven”; Ma., Abkai fulingga), and named his country Houjin (“the later Jin”).³ He thus defined his regime as the successor to the Jin Dynasty established by the Jurchen ancestors.⁴ Nurhaci’s political ambitions extended far beyond unifying the local tribes. In May 1618 he attacked the Ming forces after announcing the “Seven Grievances” (Ma., Nadan amba koro; Ch., Qi dahen). Nurhaci had visited Beijing three times to present tribute and had been appointed by the Ming court to govern the Jianzhou Jurchens, whom the Ming considered “northeastern barbarians” (Ch., dongbei yi).⁵ In the Seven Grievances, Nurhaci identified the Jianzhou as a subor- dinate that had guarded the Ming’s border for generations, and declared that various conflicts between his tribe, other tribes, and the Ming’s local leaders had led to his rebellion. The Ming was confident about suppressing Nurhaci. To do so it enlisted the aid of the tribe of Yehe, an old and powerful enemy of the Jurchens, as well as the support of Chosŏn. As a loyal fan, Chosŏn had followed the policy of “serving the great” (K., sadae) for more than two centuries. It regarded Nurhaci’s rebellion as intolerable and its military assistance to the Ming as a “legal and moral duty” (K., ŭibun). Although the king, Yi Hon (Kwanghaegun), was worried that his men would be defeated, he nonetheless ordered Gen. Kang Hong-rip in early 1619 to lead thirteen thousand soldiers across the Yalu River to join forces with the Ming
army in Manchuria.⁶ In the battle of Sarhū on April 17, 1619, more than six thousand Korean soldiers were killed, and General Kang surrendered to Nurhaci. Ending Chosŏn’s military engagement in the war, the surrender provided Nurhaci with a golden opportunity to open an official channel of communication with the Korean sovereign. In addition to seeking a peace agreement with Chosŏn to reduce the military threat on his eastern flank, Nurhaci wanted to change his relationship with Chosŏn by identifying his newly founded regime as a state equal to Chosŏn rather than as a state of lower status, as presupposed by the longstanding framework of Jurchen- Chosŏn relations.⁷ This political ambition posed a grave challenge to Chosŏn in the context of the civilized–barbarian distinction and initiated an invisible but intensive struggle of political discourse between the two sides. Chosŏn’s Role in the Jurchen-Ming War The bilateral communications between the Jurchens and Chosŏn started with an exchange of letters. In May 1619 Nurhaci sent a captured officer to Chosŏn to present a “sovereign letter” (Ch., guoshu; K., kuksŏ) and a copy of the Seven Grievances to the king. After explaining why he fought against the “big country” (Ch., daguo; Ma., amba gurun), that is, the Ming, Nurhaci asked the king to make common cause with him against the Ming. Chosŏn had contacted Nurhaci by letter in the 1600s through a local officer in the town of Manpo on the northern border, but now Nurhaci’s “barbarian letter” (K., hosŏ) reached the court directly and posed a thorny problem for the king.⁸ After fierce debate among officials, the king appointed Pak Yŏp, governor of P’yŏngan Province, to write back to Nurhaci, but the format of the reply, and in par- ticular the question of how to address Nurhaci, remained a challenge. In Nurhaci’s letter, the Mongolian characters of his stamp read “Emperor Tianming of the Houjin” (K., Hugŭm ch’ŏnmyŏng hwangje), which greatly shocked the king and the Border Defense Council (K., Pibyŏnsa) because they believed the Ming em- peror to be the sole emperor in the known universe. It was highly likely that the characters defined Nurhaci as a “khan” in the Mongol sense, rather than as an “emperor” (Ch., huangdi; K., hwangje) in the Chinese and Korean sense. Chosŏn had always called Nurhaci “old chieftain” (K., roch’u), “barbarian chieftain” (K., ich’u), “chieftain of slaves” (K., noch’u), or “chieftain of thieves” (K., chŏkch’u), so endorsing Nurhaci’s self-proclaimed imperial title was out of the question. The king, pretending he could not understand the characters on Nurhaci’s seal, instructed Pak to send a letter to the “assistant general of the Jianzhou garrison” (K., Kŏnjuwi mabŏp; Ch., Jianzhouwei mafa).⁹ The Border Defense Council had learned the word mabŏp from previous letters sent by the Jurchens and assumed that it referred to an assistant general (K., p’ŏnbi). In fact, it came from the Manchu word mafa, which means “grandfather.” In addition, the letter addressed its recipient in the second person using the form of “you” (K., chokha) that officials who were equal to each other used among themselves, not for sovereigns.¹⁰ Finally, the letter bore Pak’s official stamp instead of the king’s. In this way, the king downgraded the communication with the Houjin to a provincial level and sidestepped the sensitive issue of the political legitimacy of the Jurchen regime. The Korean letter noted that Chosŏn and the Houjin had been subjects (K., sin) of the “Heavenly Dynasty” for two hundred years and suggested that Nurhaci pledge allegiance to the “Imperial Ming,” an action that would also yield reconciliation between Chosŏn and Nurhaci. This strong pro-Ming stance made the Hou- jin bristle.¹¹ In his reply, calling himself gu, a Chinese term used only by a sovereign to refer to himself, Nurhaci inferred that the Heavenly Dynasty to which Chosŏn referred must be the “southern dynasty”—the Jurchen appellation for the Ming, which indicated that the Houjin no longer endorsed the divine position of the Ming. Nurhaci clearly asked the king to form an alliance with him and suggested that the two countries kill a white horse and a black bull to offer to Heaven and Earth and burn incense to swear an oath.¹² Nurhaci had conducted this ritual with the Yehe, Hada, Ula, and Hūifa tribes in 1597 and with the Ming in 1608 and later started wars with these entities on account of their reneging on the oath.
Chosŏn was uninterested in Nurhaci’s offer, particularly in light of the Ming’s potential reaction to Korean-Jurchen contacts. Ming officials such as Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), a close friend of the Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), suspected that Chosŏn would join the Jurchen rebellion against the Ming and con- sidered it advisable to rein Chosŏn in. In August 1619 he proposed a new policy toward Chosŏn in a memorial to Emperor Wanli. Xu argued that Beijing should follow historical precedents set by the Zhou and Han Dynasties by sending a commissioner to Chosŏn to “supervise and protect” (Ch., jianhu) the country. Xu enthusiastically volunteered to take up this position, but the emperor, who had sent Chinese forces to Chosŏn to defend the country against Japanese invasions in the 1590s, did not grant his request.¹³ As a matter of fact, Chosŏn was not collaborating with the Jurchens, whom it still called “barbarians” (K., orangk’ae), but maintaining its political and moral allegiance to Beijing would not alleviate the risk of a Jurchen attack. Under the circumstances, the king took a practical ap- proach by tactically maintaining connections with the Houjin but confining them to the local level. In the meantime, the outlook for the Ming-Chosŏn alliance was not sanguine. Two Ming emperors died within two months in 1620, and the new emperor, Tian- qi, showed more interest in carpentry than he did in statecraft. On the battlefield, the Ming was losing more lands to the Houjin. In May 1621 the Jurchens occu- pied Liaoyang, a key military fortress in Manchuria, and made it the Houjin’s new capital, cutting off the overland route of communications between Chosŏn and the Ming. Facing a series of dramatic changes, the king made the risky move of sending Nurhaci his first sovereign letter in October 1622 through a civil official of the Ministry of Rites in Hansŏng (today’s Seoul). In the letter, he referred to Houjin as “a neighboring country” and Nurhaci as “khan of the Houjin country” (K., Hugŭmguk kahan). The letter adopted the same format as letters sent to Japan in accordance with Chosŏn’s policy of kyorin, communicating with a neighboring country.¹⁴ By acknowledging the statehood of the Jurchen regime, the king elevated his communications with Nurhaci to the level of a sovereign addressing an- other sovereign. The pragmatism of this policy called into question the king’s loyalty to the Ming, which the king’s nephew, Yi Chong, used to justify a bloody coup that he launched in May 1623 to dethrone the king. Assuming power as the new king (King Injo), Yi Chong blamed his uncle for failing to embrace his monarch- subordinate and father-son relationship with the Ming. He himself took a different tack: in addition to ending the exchange of messengers with Nurhaci and imposing trade sanctions on the Houjin, Yi Chong mobilized his followers to prepare for a war with the Houjin and even planned to lead an army himself to at- tack the Jurchens.¹⁵ Being a usurper, Yi Chong used his fervent pro-Ming attitude to obtain the Ming investiture that legitimized his rulership. The new king also helped Mao Wenlong (1576–1629), a Ming general who had escaped to Chosŏn after the Jurchens’ occupation of Liaoyang and had stationed his forces on Ka Is- land, close to mainland Chosŏn, carry out a guerrilla war to prevent the Jurchens from entering Shanhai Pass. Chosŏn’s new policy posed a considerable military and economic threat to the Jurchens, but it did not stop the Jurchen expansion. In 1625 the Jurchens occupied Shenyang, the political heart and economic center of Manchuria, and made it their new capital. After Nurhaci died in 1626, his son Hongtaiji became the new khan with the regnal title Tiancong (“Heavenly wis- dom”; Ma., Abkai sure) and quickly decided to invade Chosŏn. Becoming the Elder Brother of Chosŏn: The Jin and the First Manchu Invasion In the spring of 1627 Hongtaiji launched an attack on Chosŏn. The forces of the Jin, as the Jurchen regime now styled itself, swept into northern Chosŏn and cap- tured P’yŏngyang within two weeks, forcing the king, who had escaped to Kanghwa Island, to sue for peace. As a precondition of withdrawal, the Jin commander, Amin (?–1640), required the king to swear an oath to Heaven to sever Chosŏn’s relations with the Ming and establish an elder brother–younger brother rela- tionship with the Jin, the latter taking on the dominant role. In Chosŏn, many Confucian officials and students pleaded with the king to stop negotiating with the barbarous invaders, kill their messengers, and fight to the death. Although the king told his subjects that the peace talks with the “Jurchen clowns” were only a
stalling tactic, or a conventional “loose rein” (K., kimi) policy, he had no choice but to continue the negotiations. In his letters to Hongtaiji, the king endorsed Hongtaiji’s political position by addressing him as “Khan of the Country of the Jin,” but he purposely selected neu- tral terms for the Jin and Chosŏn. While he called the Jin “your honorable country,” the king referred to Chosŏn as “our country,” instead of “our humble country” or “our small country,” as he would say in his palace memorials to the Ming. No honorific expressions for Hongtaiji appeared at the beginning of the letter.¹⁶ The king conveyed that Chosŏn would follow the policy of “communicating with a neighboring country” vis-à-vis the Jin and that of “serving the great country” vis-à- vis the Ming. By deliberately using the Ming regnal title “Tianqi” to express the date in his letter, the king implied that he would not betray the Ming. This act of adhering to Ming time led to a deadlock in the negotiations. The king later switched to a “notice” format for his communications, since this format did not require a regnal title. The new format helped the two sides reach an agreement regarding Chosŏn’s oath. The oath-swearing ceremony occurred at the palace on Kanghwa Island on April 18, 1627. The king burned incense and swore the oaths to Heaven after one of his officials read them aloud. Despite the king’s reluctance, the substance of oaths was what Hongtaiji had demanded. The nine highest Chosŏn officials and eight high-ranking Jin officials also read their own oaths. However, the performance of these ceremonies between the king and the Jurchen officials was not men- tioned in either Manchu or Korean records.¹⁷ Another oath-swearing ceremony took place later in P’yŏngyang between Amin and a brother of the king. The P’yŏngyang oath included several additional terms imposed by the Jurchen invaders, emphasizing that the king should present gifts to the khan, host the Jin’s emissaries as he did those of the Ming, and not reinforce the city walls or conduct military drills.¹⁸ The two ceremonies ushered in a decade of peace between the two countries. In political and ideological terms the Jurchens benefited substantially from their invasion of Chosŏn. Chosŏn officially endorsed the Jurchen regime as a coun- try with a supreme sovereign, helping to foster the regime’s political legitimacy in the geopolitical arena. With the support of Chosŏn, the “Little China” that now regarded the Jin as its elder brother, the Jin’s politico-cultural self-identity changed from that of a barbarian, imposed by the discourse of the Ming-centered cos- mopolitan order, to that of the civilized. Although resentment of the Jurchen “barbarians” soared in Chosŏn after the war, the Korean court was unable to escape the newly established brotherhood. Economically, too, Chosŏn yielded to the Jurchens’ terms by opening markets in several towns on its northern border and paying “annual tribute” (K., sep’ye) to the Jurchen court. Constructing a Jin-Centric, Quasi-Zongfan System: The Jin’s New Position The Rise of the Jin-Chosŏn Quasi-Zongfan Order As he withdrew from Chosŏn, Hongtaiji sent the king a letter, explaining why he fought with the “southern dynasty”—the Ming—and attacked Chosŏn. He said, “The southern dynasty regards only itself as Son of Heaven and views people of other countries as inferior servants. … The Mandate of Heaven is truly righteous by assisting us with punishing the southern dynasty…. In the future, our two countries should be brothers forever and never bully others as the southern dynasty does.”¹⁹ By quoting the theory of the Mandate of Heaven, the khan challenged the Ming’s centrality in the universe and justified his war with the Ming. Over the following decade, his construction of a Jin-centric, quasi-Zongfan system in the Jin’s contacts with Chosŏn and other neighboring entities gradually changed the Jin’s position. In the face of serious economic difficulties brought on by the war, the Jin required Chosŏn to open markets for trade in a border city, Ŭiju. Chosŏn yielded to the Jin’s pressure but agreed to hold the markets only twice a year, in the spring and the autumn, rather than three times per year, as the Jin had wished. On March
31, 1628, the Ŭiju market opened for the first time, and the Jin emissary Inggūldai (1596–1648) came to Ŭiju accompanied by eight generals and more than a thou- sand people. As the Ŭiju market fell short of the Jin’s needs, Hongtaiji urged Chosŏn to open another one in Hoeryŏng, a northeastern border city.²⁰ In the midst of the shortage, the Jin relied heavily on the yearly gifts provided by Chosŏn and conveyed to Shenyang by one emissary in the spring and another in the autumn. From 1627 to 1636, the required gift comprised up to eighty-five categories of goods, but the amounts in each category kept changing to reflect the Jin’s needs or Chosŏn’s concerns, becoming a barometer of their relations.²¹ The Korean emissaries brought commercial opportunities to Shenyang. In 1631 the Border Defense Council of Chosŏn complained to the king that “the dispatch of emissaries to Shenyang was no different from opening markets there.”²² On the other hand, the development of the market in Shenyang, like that of the markets in Ŭiju and Hoeryŏng, suffered from significant differentials in the prices of the consumer prod- ucts offered by the two sides. The black cotton cloth and ginseng sold by the Koreans were expensive, whereas the animal skins and furs that the Jurchens traded were not. This difference made it difficult for the Jurchen side to turn a profit. The Jin’s military hegemony could not subordinate Korean capital, which contrib- uted to the Jin’s second invasion of Chosŏn. Given the military and economic situation, the Jin did not force Chosŏn to end its contacts with Beijing. Hongtaiji had the option of concluding a peace agree- ment with the Ming through which he could win the latter’s political endorsement. In a memorial to Hongtaiji in 1630, Gao Hongzhong, a Han Chinese scholar serving the Jin, suggested that the Jin “follow the Chosŏn model to receive the [Ming] investiture with kingship and to use the regnal title [of the Ming] to count the date” (Ch., bi Chaoxian shili, qingfeng wangwei, cong zhengshuo).²³ This proposal reflected a popular perception among the Chinese about Chosŏn’s exemplary tributary position in the Ming-centric world. Had the Ming agreed to negotiate for a Chosŏn-like status for the Jurchen regime, the Jin could have followed Chosŏn to become an outer fan of the Ming. Nevertheless, the war persisted, and the Jin moved toward a broader objective of replacing the Ming. For that purpose, the Jin started to transform its hierarchical relationship with Chosŏn. After 1627 Chosŏn continued to embrace the centrality of the Ming in its contacts with the Jin by applying its kyorin policy to the Jin; this put the Jin on an equal footing with Chosŏn. The king called his emissaries to the Jin “messengers” (K., sinsa), not “tributary emissaries” (K., kongsa), as he did those dispatched to Bei- jing. The goods brought annually to Shenyang were “gifts” (K., yemul) rather than “tributes” (K., kongmul) like those presented to Beijing. As the king noted in 1633 to Hongtaiji, “It is the proper principle [K., ye; Ch., li] that our two countries give each other local products in communications via emissaries.”²⁴ These terms reflected befitting modesty and suggested that Chosŏn treated the Jin as a country lower than the Ming. In stark contrast, the Jin developed a new discourse to nourish its self-identity as a political entity superior to Chosŏn. In documents written in the Manchu lan- guage beginning in 1627, the Jin downgraded the Korean monarch from “khan of Chosŏn” (Ma., Solgoi kan) to “king of Chosŏn” (Ma., Solgo i wang, or Coohiyan gurun i wang).²⁵ With the steady rise of the Jin’s military power, especially after its triumph in the battle at Dalinghe in late 1631 and early 1632, Hongtaiji enacted considerable reforms to the Jin political structure, abolishing the power-sharing system at the highest level of the court and making himself the exclusive sovereign.²⁶ From 1632, in his letters to the Ming and Chosŏn, Hongtaiji began to call himself “brilliant khan of the Manchu country” (Ma., Manju gurun i sure han) rather than “khan of the Jin country” (Ma., Aisin gurun i han), the title he had used before.²⁷ More importantly, he imitated the Ming bureaucracy by estab- lishing a six-ministry system in Shenyang and instructing Manchu officials such as Dahai (1595– 1632) to translate Chinese classics into the Manchu language.²⁸ From then on, the regime substantially accelerated the Sinicization of its imperial norms from the top down, a process carried out through the institution-building efforts of a group of Han Chinese officials and scholars such as Ning Wanwo (1593–1665), Fan Wencheng (1597–1666), Gao Hongzhong, and Bao Chengxian (?–1645). One of the most significant acts of these elites was to persuade Hongtaiji to produce the annals of the monarch and the regime in both the Chinese and
Manchu languages. The Chinese terms that these Han Chinese savants adopted to describe the exchanges of emissaries and diplomatic relations between the Jin and Chosŏn were crucial to revising the Jin’s political identity. According to the Manchu-language records written by the Manchu scholars, the emissaries of Chosŏn (Ma., Solho i elcin) “arrived and delivered the local products as gifts” (Ma., baci tucire doroi jaka benjime isinjiha) in Shenyang. When they left, the khan “gave” (Ma., unggihe) or “awarded” (Ma., šangnaha) them and the king gifts.²⁹ Although these Manchu terms were largely vernacular and had no strong political meaning, their counter- parts in the Chinese-language records offered a very different portrayal. The visit of the “tributary emissaries” (Ch., gongshi), who brought “tribute” (Ch., gongwu) or “local products” (Ch., fangwu), was described as “the coming to the court to present themselves before the sovereign” (Ch., laichao), suggesting that the emis- saries’ visit was prompted not by the Jin’s formidable military might but by its outstanding merits.³⁰ These terms invoked a hierarchical relationship between the sovereign—an emperor in the Chinese sense—and his subjects, which in this case included Chosŏn, Vietnam, Ryukyu, other fan of the Ming, and the Central Asian political entities.³¹ Meanwhile, the Jin applied the political and diplomatic discourse it had developed toward Chosŏn to forces and political entities that sought shelter with or surrendered to the Jin, such as Bar Baturu, Nomun Dalai, Coir Jamsu from Alakcot of Cahar, and the Ming general Kong Youde (?–1652).³² In 1634 Hongtaiji changed the name of Shenyang to Mukden in Manchu and Shengjing (lit. “prosperous capital”) in Chinese, and the following year he in- structed his people to call the country “Manzhou” (M., Manju; “the Manchu state”), not “Jurchen” or other names. The regime’s institutional construction was thus facilitated by a clear ethnic identification, but the rationale behind this framework focused more on politico-cultural factors than on ethnic ones. In this pe- riod, Jin officials, particularly those who were Han Chinese, started to address Hongtaiji as “emperor” (Ch., huangshang, or huangdi). Some suggested that Hong- taiji perform conventional rituals established by the Han Dynasty, through which he would claim to be the Son of Heaven in the Chinese sense. More signif- icantly, these officials invoked the principles of the civilized–barbarian distinction to brand the Ming “southern barbarians” (Ch., manzi) and those Chinese who surrendered to the Jin “Han Chinese barbarians” (Ch., hanyi), thereby appropriating and completely reversing the Ming’s language regarding the center of the world.³³ With this change in its worldview, the Manchu regime began to play the role of the exclusive institutional agent of the Mandate of Heaven, to which “all barbar- ians in the four quarters of the world willingly come in submission” (Ch., siyi xianfu). When the Ming generals Kong Youde and Geng Zhongming (1604–49) sur- rendered to Hongtaiji in 1633, the Jin jubilantly described the event as “people from afar willingly coming to our court for civilization” (Ch., yuanren laigui).³⁴ The euphoric adoption of this phrase demonstrated that the Manchu regime was purposely constructing its identity as the center of the world, with cultural superiority over “barbarians from afar” or on its periphery, which now included the Ming.³⁵ These momentous changes in the Jin’s political discourse were rooted in ortho- dox Chinese political theory as articulated in Confucian classics, such as Analects of Confucius (Ch., Lunyu) and Doctrine of the Mean (Ch., Zhongyong), and they demonstrate the deep significance of both the Sinicization of the Manchu regime and the barbarianization of others by the regime. The use of Chinese political rhetoric of this sort was no mere imitation of the Ming’s discourse to please Hongtaiji. Rather, it was aimed at achieving a political goal by transforming the regime into a new center of gravity in a Jin-dominated world, a goal that the young and vernacular Manchu language—including the New Manchu (Ma., ice manju hergen) developed in 1632—was incapable of securing. The Manchu regime conducted its relations with Chosŏn in accordance with hierarchical principles within a quasi-Zongfan system. Some historians have ar- gued that at this time the Manchus derived their political concepts of imperial rule mainly from their Mongol allies rather than from the Chinese.³⁶ Yet the transformation of the Manchu regime’s understanding of its relations with neighboring nomadic and Confucian states, which took place concurrently
with the transformation of the Manchu-Chosŏn relationship, indicates that the regime was enthusiastically constructing a new politico-cultural self-identity by appropriating and exploiting the Chinese politico-cultural discourse. Scholars have also long debated the theory of the Sinicization or Sinification of the Manchus. The mainstream explorations of this issue so far have focused either on how the Han Chinese culturally assimilated the Manchus or on how the Manchus tried to retain their ethnic identity.³⁷ What this chapter explores is how the Manchu regime, rather than the ethnic Manchus, promoted itself as the exclusively civilized Middle Kingdom—Zhongguo—and it is in this sense that I use the term “Sinicization” in this book. The Manchu Regime’s Strategic Goal of Transforming into Zhongguo While the quasi-Zongfan discourse helped to refashion the self-image of the Manchu regime along Chinese lines, the Manchu language offered an international setting for this reconstruction by framing the Jin’s relations with other political entities as state-to-state interactions. In Manchu records the Jin, the Ming, Chosŏn, and such Mongol polities as Korcin were all defined as gurun. The term gurun has several meanings, including “country,” “tribe,” “people of a tribe,” and “race.” Two of these meanings are primary: “people” and “country.” For instance, amba gurun could mean “big country” or “adults,” and ajige gurun could mean “small country” or “children,” while haha gurun refers to “men” and hehe gurun refers to “women.”³⁸ In political contexts, gurun denoted primarily “country,” as in Aisin gurun (the country of the Jin), Nikan gurun (the country of the Han Chinese, that is, the Ming), Daiming gurun (the country of the Great Ming), Solho gurun or Coohiyan gurun (the country of Chosŏn), Korcin gurun (the country of the Korcin Mongols), and Cahar gurun (the country of the Cahar Mongols).³⁹ The Mongolian equivalent of the term in the Mongol records of the day is ulus (country).⁴⁰ The Manchu rulers drew clear geographical, social, and cultural lines between the Manchu regime and other countries, even as they emphasized common- alities. Nurhaci underlined to the Kalka Mongols in 1619 that “the Ming and Chosŏn have different languages, but they share the same styles in clothing and hair, so the two countries look like a single country; similarly, our two countries look like a single country.”⁴¹ The consciousness of being a state became progressively more transparent in the regime’s political norms, in particular in the Chinese-language records. In 1628, for instance, Hongtaiji called the Cahar Mongols a “dif- ferent country” (Ma., encu gurun; Ch., yiguo) and a “far country” (Ch., yuanguo).⁴² The following year Hongtaiji treated the prince of “the country of Korcin” to the music and dances of “four countries,” including the Jin, the Korcin Mongols, the Ming, and Chosŏn.⁴³ In a letter to Ming officials in 1632, Hongtaiji named his country and the Cahar Mongols as two “countries outside of the border [of the Ming]” (Ma., jasei tulergi gurun; Ch., bianwai zhi guo).⁴⁴ The new political discourse fundamentally transformed the worldview of the Manchu regime from within by representing the regime as a state at the center of a multistate community. The strategic goal of this transformation, as Ning Wanwo indicated in 1633 when he suggested that the Jin compose an institutional code (Ch., Jindian) by modifying that of the Ming, was to break with Ming conventions and “gradually develop the institutions of Zhongguo” (Ch., jianjiu Zhongguo zhi zhi). In other words, the Jin intended to develop its own “institutions of Zhongguo” to replace those of the Ming. According to Ning, only in this way could the regime manage its great enterprise after conquering the “place of the southern barbarians” (Ch., manzi difang), that is, the Ming. Ning justified his proposal by stressing that “a new monarch and his officials must have their own institutional works.”⁴⁵ This strategic plan shows that Zhongguo, as a politico-cultural identity, was available for the Manchu regime to embrace and claim. What is more, it suggests that control over the central plain (Ch., Zhongyuan) was not necessarily a prerequisite for a regime to claim to be Zhongguo, as has been assumed. Nurhaci wished to preserve the ways of his ethnic nation, or Manchuness, by enshrining Shanhai Pass and the Liao River as the border between “the Chinese and Jurchen countries” (Ma., nikan, jušen meni meni gurun). He tried to avoid “turning to the Chinese way” (Ma., nikan i doro de dosimbi; Ch., xiao hansu)—or becoming Sinicized—as the Liao, the Jin, and the Yuan Dynasties had done after their founders left their own homelands for the “Chinese inner land” (Ma., nikan
i dorgi bade; Ch., handi); they had “changed ways and all became Chinese” (Ma., doro forgošoro jakade, gemu nikan ohobi).⁴⁶ Although the Manchu leaders exhorted their ethnic cohorts to keep to the “old way” (Ma., fe doro) in daily life by wearing traditional garb and practicing Manchu archery and horseback riding, the regime was unavoidably following the “Chinese way” in its rapid transformation in the 1630s. The Manchu regime could have become Zhongguo even if it had remained in Manchuria and not crossed the Great Wall in 1644. By employing the newly adopted Chinese political discourse, the Manchu regime gradually absorbed the Chinese political philosophy of the Zongfan order into its understanding of its place within the constellation of polities. Aside from the Ming, other countries served as the Jin’s outer fan by presenting tribute to the khan, who occupied a position akin to that of a Chinese emperor. This quasi-Zongfan system matured to the point that in 1636, in their Chinese letter to Chosŏn, forty-nine princes of sixteen countries of Mongols under the Jin’s leadership termed themselves “Mongols as the outer fan of the Jin” (Ch., Jinguo waifan menggu), equivalent to the Manchu term tulergi goloi monggo (“Mongols as the outer fan ”).⁴⁷ In the same year, the Jin founded Menggu yamen (M., Monggo jurgan, lit. “the ministry of Mongolian affairs”) on the basis of Chinese civil administrational concepts. As an institution parallel to the Ministry of Rites, this ministry enabled the regime to transform its relations with the Mongols and to build and govern an emerging empire. The construction of this quasi-Zongfan discourse occurred primarily within the Jin’s borders, but the Jin found Chosŏn the best external resource to support its discursive revolution. Within the bilateral relationship, the Jin held the role of the supreme power, and it converted Chosŏn from a younger brother into a subor- dinate or outer fan. Students of Sino-Korean relations tend to assume that the Manchus adopted hierarchical discourse in 1637 after the second Manchu invasion, when the Manchu side imposed clear Zongfan terms on Chosŏn. However, in practice the process had begun much earlier. In the 1630s the scholars of the Jin had mined Chinese history for intellectual resources with which to manipulate the civilized–barbarian distinction in order to establish the centrality of the Jin. Within the Zongfan framework, the “central civilized country” (Ch., Huaxia) and its counterpart, “barbarians,” were the two key concepts addressing the status of the Middle Kingdom and that of its outer fan. The two terms were derived from the notion of all-under-Heaven, developed in the Xia (ca. 2070–1600 BC), Shang (1600–1046 BC), and Zhou periods, through which the three dynasties sought to legitimize their rule as divine. At the same time, the political entities spanning China’s lands identified xia (referring not to the Xia Dynasty but to a larger area in which the regime once resided) as the symbol of a civilized commu- nity possessing the Mandate of Heaven, namely, Zhongguo, Zhongyuan (the central plain), or Zhongtu (the central lands). At that time, the term “barbarians” re- ferred primarily to groups that resided along the periphery of the central plain and were reluctant to identify and embrace the concept of “civilized China,” as exemplified by the state relationship between the Qin and the Chu in the third century BC.⁴⁸ The originally geographic notion of “barbarian” became an instrument used by political forces to deprecate their antagonists during the movement of “revering the court of the Zhou and expelling the barbarians” (Ch., zunzhou rangyi) in the Eastern Zhou (770–256 BC), a chaotic time that led Confucius (551–479 BC) to call for restoring the ideal order of “proper conduct” (Ch., li) of the Western Zhou. Due to the fierce interstate rivalries, the civilized– barbarian distinction evolved into a politico-cultural ideology that the dynastic regimes of China contin- uously reinterpreted for the next two thousand years, until 1911. After the Han Dynasty, with the official institutionalization of Confucianism and the expansion of the concept of all-under-Heaven, the civilized–barbarian dis- tinction became a critical theoretical framework for the Chinese court’s management of its foreign relations. As “northern barbarians” gained ascendancy in the Northern Song (960–1127), the distinction presented itself as an essential cultural instrument with which Chinese elites endowed certain regimes with the pedi- gree of “legitimate historical narratives” (Ch., zhengshi) by expelling competing polities from these narratives.⁴⁹ Some scholars, such as Shi Jie (1005–45), the au- thor of A Treatise on the Middle Kingdom (Ch., Zhongguo lun), and Ouyang Xiu (1007–72), the author of A Treatise on Orthodox Legitimacy (Ch., Zhengtong lun),
depicted the Song as the exclusive civilized center of the world and the polities on the Song’s northern border as uncivilized. One of the most influential histories, A Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government (Ch., Zizhi tongjian), edited by Sima Guang (1019–86), drew a clear lineage connecting states identified as “China” from 403 BC to AD 959. The efforts of these scholars to conceptualize the narrative of orthodox legitimacy eventually paid off, for their rhetoric triumphed over that of the northern regimes, especially when Neo-Confucianism, created and elaborated by such Song intellectual vanguards as Cheng Hao (1032–85), Cheng Yi (1033–1107), and Zhu Xi (1130–1200), became China’s official ideology under the Yuan Dynasty. This intellectual history can help explain why the official historical narrative of the People’s Republic of China still celebrates the Song for its legitimate status as Zhongguo and marginalizes the Liao, the Xixia, and the Jin as regimes established by “ethnic minorities” (Ch., shaoshu minzu). It was against this historical back- drop that the scholars of the Manchu regime in the 1630s began to construct the regime’s orthodox legitimacy, which laid the foundation for the Manchu enter- prise of governing a vast empire as the legitimate Middle Kingdom, Zhongguo. The Practices of the Manchu-Chosŏn Quasi-Zongfan Order The Manchu regime implemented its quasi-Zongfan discourse through the rituals that accompanied the exchange of emissaries with Chosŏn by imitating Ming- Chosŏn contacts. In Mukden, the Korean emissaries kowtowed five times to Hongtaiji. They were comfortably lodged in the city and enjoyed a welcome banquet (K., hama yŏn, lit. “banquet for getting off a horse”) and a farewell banquet (K., sangma yŏn, lit. “banquet for getting on a horse”). Hongtaiji dispensed gifts to the Korean king, emissaries, interpreters, and servants.⁵⁰ In exchange, the Jin sent Manchu emissaries to Hansŏng in the spring and autumn of every year. Before they entered the Korean capital, the Manchu emissaries were housed at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country (K., Mohwa gwan), a place that had previ- ously accommodated Ming emissaries. The emissaries also had an audience with the king in the palace and were treated to official welcome and farewell ban- quets. Although Chosŏn did not want to treat the Manchu representatives like those of the Ming, the general ritual procedures of greeting were practically iden- tical. The Manchu emissaries lacked only their Ming counterparts’ standing as “imperial envoy” or “Heavenly envoy.” This de facto Zongfan relationship conflicted with the de jure one of equality between the two brothers, a contradiction strikingly manifested in the different for- mats of their sovereign letters to each other. In its letters to the Jin, Chosŏn placed the two sides on a fully equal political plane, which was hierarchically lower than the status of the Ming. According to the Chinese convention, whenever the characters for Heaven or the Ming emperor appeared, they were placed at the top of a new line, two character spaces higher than the characters for Chosŏn and the first characters of other lines. This honorific elevation acknowledged the em- peror as the supreme human agent of Heaven with the highest spiritual position in the world. Hongtaiji also used honorific elevation in his letters, but he adopted a different arrangement of the hierarchy, as shown by his letters to the Ming general Yuan Chonghuan (1584–1630). Hongtaiji divided the hierarchy into four lev- els, among which his position was lower than that of Heaven and the Ming emperor but higher than that of Ming officials (see figure 1.1). For his part, General Yuan followed Ming custom in his letters to Hongtaiji (see figure 1.2). Frustrated by Yuan’s usage, Hongtaiji exclaimed that he was “the monarch or the khan of another country” (Ma., encu gurun i ejen han) and “son of Heaven and the Buddha” (Ma., abka fucihi i jui). He declared that he would not accept any letters from the Ming that addressed him with a status lower than or even equal to that of the Ming officials.⁵¹ Nevertheless, in his communications with the king of Chosŏn, Hongtaiji was more pragmatic, addressing the king as a near equal in order to avoid offending the Korean monarch (see figure 1.3). The king followed the same format in his responses to Hongtaiji but avoided mention of the imposed brotherhood (see figure 1.4). Although Hongtaiji called the king “younger brother,” the king never referred to Hongtaiji as “elder brother.” When Hongtaiji questioned the king about this discrepancy in 1629, the king shifted to friend-to-friend expressions: “The king of the country of Chosŏn,” he wrote, “presents this letter to the khan of the country of the Jin” (K., Chosŏn
kugwang pongsŏ Kŭmguk han; Ma., Coohiyan gurun i wang ni bithe, Aisin gurun i han de unggimbi). This usage matched Hongtaiji’s wording: “The khan of the country of the Jin sends this letter to the king of the country of Chosŏn” (Ma., Aisin gurun i han i bithe, Coohiyan gurun i wang de unggimbi). Later, the king changed the verb “present” (K., pong; Ma., jafambi) to “send” (K., ch’i; Ma., unggimbi), eliminating the hierarchical connotations of the former term. This subtle change provoked the Jin, but Chosŏn explained that both terms were used between “neighboring countries.”⁵² To the Jin, Chosŏn’s pronounced pro-Ming attitude meant that the brotherhood was unstable. The Jin’s security would not be guaranteed so long as Chosŏn was a loyal subject of the Ming. The only way to solve this problem, the Jin believed, was with another war against Chosŏn. FIGURE 1.1. The format of Hongtaiji’s letters to Yuan Chonghuan in 1627. In this and the three figures that follow, the Arabic numerals represent horizontal lines from the top down, the English letters represent vertical lines, and the direction of the writing is from right to left. “X” represents a Chinese character. MWLD, 821, 847; MBRT, 4:28, 72.
FIGURE 1.2. The format of Yuan Chonghuan’s letters to Hongtaiji in 1627. MWLD, 821; MBRT, 4:28.
FIGURE 1.3. The format of Hongtaiji’s letters to the king of Chosŏn, 1627–36. Kakyu gobu . FIGURE 1.4. The format of the letters of the king of Chosŏn to Hongtaiji, 1627–36. Chosŏnguk raesoȈ bu, vol. 1. From Elder Brother to Father of Chosŏn: The Second Manchu Invasion Manchu-Chosŏn Conflicts over Orthodox Legitimacy In the middle of the 1630s, many Han Chinese and Manchu officials of the Jin sought to persuade Hongtaiji to take the title of emperor. On February 4, 1636, these officials presented memorials to prompt Hongtaiji to follow the Mandate of Heaven by claiming the emperorship. Following Chinese ritual conventions, Hongtaiji ostensibly declined and suggested his officials send emissaries to Chosŏn to discuss the matter with the king, his younger brother.⁵³ Hongtaiji’s true motivation, as the Korean official Hong Ik-han (1586–1637) shrewdly recognized, was to use Chosŏn’s identity as Little China to assert before other countries that Chosŏn revered him as the Son of Heaven. The Manchu officials Inggūldai and Mafuta (?–1640) arrived in Hansŏng on March 30, along with forty-seven Mongol princes, thirty generals, and ninety-eight soldiers. They brought with them five letters. The first three letters extended Hongtaiji’s condolences on the death of the queen of Chosŏn. The fourth letter, writ- ten by eight Manchu princes (Ma., hošoi beile) and seventeen high-ranking Manchu ministers (Ma., gūsai amban), and the fifth letter, by forty-nine Mongol princes under the Chinese name Jinguo waifan menggu (Mongols as the outer fan of the Jin), aimed to persuade the king to submit a memorial urging Hongtaiji to follow the Mandate of Heaven (Ma., Abkai gūnin) and to claim the “great title” (Ma., amba gebu)—namely, that of emperor. The letters emphasized that the Jin now pos- sessed “virtues” (Ma., erdemu) that enabled it to manage the world.⁵⁴ But on March 31, 139 Korean Confucian students presented the king with a petition, calling
on him “to kill the barbarian emissaries and burn the barbarian letters.” Inggūldai and his followers were thrown into panic and fled the city.⁵⁵ Chosŏn’s stance was strengthened when the king dispatched Na Tŏk-hŏn as the spring emissary and Yi Kwak as the response emissary to Mukden in late April. On May 15 the Jin held a grand ceremony in which Hongtaiji assumed the title “emperor of lenience, kindheartedness, beneficence, and brilliance” (Ma., gosin onco huwaliyasun enduringge han; Ch., kuan wen ren sheng huangdi) and adopted the regnal title Chongde (Ma., Wesihun erdemungge, lit. “worshiping virtues”). The Jin renamed itself the “Country of the Great Qing” (Ma., Daicing gurun; Ch., Da Qing guo). Gathering on Hongtaiji’s left and right flanks, the Jin’s Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese officials knelt down three times, each time making three prostrations (Ma., ilan jergi niyakūrafi uyun jergi hengkilembi; Ch., san gui jiu koutou)—the highest level of kowtow during the Qing period. Although Na and Yi had performed a ceremony of four kowtows before Hongtaiji upon their arrival, they called this second ceremony a “usurpation of the imperial title” (K., ch’amho) and refused to perform it, expressing their strong opposition to Hongtaiji’s political ambitions.⁵⁶ Chosŏn was the only Confucian country that lay beyond the Manchu regime’s political control but maintained regular and official diplomatic communications with it. Since Hongtaiji had made his claim to be the Son of Heaven in observance of proper Chinese conduct, he desperately needed the sup- port of Chosŏn to counteract the designation of the Manchus as barbarians and to legitimize his emperorship in the Chinese sense. The ritual conflict with the Korean emissaries thus posed a grave identity crisis for him. Without endorsement from Chosŏn, the Manchu regime’s political transformation would remain largely confined to its borders and would not significantly influence regional politics. Hongtaiji sent Na and Yi back to Chosŏn with two Chinese-language letters to the king. In the letters Hongtaiji called himself “emperor of the country of the Great Qing” (Ch., Da Qing guo huangdi) rather than “khan of the Jin” and referred to Chosŏn as “your country” (Ch., erguo) instead of “your honorable country” (Ch., guiguo), signaling the end of the bilateral brotherly relationship. Invoking the time-honored notion that “the Heaven does not belong to one person, but to all people under the Heaven” (Ma., abkai fejergi emu niyalmai abkai fejergi waka, abkai fejergi niyalmai abkai fejergi), Hongtaiji sought to demonstrate that his regime could govern the space of all-under-Heaven (Ch., tianxia; Ma., abkai fejergi) by following the precedent set by previous dynasties: namely, the Liao, which had been founded by the “northeastern barbarians” (Ch., dongbei yi; Ma., dergi amargi jušen); the Jin, founded by the “eastern barbarians” (Ch., dongyi; Ma., dergi jušen); and the Yuan, established by the “northern barbarians” (Ch., beiyi; Ma., amargi monggo, “northern Mongols”). By chronicling the rise and fall of these dynasties, Hongtaiji located the Qing, the dynasty of the Manchu “barbarians,” within this lineage of rulership, with himself as the Son of Heaven. The Qing’s rule was justified, he argued, because the Qing possessed the virtue that the Ming had lost.⁵⁷ This assertion was based on the Chinese political view that “the Great Heaven has no partial affections and it helps only the virtuous” (Ch., huangtian wu qin, wei de shi fu), a theory articulated in The Classic of History (Ch., Shangshu), which had endowed more than thirty dynasties with legitimacy. In short, Hongtaiji hoped that Chosŏn would become the Great Qing’s outer fan, just as it had served the previous dynasties of China. Chosŏn became the first external target of the Qing’s new, Qing-centric Zongfan doctrine. Yet Hongtaiji’s position was unpopular in Chosŏn because it con- flicted with the orthodox legitimacy on which the Confucian country based its political and social principles. With the exception of several high-ranking officials who preferred the Manchus, the majority of the ruling elite resolutely called for “revering China and expelling the barbarians” (K., chon Chungguk, yang yichŏk) in accordance with “the doctrine of revering the Zhou Dynasty” (K., chonju ŭiri).⁵⁸ In the face of tremendous pressure, the king reaffirmed that Chosŏn would not en- dorse Hongtaiji’s emperorship. The Qing thus declared war for the sake of its name and legitimacy. The Establishment of Manchu-Chosŏn Zongfan Relations On December 28, 1636, Qing troops attacked Chosŏn. They captured Hansŏng on January 9, 1637, without encountering strong resistance. The king had escaped
to Namhan Mountain Fortress with the crown prince (K., seja; Ch., shizi; Ma., šidz) and some officials, while the remaining royal family members and other offi- cials fled to Kanghwa Island. The Qing forces surrounded the Namhan Fortress and, as their precondition for negotiations, demanded that the king send the crown prince as hostage. The king refused and mobilized his forces to resist the invasion and protect the “great justice under Heaven” (K., ch’ŏnha taeŭi). While Hongtaiji marched on the fortress with reinforcements on January 19, the king and his officials performed ceremonies to celebrate the birthday of Emperor Chongzhen of the Ming. Yet the king realized that Chosŏn’s fate was now at a crossroads. Ch’oe Myŏng-gil (1586–1647), a minister who had assisted the king in assuming the throne in the coup of 1623 and served as the king’s close adviser since that time, argued for peaceful negotiation with the Qing as he had done in 1627, when the Manchus invaded Chosŏn for the first time. Ch’oe’s approach was not welcomed by the majority of his colleagues, but it was undeniably prag- matic. On January 26, the lunar New Year, the king, fulfilling Chosŏn’s duty as a subject of the Ming, performed vested rituals in the direction of Beijing. Once the ceremony was over, the king sent two officials to negotiate with the Qing. Two days later the king presented a letter to Hongtaiji in which he called Hongtaiji “the emperor of lenience, kindheartedness, beneficence, and brilliance of the country of the Great Qing” and referred to the Qing as the “big country” (K., taeguk) and to Chosŏn as the “small country” (K., sobang). The presentation of the letter was defined as “submitting the letter to the higher authority” (K., songsŏ).⁵⁹ Hongtaiji insisted that the king should surrender to him in person, so the two sides negotiated for two more weeks, during which the Qing troops shelled the fortress and defeated Chosŏn reinforcements sent from provinces. On February 15 the king presented another letter, in which he called Hongtaiji “Your Majesty” and himself a “subordinate” (see figure 1.5). He dated the letter using the Qing reg- nal title “Chongde.”⁶⁰ His letter suggested that the king had decided to surrender before Kanghwa Island was conquered.⁶¹ On February 17 the king submitted a sovereign letter to Hongtaiji, declaring that Chosŏn would “present the humble palace memorial [K., p’yo; Ch., biao] as the subordinate and serve as a fan [K., pŏnbang; Ch., fanbang] of the Great Qing forever,” while “all rituals about serving the big country would be performed in the vested format.”⁶² On February 22, 1637, Inggūldai brought an imperial edict to the king and asked the Korean officials to perform the same rituals that they had done when receiv- ing edicts from the “southern dynasty” (the Ming). This occasion marked the first time that the Qing replaced the Ming in ritual exchanges with Chosŏn on Ko- rean territory. In his edict, Hongtaiji listed ten terms of submission, among which two stood out. First, the king had to surrender to the Qing the book of imperial investiture and the seal that he had received from the Ming, stop communicating with the Ming, and begin to use the regnal title of the Qing instead of that of the Ming to indicate dates in all documents. Second, the king had to dispatch officials to the Qing every year to bring “humble palace memorials,” present gifts, and perform rituals to celebrate occasions such as the winter solstice, the New Year, the birthdays of the emperor, empress, and crown prince, and any good news for the Qing, and to extend condolences on the loss of members of the Qing’s royal house. The format of these memorials was required to follow the established for- mat of Chosŏn’s memorials to the Ming. The rituals of receiving imperial decrees, accommodating imperial envoys in Chosŏn, and paying formal visits to the Qing emperor through tributary emissaries were to dovetail precisely with the “established way of the Ming country” (Ch., Mingguo jiuli). Hongtaiji also listed the items and amounts of the tributes required of Chosŏn and specified that tribute submissions ought to begin in 1639.⁶³
FIGURE 1.5. The format of the king’s letters to Hongtaiji in February 1637. The Arabic numerals represent horizontal lines from the top down, the English letters represent vertical lines, and the direction of the writing is from right to left. X represents a Chinese character. Chosŏnguk raesoȈ bu, 2:26–38. The king unconditionally accepted all of Hongtaiji’s terms. On February 24, 1637, he presented himself before Hongtaiji at Samjŏndo (lit. “three fields ferry”), near the Hangang River, where the Qing had built a massive altar for Hongtaiji to receive the king’s surrender. During the ceremony, presided over by the Qing’s Ministry of Rites, the king knelt down three times, each time bowing his head three times before the emperor, after which he handed in his seal issued by the Ming. This ceremony marked the official establishment of the Zongfan relationship between the Qing and Chosŏn, as the king confirmed in his palace memorial to Hongtaiji on December 16, 1637.⁶⁴ The Qing’s forces soon returned to Mukden, taking the crown prince of Chosŏn, Yi Wang (1612–45), and the king’s second son, Yi Ho (King Hyojong, 1619–59), as hostages. Beginning on March 24, 1637, Chosŏn used the regnal title of the Qing to express the date, thus incorporating the country into the Qing’s temporal realm.⁶⁵ Chosŏn became the Qing’s outer fan . The establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship, which replaced the Ming-Chosŏn relationship that had been officially institutionalized in 1401, was extremely significant for the Qing. The Ming’s passionate endorsement of the Zhou Zongfan system meant that under the Qing, the system was likewise di- rectly connected with the classical and ideal tenets of the Zhou. As its political rhetoric developed after 1644, the Manchu court began to define its relationship with Chosŏn’s court by using more sophisticated terms that were associated with the Zhou Zongfan system. As early as 1649, Emperor Shunzhi, in his imperial mandate to invest King Hyojong, emphasized that Chosŏn served as an “outer fan ” for the “central court” (Ch., wangshi).⁶⁶ In 1659 Emperor Shunzhi began his imperial mandate to invest King Hyŏngjong with the traditional term “dividing cogongrass” (Ch., fenmao), a metaphor for the Zhou’s Zongfan investiture.⁶⁷ Meanwhile, the Manchu court came to define Chosŏn as a “princely submission” (Ch., houfu; Ma., jecen i golo) according to the conventional theory of the “five submissions” (Ch., wufu) of the Zhou.⁶⁸ This definition equated the status of the king with that of China’s princely minister, governor-general, and governor.⁶⁹
Along the same lines, the Qing side, emperors and officials alike, regarded Korean emissaries as “ministers of ministers of the outer fan ” (Ch., waifan peichen).⁷⁰ These established Zongfan tenets determined the familistic nature of the Qing-Chosŏn relationship, which crystallized in a crisis of kingship in 1768. In August of that year, Yi Gŭm (King Yŏngjo) asked Emperor Qianlong to invest his grandson Yi San (later known as Chŏngjo) as the crown successor to the Chosŏn king- ship in the wake of the deaths of Yi Gŭm’s two sons, including the crown prince. Because the Qing court had never before encountered this situation, Emperor Qianlong instructed the Grand Secretariat (Ch., Neige) and the Ministry of Rites to consult Confucian books and historical records in search of appropriate prece- dents for the title of “crown grandson” (Ch., shisun). The ministry cited Confucius’s interpretations in The Book of Rites (Ch., Liji) and historical precedents ranging from the Liu Song Dynasty (420–79) to the Ming Dynasty pertaining to the investment of a vassal’s grandson as crown grandson. Stressing that “the outer fan is fundamentally the same as Zongfan,” the ministry recommended that the emperor invest Yi San as the crown grandson, and the emperor did so.⁷¹ As the Ming had done, the Qing regarded Chosŏn as an extended royal family member of the Middle Kingdom where the patriarch—the Son of Heaven—resided. This ideology continued to exert profound influence over Qing-Chosŏn relations in the nineteenth century. In 1882, under the Qing’s supervision and medi- ation, Chosŏn signed a treaty with the United States that portrayed Chosŏn as an independent state with a sovereign equal to the American president. But regard- less of the treaty’s legal implications based on international law, in 1883 the Chinese official Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), who had negotiated the 1882 treaty with the United States on Chosŏn’s behalf as governor-general of Zhili, superintendent of trade for the northern ports of China (Ch., Beiyang tongshang dachen, here- after “Beiyang superintendent”), and China’s de facto foreign minister, cited the Western Zhou’s Zongfan tenets to declare that the king was an “outer vassal” (Ch., wai zhuhou) of the Son of Heaven in China. Li further pointed out that the king was equal to China’s governors-general and provincial governors, who were “inner vassals” (Ch., nei zhuhou), while the status of lower-ranking Korean officials corresponded to that of their Chinese counterparts.⁷² In 1886, when Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), Li’s protégé, who resided in Chosŏn as the Chinese imperial resident, asked Li what level of ritual he should perform in front of the king, Li replied that it would be courteous enough for Yuan to follow the rituals used by Chinese provincial officials when visiting first-degree princes (Ch., qinjunwang).⁷³ On the Korean side, the king, in a pre-1894 humble memorial to Emperor Guangxu, still referred to Chosŏn as China’s “princely submission.”⁷⁴ In their dealings with each other in the late nineteenth century, both China and Korea looked to Zongfan precedents from the Western Zhou down through the Ming, and their country-to-country contacts were subordinate to their familistic court-to-court hierarchy. All of these stories started in 1637, when the Qing formalized its Zongfan relationship with Chosŏn. At this point it is necessary to explain further why this book prefers the Chinese term “Zongfan” over the oft-used English renderings “tribute system” or “trib- utary system.” In the twentieth century, the promulgation of the term “tribute system,” together with the concepts “suzerain” and “vassal,” owed a great debt to the popularity of a more neutral phrase, “Chinese world order,” proposed by the American historian John King Fairbank. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, Fair- bank prompted a constellation of historians and political scientists to explore the rationale behind China’s foreign relations in the late imperial period. Although Fairbank was aware of the complexity of Sinocentric cosmopolitanism, or “Sinocentrism,” the term “Chinese world order,” which he used broadly to denote this system and to highlight its diversity, became a rough equivalent of “tribute system.” Acceptance of this English rendering has allowed scholars in a variety of fields to treat it as a counterpart to “treaty system” or “treaty port system.” Some scholars have questioned the appositeness of the terms “tributary system” and “suzerain-vassal relations” and criticized them as “a nineteenth- and twentieth-century reinterpretation of an older form of symbolically asymmetric interstate rela- tions,” while others, likewise seeking to avoid the possible misunderstandings caused by English terminology, have proposed new terms, such as “Pax Sinica,” in a world history context.⁷⁵ But their combined efforts have not changed the entrenched renderings or paradigm, and the conventional English parlance still
profoundly influences scholars’ understanding of late imperial China’s foreign relations.⁷⁶ An underlying problem with the term “tribute system,” as chapter 2 shows, is that it can convey only some of the connotations of the comprehensive Zongfan system—namely, chaogong, or sending emissaries to pay tribute to China, the perennial activity that was the most sensational and visible part of the regular ritual contacts between Qing China and its fan. The term “tribute system” thus trims the entire mechanism down to a Sinocentric trade structure. As Peter C. Perdue points out in his study of Qing-Zunghar relations, “Overly simplistic generalizations about the Qing ‘tribute system’ tend to single out one trading relationship as the orthodox, normative one, neglecting the great diversity of ritual, economic, and diplomatic conditions found in the Qing trading regime as a whole.”⁷⁷ The submission of tribute should not be used loosely as a master concept to represent the entire structure and its core nature. This is not to suggest, however, that the term “tribute system” has no analytical utility as a conceptual interpretive tool. This is clear in the debate over the question of when the practices of the Sinocentric order became as mature, institutional, and systematic as they were in the Ming and Qing periods.⁷⁸ Cherishing the Small Country: The Qing’s Construction of Its Zhongguo Identity The Qing’s Transformation into the “Big Country” Within the new Zongfan relationship, the Qing was Chosŏn’s monarch and the patriarch of the big family principally consisting of the Qing, Chosŏn, and the Mongol states. Given its supreme authority, the Qing could use the subordination of Chosŏn to its advantage. The first and most direct effect of the relationship was the formation of a new military alliance between the two countries. By conquering Chosŏn, the Qing reinforced its home front in the war with the Ming by eliminating the potential military threat on its eastern flank. It also gained material assistance from Chosŏn in the form of warhorses, grain, warships, cannons, and soldiers. Two months after Chosŏn’s subordination, the Manchu forces conquered Ka Island, destroying the last Ming military base in Chosŏn. In the next few years, a number of Korean soldiers, particularly gunners, were forced to join the Manchus in their fight against the Ming and to garrison Jinzhou and other cities newly conquered by the Qing in Manchuria.⁷⁹ By transforming its relationship with Chosŏn into one between a monarch and a subordinate, or between a father and a son, the Qing obtained political legit- imacy from Chosŏn, a Confucian country beyond the Qing’s geographical borders but within its political and cultural realm. Given that the Chinese perceived their Zongfan relationships with other countries or political entities within a model centered on China as the Middle Kingdom, the establishment of the Qing- Chosŏn Zongfan relationship defined the Qing as the Middle Kingdom. In other words, the identities of both China and the countries on its periphery within the Zongfan framework were mutually dependent and constitutive. This rationale provided the Qing with the political and cultural foundations that it desperately needed to legitimize its centrality in the Chinese world. In practice, the change of the Qing’s position was materially corroborated by the intensive bilateral exchange of missions between 1637 and 1643. On May 13, 1637, Chosŏn sent its first tributary mission to Mukden, and in the documents submitted to the Qing the Korean side called the city “capital” (K., Kyŏngsa), a term previously reserved for Beijing. This terminological choice indicated that, at least on the surface, Chosŏn acknowledged Mukden as the new political center of the world.⁸⁰ The mission had 315 members, including three primary members: an envoy, an associate envoy, and a secretary. After traveling 517 miles along the con- ventional overland tributary route between Hansŏng and Beijing, the mission arrived in Mukden on July 8.⁸¹ The next day the Korean officials appeared before Hongtaiji to perform the highest level of kowtow. During the imperial audience, the Qing’s officials read the king’s humble memorials, written in the hierarchical format once used for the Ming emperor. By praising the admirable virtues of the “big country” that “brought Chosŏn to life again,” the text of the humble
memorials endowed the Qing with the position of the Middle Kingdom, adding that “all far countries on the periphery [of the Qing] have willingly subordinated themselves” (K., hwangbok hambin) and lauding the Qing for its virtuous act of “cherishing the small.” The Qing’s position was confirmed by the Qing itself in the emperor’s edict to the king, which defined the relationship clearly with reference to orthodox Zongfan principles such as “serving the great” and “cherishing the small.” Chosŏn became a “far country,” a “small country,” and the “remote land” on the periphery of the new civilized center.⁸² This framing of the two coun- tries’ mutually constitutive identities consigned Chosŏn to the category of barbarians surrounding the civilized Middle Kingdom of the Qing. At the same time, the frequent visits to Mukden by tributary emissaries from the Mongols and other ethnic-minority polities whose affairs were under the man- agement of the Mongolian Superintendency highlighted the spread of the Qing-centric Zongfan circle. For the previous two decades, the Manchu regime had gradually eroded the Ming’s Zongfan network at the periphery and used the dislodged parts to construct a similar model with itself at the center. After establishing the Zongfan relationship with Chosŏn, the Qing sought to institutionalize its Zongfan mechanism by imitating the Ming’s policies and improving them to meet the Qing’s needs. The institutionalization of the system took place through the Ministry of Rites. Although the Ministries of Revenue, War, and Justice also ex- changed official notes with the king over cases involving financial and military assistance or illegal border crossings, the Ministry of Rites constituted the most important channel between the emissaries and the Qing court. It forwarded the king’s humble memorials to the emperor, directed the emissaries’ visits, treated the emissaries to banquets, accommodated them at a dedicated residence in Mukden for forty days, forwarded imperial edicts to them, and issued official re- sponse notes to the king. With the ministry’s guidance, the Korean emissaries performed the highest level of kowtow to the emperor, presented tributes, and re- ceived imperial edicts and gifts. These highly programmed ritual practices demonstrated, institutionalized, and consolidated the two sides’ bilateral relationship and strict hierarchy. To formalize the Zongfan relationship, the Qing sent ethnic Manchu emissaries to Chosŏn to invest the king and other core members of the royal family with certain titles. On January 4, 1638, the first imperial mission led by Inggūldai, Mafuta, and Daiyun arrived in Hansŏng to officially invest the king. The king greeted the envoys at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country outside the West Gate of the capital.⁸³ Later, in the palace, the king received the imperial edicts of investiture, a gold seal, and gifts, and performed established rituals for the occasion. The edicts stated that, with the establishment of “investiture-subordinate” (Ch., fanfeng) relations between the Qing and Chosŏn, the latter was expected to serve as a “ fan and fence” (Ch., fanping) of the Great Qing “until the Yellow River becomes as narrow as a belt and Mount Tai becomes as small as a grindstone” (Ch., daihe lishan). The emperor’s mandate noted that both sides “have an estab- lished name and status, which will regulate the relationship and hierarchy for ten thousand years” (Ch., li yishi zhi mingfen, ding wanzai zhi gangchang).⁸⁴ Fol- lowing the ceremony, the king visited the envoys at their residence, the South Palace Annex (K., Nambyŏl gung), where he treated them to banquets. All of these ritual procedures were identical to those that had been performed between Chosŏn and the Ming. The Qing’s investiture legitimatized the bilateral Zongfan rela- tionship between the two countries, an arrangement that would last for 258 years. The Establishment of the Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing In the precise spot in Samjŏndo where the Korean king had subordinated himself to Hongtaiji in 1637, the Qing forced Chosŏn to erect a stele to commemorate Hongtaiji’s achievements. Despite the Koreans’ reluctance to memorialize the humiliating invasion, the Qing continued to advance the project, and the Korean official Yi Kyŏng-sŏk (1595–1671) eventually drafted a Chinese-language inscription based on the Korean letters to the Qing side during the war.⁸⁵ After the Chinese official Fan Wencheng approved the inscription, the Qing sent interpreters to Hansŏng to translate it into Manchu and Mongolian. In 1639 the stele, inscribed in three languages, was erected as the Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing (Ma., Daicing gurun i enduringge han i gung erdemui bei; Ch.,
Da Qing huangdi gongde bei) (see figure 1.6). The inscription reviewed the history between the two countries from 1619 to 1637 from Chosŏn’s perspective and exalted the Qing’s great virtues in “bringing Chosŏn to life again.” It claimed that the king had surrendered in 1637 “not to[the Qing’s] might but to [its] virtues” (Ma., horon de gelere teile waka, erdemu de dahahangge kai), given that those virtues made “all the far [people] subordinate themselves willingly” (Ma., goroki ci aname gemu dahambi). The stele also stated that the bilateral relationship would last for ten thousand years under “the emperor’s goodness.” The most significant aspect was the official transformation of the identity of the Manchu regime as manifested in certain terms. The inscription called the Qing the “big country” (Ch., dabang, dachao; Ma., amba gurun) or the “upper country” (Ch., shangguo; Ma., dergi gurun), while terming Chosŏn the “small country” (Ch., xiaobang; Ma., ajige gurun) as well as “a faraway country.” The fact that the two countries geographically bordered each other did not prevent the Qing from redefining Chosŏn as “faraway” in the politico-cultural sense.
FIGURE 1.6. The Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing. The stele is now located in a small park next to Lotte World in Seoul. Photo taken by the author in 2015. Among these terms, which had been used between Chosŏn and the Ming and were now grafted onto the Qing-Chosŏn relationship, the Manchu phrase amba gurun (big country) was particularly significant. As a literal translation of the Chinese dabang or dachao, the term had once referred exclusively to the Ming. More importantly, as chapter 2 shows, after 1644 the Qing adopted amba gurun as a key equivalent of the Chinese terms Zhongguo (Ma., Dulimbai gurun) and Tianchao (“the Heavenly Dynasty”; Ma., abkai gurun). The inscription of the Samjŏndo stele was probably the first instance in which the Qing publicly and officially called itself amba gurun; over the following two and a half centuries, this term would refer solely to Qing China. “Cherishing Men from Afar”: Publicizing Qing Centrality, 1637–43 The Manchu invasion of 1636 and the king’s surrender to Hongtaiji, known in Chosŏn as Pyŏngja horan (lit. “the invasion of the northern barbarians in the year of Pyŏngja”), were humiliating to the Koreans and stimulated widespread anti-Manchu feeling in the country. Korean resentment is evident, for example, in an inci- dent that took place in December 1637, when the Manchu envoys visiting Chosŏn asked Korean local officials to procure courtesans (K., panggi), but the women “killed themselves to show their resistance” (K., yisa kŏchi).⁸⁶ In order to win Chosŏn’s loyalty beyond mere lip service, the Qing quickly adopted the traditional Chinese policies of “cherishing the small” and “cherishing men from afar” (Ch., huairou yuanren; Ma., goroki niyalma be bilume gosimbi).⁸⁷ In addition to providing Chosŏn’s delegation with better accommodations in Mukden and bestowing more gifts on the king and his emissaries, the Qing pro- gressively reduced the tribute required of Chosŏn beginning in the early 1640s, when the Qing controlled more resources as a result of its military triumphs over the Ming. In 1640, for instance, the Qing lowered the number of sacks of rice that Chosŏn was expected to offer as tribute from ten thousand to just one thou- sand. In 1643 the Qing further reduced the annual tribute and furthermore cut by more than half the gifts that Chosŏn gave to the Manchu envoys. Proclaiming that “the two countries have become one family,” the Shunzhi emperor also permanently abolished many tributary conventions, such as the requirement that Chosŏn provide the imperial envoys with official courtesans. These exemptions, the emperor suggested, embodied the Qing policy of “cherishing the small with benevolence.”⁸⁸ Compared with the late Ming, which tried to extract the maximum economic and military benefits from Chosŏn, the Qing took a deliberately placatory approach toward its outer fan, represented by the many exemptions. This benign policy substantially facilitated the Qing’s historical transformation into Zhongguo. The Qing was characterized more by its actions than by its pronouncements. Its policy of appealing to the subordinate country was manifested above all in its frequent contacts with Chosŏn. From 1637 to 1643, the Qing sent twelve missions and twenty-eight emissaries to Chosŏn, an average of one and a half missions per year, while Chosŏn sent fifty-six missions and 102 emissaries to the Qing, an average of seven missions per year.⁸⁹ In this context, some Koreans changed their established understandings of the Qing. In the spring of 1643, for example, Yi Chŏng-hae from Kyŏngsang Province submitted a letter to the Qing envoys in Hansŏng, volunteering to go to Mukden to serve the Qing and “our emperor” (K., a hwangje).⁹⁰ The Qing used its intensive contacts with Chosŏn as a powerful tool to manage its relations with other political entities. In 1638, a year after it converted Chosŏn from a younger brother into an outer fan, the Qing changed the Chinese name of the Mongolian Superintendency from Menggu yamen to Lifan yuan, applying the Chosŏn precedent to add the Mongols, too, to the Qing-centric family of nations as a fan. This move was part of the Manchu leaders’ project of steadily transforming Mongol conceptualizations of their position in the Qing-dominated world.⁹¹ In this sense, it could be argued that the dramatic change in the
Manchu-Mongol relationship had deep roots in the Zongfan concepts promulgated by Han Chinese officials of the Manchu regime since the early 1630s. This shift could also indicate that the Qing was streamlining the administration of its outer fan in order to strengthen its centrality and pursue an imperial enterprise beyond Manchuria.
1
CONQUERING CHOSŎN
The Rise of the Manchu Regime as the Middle Kingdom, 1616–43
As the Manchu regime consolidated its power in Manchuria between the late 1610s and the early 1640s, it reshaped the perceptions of other polities and eradicated its longstanding barbarian image. The regime derived its political and cultural resources in large part from its relations with Chosŏn, which validated and reinforced the Manchu dynasty’s position as the Middle Kingdom within the newly established multistate hierarchical system. In this process, the Manchus appropriated the Ming’s Zongfan discourse to designate other political entities as barbarians, initiating a prolonged process that I call the barbarianization of others. By crossing the Great Wall in 1644, the Manchu regime had fundamentally reconceptualized its own identity and position in the Chinese world.
Barbarians, Rebellions, and Wars
The Jurchen Uprising in Manchuria
On February 17, 1616, the lunar New Year and the first day of the Forty-Fourth Year of Wanli of the Ming Dynasty, a number of high-ranking Chinese officials assembled at the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City with tributary emissaries from Chosŏn and China’s other outer fan. They waited to enter the imperial hall to present the emperor with their congratulations on the New Year. Finally, realizing the emperor had no desire to grant them an audience, the officials and emissaries carried out their ceremonies in front of the gate.¹ This scene was not surprising, as the emperor had long been uninterested in such ceremonies. Many high-ranking officials in Beijing had not seen the hermit-like Son of Heaven for almost thirty years.² The Middle Kingdom and its lethargic human agent seemed to have fallen asleep.
The day was significant, however, in Hetuala, a small Manchurian town about seven hundred miles northeast of Beijing, where a tribe called the Jianzhou Jurchens announced the establishment of its own country under the leadership of Nurhaci (1559–1626; r. 1616–26). Proclaiming himself the brilliant khan caring for all countries/peoples (Ma., abka geren gurun be ujikini seme sindaha genggiyen han), Nurhaci accepted the congratulations of Jurchen and Mongol officials and generals, took the regnal title of Tianming (mandate of Heaven; Ma., Abkai fulingga), and named his country Houjin (the later Jin).³ He thus defined his regime as the successor to the Jin Dynasty established by the Jurchen ancestors.⁴
Nurhaci’s political ambitions extended far beyond unifying the local tribes. In May 1618 he attacked the Ming forces after announcing the Seven Grievances (Ma., Nadan amba koro; Ch., Qi dahen). Nurhaci had visited Beijing three times to present tribute and had been appointed by the Ming court to govern the Jianzhou Jurchens, whom the Ming considered northeastern barbarians (Ch., dongbei yi).⁵ In the Seven Grievances, Nurhaci identified the Jianzhou as a subordinate that had guarded the Ming’s border for generations, and declared that various conflicts between his tribe, other tribes, and the Ming’s local leaders had led to his rebellion.
The Ming was confident about suppressing Nurhaci. To do so it enlisted the aid of the tribe of Yehe, an old and powerful enemy of the Jurchens, as well as the support of Chosŏn. As a loyal fan, Chosŏn had followed the policy of serving the great (K., sadae) for more than two centuries. It regarded Nurhaci’s rebellion as intolerable and its military assistance to the Ming as a legal and moral duty (K., ŭibun). Although the king, Yi Hon (Kwanghaegun), was worried that his men would be defeated, he nonetheless ordered Gen. Kang Hong-rip in early 1619 to lead thirteen thousand soldiers across the Yalu River to join forces with the Ming
army in Manchuria.⁶
In the battle of Sarhū on April 17, 1619, more than six thousand Korean soldiers were killed, and General Kang surrendered to Nurhaci. Ending Chosŏn’s military engagement in the war, the surrender provided Nurhaci with a golden opportunity to open an official channel of communication with the Korean sovereign. In addition to seeking a peace agreement with Chosŏn to reduce the military threat on his eastern flank, Nurhaci wanted to change his relationship with Chosŏn by identifying his newly founded regime as a state equal to Chosŏn rather than as a state of lower status, as presupposed by the longstanding framework of Jurchen-Chosŏn relations.⁷ This political ambition posed a grave challenge to Chosŏn in the context of the civilized–barbarian distinction and initiated an invisible but intensive struggle of political discourse between the two sides.
Chosŏn’s Role in the Jurchen-Ming War
The bilateral communications between the Jurchens and Chosŏn started with an exchange of letters. In May 1619 Nurhaci sent a captured officer to Chosŏn to present a sovereign letter (Ch., guoshu; K., kuksŏ) and a copy of the Seven Grievances to the king. After explaining why he fought against the big country (Ch., daguo; Ma., amba gurun), that is, the Ming, Nurhaci asked the king to make common cause with him against the Ming. Chosŏn had contacted Nurhaci by letter in the 1600s through a local officer in the town of Manpo on the northern border, but now Nurhaci’s barbarian letter (K., hosŏ) reached the court directly and posed a thorny problem for the king.⁸
After fierce debate among officials, the king appointed Pak Yŏp, governor of P’yŏngan Province, to write back to Nurhaci, but the format of the reply, and in particular the question of how to address Nurhaci, remained a challenge. In Nurhaci’s letter, the Mongolian characters of his stamp read Emperor Tianming of the Houjin (K., Hugŭm ch’ŏnmyŏng hwangje), which greatly shocked the king and the Border Defense Council (K., Pibyŏnsa) because they believed the Ming emperor to be the sole emperor in the known universe. It was highly likely that the characters defined Nurhaci as a khan in the Mongol sense, rather than as an emperor (Ch., huangdi; K., hwangje) in the Chinese and Korean sense. Chosŏn had always called Nurhaci old chieftain (K., roch’u), barbarian chieftain (K., ich’u), chieftain of slaves (K., noch’u), or chieftain of thieves (K., chŏkch’u), so endorsing Nurhaci’s self-proclaimed imperial title was out of the question. The king, pretending he could not understand the characters on Nurhaci’s seal, instructed Pak to send a letter to the assistant general of the Jianzhou garrison (K., Kŏnjuwi mabŏp; Ch., Jianzhouwei mafa).⁹ The Border Defense Council had learned the word mabŏp from previous letters sent by the Jurchens and assumed that it referred to an assistant general (K., p’ŏnbi). In fact, it came from the Manchu word mafa, which means grandfather. In addition, the letter addressed its recipient in the second person using the form of you (K., chokha) that officials who were equal to each other used among themselves, not for sovereigns.¹⁰ Finally, the letter bore Pak’s official stamp instead of the king’s. In this way, the king downgraded the communication with the Houjin to a provincial level and sidestepped the sensitive issue of the political legitimacy of the Jurchen regime.
The Korean letter noted that Chosŏn and the Houjin had been subjects (K., sin) of the Heavenly Dynasty for two hundred years and suggested that Nurhaci pledge allegiance to the Imperial Ming, an action that would also yield reconciliation between Chosŏn and Nurhaci. This strong pro-Ming stance made the Houjin bristle.¹¹ In his reply, calling himself gu, a Chinese term used only by a sovereign to refer to himself, Nurhaci inferred that the Heavenly Dynasty to which Chosŏn referred must be the southern dynasty—the Jurchen appellation for the Ming, which indicated that the Houjin no longer endorsed the divine position of the Ming. Nurhaci clearly asked the king to form an alliance with him and suggested that the two countries kill a white horse and a black bull to offer to Heaven and Earth and burn incense to swear an oath.¹² Nurhaci had conducted this ritual with the Yehe, Hada, Ula, and Hūifa tribes in 1597 and with the Ming in 1608 and later started wars with these entities on account of their reneging on the oath.
Chosŏn was uninterested in Nurhaci’s offer, particularly in light of the Ming’s potential reaction to Korean-Jurchen contacts. Ming officials such as Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), a close friend of the Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), suspected that Chosŏn would join the Jurchen rebellion against the Ming and considered it advisable to rein Chosŏn in. In August 1619 he proposed a new policy toward Chosŏn in a memorial to Emperor Wanli. Xu argued that Beijing should follow historical precedents set by the Zhou and Han Dynasties by sending a commissioner to Chosŏn to supervise and protect (Ch., jianhu) the country. Xu enthusiastically volunteered to take up this position, but the emperor, who had sent Chinese forces to Chosŏn to defend the country against Japanese invasions in the 1590s, did not grant his request.¹³ As a matter of fact, Chosŏn was not collaborating with the Jurchens, whom it still called barbarians (K., orangk’ae), but maintaining its political and moral allegiance to Beijing would not alleviate the risk of a Jurchen attack. Under the circumstances, the king took a practical approach by tactically maintaining connections with the Houjin but confining them to the local level.
In the meantime, the outlook for the Ming-Chosŏn alliance was not sanguine. Two Ming emperors died within two months in 1620, and the new emperor, Tianqi, showed more interest in carpentry than he did in statecraft. On the battlefield, the Ming was losing more lands to the Houjin. In May 1621 the Jurchens occupied Liaoyang, a key military fortress in Manchuria, and made it the Houjin’s new capital, cutting off the overland route of communications between Chosŏn and the Ming. Facing a series of dramatic changes, the king made the risky move of sending Nurhaci his first sovereign letter in October 1622 through a civil official of the Ministry of Rites in Hansŏng (today’s Seoul). In the letter, he referred to Houjin as a neighboring country and Nurhaci as khan of the Houjin country (K., Hugŭmguk kahan). The letter adopted the same format as letters sent to Japan in accordance with Chosŏn’s policy of kyorin, communicating with a neighboring country.¹⁴ By acknowledging the statehood of the Jurchen regime, the king elevated his communications with Nurhaci to the level of a sovereign addressing another sovereign.
The pragmatism of this policy called into question the king’s loyalty to the Ming, which the king’s nephew, Yi Chong, used to justify a bloody coup that he launched in May 1623 to dethrone the king. Assuming power as the new king (King Injo), Yi Chong blamed his uncle for failing to embrace his monarch-subordinate and father-son relationship with the Ming. He himself took a different tack: in addition to ending the exchange of messengers with Nurhaci and imposing trade sanctions on the Houjin, Yi Chong mobilized his followers to prepare for a war with the Houjin and even planned to lead an army himself to attack the Jurchens.¹⁵ Being a usurper, Yi Chong used his fervent pro-Ming attitude to obtain the Ming investiture that legitimized his rulership. The new king also helped Mao Wenlong (1576–1629), a Ming general who had escaped to Chosŏn after the Jurchens’ occupation of Liaoyang and had stationed his forces on Ka Island, close to mainland Chosŏn, carry out a guerrilla war to prevent the Jurchens from entering Shanhai Pass. Chosŏn’s new policy posed a considerable military and economic threat to the Jurchens, but it did not stop the Jurchen expansion. In 1625 the Jurchens occupied Shenyang, the political heart and economic center of Manchuria, and made it their new capital. After Nurhaci died in 1626, his son Hongtaiji became the new khan with the regnal title Tiancong (Heavenly wisdom; Ma., Abkai sure) and quickly decided to invade Chosŏn.
Becoming the Elder Brother of Chosŏn: The Jin and the First Manchu Invasion
In the spring of 1627 Hongtaiji launched an attack on Chosŏn. The forces of the Jin, as the Jurchen regime now styled itself, swept into northern Chosŏn and captured P’yŏngyang within two weeks, forcing the king, who had escaped to Kanghwa Island, to sue for peace. As a precondition of withdrawal, the Jin commander, Amin (?–1640), required the king to swear an oath to Heaven to sever Chosŏn’s relations with the Ming and establish an elder brother–younger brother relationship with the Jin, the latter taking on the dominant role. In Chosŏn, many Confucian officials and students pleaded with the king to stop negotiating with the barbarous invaders, kill their messengers, and fight to the death. Although the king told his subjects that the peace talks with the Jurchen clowns were only a
stalling tactic, or a conventional loose rein (K., kimi) policy, he had no choice but to continue the negotiations.
In his letters to Hongtaiji, the king endorsed Hongtaiji’s political position by addressing him as Khan of the Country of the Jin, but he purposely selected neutral terms for the Jin and Chosŏn. While he called the Jin your honorable country, the king referred to Chosŏn as our country, instead of our humble country or our small country, as he would say in his palace memorials to the Ming. No honorific expressions for Hongtaiji appeared at the beginning of the letter.¹⁶ The king conveyed that Chosŏn would follow the policy of communicating with a neighboring country vis-à-vis the Jin and that of serving the great country vis-à-vis the Ming. By deliberately using the Ming regnal title Tianqi to express the date in his letter, the king implied that he would not betray the Ming. This act of adhering to Ming time led to a deadlock in the negotiations. The king later switched to a notice format for his communications, since this format did not require a regnal title. The new format helped the two sides reach an agreement regarding Chosŏn’s oath.
The oath-swearing ceremony occurred at the palace on Kanghwa Island on April 18, 1627. The king burned incense and swore the oaths to Heaven after one of his officials read them aloud. Despite the king’s reluctance, the substance of oaths was what Hongtaiji had demanded. The nine highest Chosŏn officials and eight high-ranking Jin officials also read their own oaths. However, the performance of these ceremonies between the king and the Jurchen officials was not mentioned in either Manchu or Korean records.¹⁷ Another oath-swearing ceremony took place later in P’yŏngyang between Amin and a brother of the king. The P’yŏngyang oath included several additional terms imposed by the Jurchen invaders, emphasizing that the king should present gifts to the khan, host the Jin’s emissaries as he did those of the Ming, and not reinforce the city walls or conduct military drills.¹⁸ The two ceremonies ushered in a decade of peace between the two countries.
In political and ideological terms the Jurchens benefited substantially from their invasion of Chosŏn. Chosŏn officially endorsed the Jurchen regime as a country with a supreme sovereign, helping to foster the regime’s political legitimacy in the geopolitical arena. With the support of Chosŏn, the Little China that now regarded the Jin as its elder brother, the Jin’s politico-cultural self-identity changed from that of a barbarian, imposed by the discourse of the Ming-centered cosmopolitan order, to that of the civilized. Although resentment of the Jurchen barbarians soared in Chosŏn after the war, the Korean court was unable to escape the newly established brotherhood. Economically, too, Chosŏn yielded to the Jurchens’ terms by opening markets in several towns on its northern border and paying annual tribute (K., sep’ye) to the Jurchen court.
Constructing a Jin-Centric, Quasi-Zongfan System: The Jin’s New Position
The Rise of the Jin-Chosŏn Quasi-Zongfan Order
As he withdrew from Chosŏn, Hongtaiji sent the king a letter, explaining why he fought with the southern dynasty—the Ming—and attacked Chosŏn. He said, The southern dynasty regards only itself as Son of Heaven and views people of other countries as inferior servants. … The Mandate of Heaven is truly righteous by assisting us with punishing the southern dynasty…. In the future, our two countries should be brothers forever and never bully others as the southern dynasty does.¹⁹ By quoting the theory of the Mandate of Heaven, the khan challenged the Ming’s centrality in the universe and justified his war with the Ming. Over the following decade, his construction of a Jin-centric, quasi-Zongfan system in the Jin’s contacts with Chosŏn and other neighboring entities gradually changed the Jin’s position.
In the face of serious economic difficulties brought on by the war, the Jin required Chosŏn to open markets for trade in a border city, Ŭiju. Chosŏn yielded to the Jin’s pressure but agreed to hold the markets only twice a year, in the spring and the autumn, rather than three times per year, as the Jin had wished. On March
31, 1628, the Ŭiju market opened for the first time, and the Jin emissary Inggūldai (1596–1648) came to Ŭiju accompanied by eight generals and more than a thousand people. As the Ŭiju market fell short of the Jin’s needs, Hongtaiji urged Chosŏn to open another one in Hoeryŏng, a northeastern border city.²⁰ In the midst of the shortage, the Jin relied heavily on the yearly gifts provided by Chosŏn and conveyed to Shenyang by one emissary in the spring and another in the autumn. From 1627 to 1636, the required gift comprised up to eighty-five categories of goods, but the amounts in each category kept changing to reflect the Jin’s needs or Chosŏn’s concerns, becoming a barometer of their relations.²¹ The Korean emissaries brought commercial opportunities to Shenyang. In 1631 the Border Defense Council of Chosŏn complained to the king that the dispatch of emissaries to Shenyang was no different from opening markets there.²² On the other hand, the development of the market in Shenyang, like that of the markets in Ŭiju and Hoeryŏng, suffered from significant differentials in the prices of the consumer products offered by the two sides. The black cotton cloth and ginseng sold by the Koreans were expensive, whereas the animal skins and furs that the Jurchens traded were not. This difference made it difficult for the Jurchen side to turn a profit. The Jin’s military hegemony could not subordinate Korean capital, which contributed to the Jin’s second invasion of Chosŏn.
Given the military and economic situation, the Jin did not force Chosŏn to end its contacts with Beijing. Hongtaiji had the option of concluding a peace agreement with the Ming through which he could win the latter’s political endorsement. In a memorial to Hongtaiji in 1630, Gao Hongzhong, a Han Chinese scholar serving the Jin, suggested that the Jin follow the Chosŏn model to receive the [Ming] investiture with kingship and to use the regnal title [of the Ming] to count the date (Ch., bi Chaoxian shili, qingfeng wangwei, cong zhengshuo).²³ This proposal reflected a popular perception among the Chinese about Chosŏn’s exemplary tributary position in the Ming-centric world. Had the Ming agreed to negotiate for a Chosŏn-like status for the Jurchen regime, the Jin could have followed Chosŏn to become an outer fan of the Ming. Nevertheless, the war persisted, and the Jin moved toward a broader objective of replacing the Ming. For that purpose, the Jin started to transform its hierarchical relationship with Chosŏn.
After 1627 Chosŏn continued to embrace the centrality of the Ming in its contacts with the Jin by applying its kyorin policy to the Jin; this put the Jin on an equal footing with Chosŏn. The king called his emissaries to the Jin messengers (K., sinsa), not tributary emissaries (K., kongsa), as he did those dispatched to Beijing. The goods brought annually to Shenyang were gifts (K., yemul) rather than tributes (K., kongmul) like those presented to Beijing. As the king noted in 1633 to Hongtaiji, "It is the proper principle [K., ye; Ch., li] that our two countries give each other local products in communications via emissaries."²⁴ These terms reflected befitting modesty and suggested that Chosŏn treated the Jin as a country lower than the Ming.
In stark contrast, the Jin developed a new discourse to nourish its self-identity as a political entity superior to Chosŏn. In documents written in the Manchu language beginning in 1627, the Jin downgraded the Korean monarch from khan of Chosŏn (Ma., Solgoi kan) to king of Chosŏn (Ma., Solgo i wang, or Coohiyan gurun i wang).²⁵ With the steady rise of the Jin’s military power, especially after its triumph in the battle at Dalinghe in late 1631 and early 1632, Hongtaiji enacted considerable reforms to the Jin political structure, abolishing the power-sharing system at the highest level of the court and making himself the exclusive sovereign.²⁶ From 1632, in his letters to the Ming and Chosŏn, Hongtaiji began to call himself brilliant khan of the Manchu country (Ma., Manju gurun i sure han) rather than khan of the Jin country (Ma., Aisin gurun i han), the title he had used before.²⁷ More importantly, he imitated the Ming bureaucracy by establishing a six-ministry system in Shenyang and instructing Manchu officials such as Dahai (1595– 1632) to translate Chinese classics into the Manchu language.²⁸ From then on, the regime substantially accelerated the Sinicization of its imperial norms from the top down, a process carried out through the institution-building efforts of a group of Han Chinese officials and scholars such as Ning Wanwo (1593–1665), Fan Wencheng (1597–1666), Gao Hongzhong, and Bao Chengxian (?–1645). One of the most significant acts of these elites was to persuade Hongtaiji to produce the annals of the monarch and the regime in both the Chinese and
Manchu languages.
The Chinese terms that these Han Chinese savants adopted to describe the exchanges of emissaries and diplomatic relations between the Jin and Chosŏn were crucial to revising the Jin’s political identity. According to the Manchu-language records written by the Manchu scholars, the emissaries of Chosŏn (Ma., Solho i elcin) arrived and delivered the local products as gifts (Ma., baci tucire doroi jaka benjime isinjiha) in Shenyang. When they left, the khan gave (Ma., unggihe) or awarded (Ma., šangnaha) them and the king gifts.²⁹ Although these Manchu terms were largely vernacular and had no strong political meaning, their counterparts in the Chinese-language records offered a very different portrayal. The visit of the tributary emissaries (Ch., gongshi), who brought tribute (Ch., gongwu) or local products (Ch., fangwu), was described as the coming to the court to present themselves before the sovereign (Ch., laichao), suggesting that the emissaries’ visit was prompted not by the Jin’s formidable military might but by its outstanding merits.³⁰ These terms invoked a hierarchical relationship between the sovereign—an emperor in the Chinese sense—and his subjects, which in this case included Chosŏn, Vietnam, Ryukyu, other fan of the Ming, and the Central Asian political entities.³¹ Meanwhile, the Jin applied the political and diplomatic discourse it had developed toward Chosŏn to forces and political entities that sought shelter with or surrendered to the Jin, such as Bar Baturu, Nomun Dalai, Coir Jamsu from Alakcot of Cahar, and the Ming general Kong Youde (?–1652).³²
In 1634 Hongtaiji changed the name of Shenyang to Mukden in Manchu and Shengjing (lit. prosperous capital) in Chinese, and the following year he instructed his people to call the country Manzhou (M., Manju; the Manchu state), not Jurchen or other names. The regime’s institutional construction was thus facilitated by a clear ethnic identification, but the rationale behind this framework focused more on politico-cultural factors than on ethnic ones. In this period, Jin officials, particularly those who were Han Chinese, started to address Hongtaiji as emperor (Ch., huangshang, or huangdi). Some suggested that Hongtaiji perform conventional rituals established by the Han Dynasty, through which he would claim to be the Son of Heaven in the Chinese sense. More significantly, these officials invoked the principles of the civilized–barbarian distinction to brand the Ming southern barbarians (Ch., manzi) and those Chinese who surrendered to the Jin Han Chinese barbarians (Ch., hanyi), thereby appropriating and completely reversing the Ming’s language regarding the center of the world.³³
With this change in its worldview, the Manchu regime began to play the role of the exclusive institutional agent of the Mandate of Heaven, to which all barbarians in the four quarters of the world willingly come in submission (Ch., siyi xianfu). When the Ming generals Kong Youde and Geng Zhongming (1604–49) surrendered to Hongtaiji in 1633, the Jin jubilantly described the event as people from afar willingly coming to our court for civilization (Ch., yuanren laigui).³⁴ The euphoric adoption of this phrase demonstrated that the Manchu regime was purposely constructing its identity as the center of the world, with cultural superiority over barbarians from afar or on its periphery, which now included the Ming.³⁵ These momentous changes in the Jin’s political discourse were rooted in orthodox Chinese political theory as articulated in Confucian classics, such as Analects of Confucius (Ch., Lunyu) and Doctrine of the Mean (Ch., Zhongyong), and they demonstrate the deep significance of both the Sinicization of the Manchu regime and the barbarianization of others by the regime. The use of Chinese political rhetoric of this sort was no mere imitation of the Ming’s discourse to please Hongtaiji. Rather, it was aimed at achieving a political goal by transforming the regime into a new center of gravity in a Jin-dominated world, a goal that the young and vernacular Manchu language—including the New Manchu (Ma., ice manju hergen) developed in 1632—was incapable of securing.
The Manchu regime conducted its relations with Chosŏn in accordance with hierarchical principles within a quasi-Zongfan system. Some historians have argued that at this time the Manchus derived their political concepts of imperial rule mainly from their Mongol allies rather than from the Chinese.³⁶
Yet the transformation of the Manchu regime’s understanding of its relations with neighboring nomadic and Confucian states, which took place concurrently
with the transformation of the Manchu-Chosŏn relationship, indicates that the regime was enthusiastically constructing a new politico-cultural self-identity by appropriating and exploiting the Chinese politico-cultural discourse. Scholars have also long debated the theory of the Sinicization or Sinification of the Manchus. The mainstream explorations of this issue so far have focused either on how the Han Chinese culturally assimilated the Manchus or on how the Manchus tried to retain their ethnic identity.³⁷ What this chapter explores is how the Manchu regime, rather than the ethnic Manchus, promoted itself as the exclusively civilized Middle Kingdom—Zhongguo—and it is in this sense that I use the term Sinicization in this book.
The Manchu Regime’s Strategic Goal of Transforming into Zhongguo
While the quasi-Zongfan discourse helped to refashion the self-image of the Manchu regime along Chinese lines, the Manchu language offered an international setting for this reconstruction by framing the Jin’s relations with other political entities as state-to-state interactions. In Manchu records the Jin, the Ming, Chosŏn, and such Mongol polities as Korcin were all defined as gurun. The term gurun has several meanings, including country, tribe, people of a tribe, and race. Two of these meanings are primary: people and country. For instance, amba gurun could mean big country or adults, and ajige gurun could mean small country or children, while haha gurun refers to men and hehe gurun refers to women.³⁸ In political contexts, gurun denoted primarily country, as in Aisin gurun (the country of the Jin), Nikan gurun (the country of the Han Chinese, that is, the Ming), Daiming gurun (the country of the Great Ming), Solho gurun or Coohiyan gurun (the country of Chosŏn), Korcin gurun (the country of the Korcin Mongols), and Cahar gurun (the country of the Cahar Mongols).³⁹ The Mongolian equivalent of the term in the Mongol records of the day is ulus (country).⁴⁰
The Manchu rulers drew clear geographical, social, and cultural lines between the Manchu regime and other countries, even as they emphasized commonalities. Nurhaci underlined to the Kalka Mongols in 1619 that the Ming and Chosŏn have different languages, but they share the same styles in clothing and hair, so the two countries look like a single country; similarly, our two countries look like a single country.⁴¹ The consciousness of being a state became progressively more transparent in the regime’s political norms, in particular in the Chinese-language records. In 1628, for instance, Hongtaiji called the Cahar Mongols a different country (Ma., encu gurun; Ch., yiguo) and a far country (Ch., yuanguo).⁴² The following year Hongtaiji treated the prince of the country of Korcin to the music and dances of four countries, including the Jin, the Korcin Mongols, the Ming, and Chosŏn.⁴³ In a letter to Ming officials in 1632, Hongtaiji named his country and the Cahar Mongols as two countries outside of the border [of the Ming] (Ma., jasei tulergi gurun; Ch., bianwai zhi guo).⁴⁴
The new political discourse fundamentally transformed the worldview of the Manchu regime from within by representing the regime as a state at the center of a multistate community. The strategic goal of this transformation, as Ning Wanwo indicated in 1633 when he suggested that the Jin compose an institutional code (Ch., Jindian) by modifying that of the Ming, was to break with Ming conventions and gradually develop the institutions of Zhongguo (Ch., jianjiu Zhongguo zhi zhi). In other words, the Jin intended to develop its own institutions of Zhongguo to replace those of the Ming. According to Ning, only in this way could the regime manage its great enterprise after conquering the place of the southern barbarians (Ch., manzi difang), that is, the Ming. Ning justified his proposal by stressing that a new monarch and his officials must have their own institutional works.⁴⁵ This strategic plan shows that Zhongguo, as a politico-cultural identity, was available for the Manchu regime to embrace and claim. What is more, it suggests that control over the central plain (Ch., Zhongyuan) was not necessarily a prerequisite for a regime to claim to be Zhongguo, as has been assumed.
Nurhaci wished to preserve the ways of his ethnic nation, or Manchuness, by enshrining Shanhai Pass and the Liao River as the border between the Chinese and Jurchen countries (Ma., nikan, jušen meni meni gurun). He tried to avoid turning to the Chinese way (Ma., nikan i doro de dosimbi; Ch., xiao hansu)—or becoming Sinicized—as the Liao, the Jin, and the Yuan Dynasties had done after their founders left their own homelands for the Chinese inner land (Ma., nikan
i dorgi bade; Ch., handi); they had changed ways and all became Chinese (Ma., doro forgošoro jakade, gemu nikan ohobi).⁴⁶ Although the Manchu leaders exhorted their ethnic cohorts to keep to the old way (Ma., fe doro) in daily life by wearing traditional garb and practicing Manchu archery and horseback riding, the regime was unavoidably following the Chinese way in its rapid transformation in the 1630s. The Manchu regime could have become Zhongguo even if it had remained in Manchuria and not crossed the Great Wall in 1644.
By employing the newly adopted Chinese political discourse, the Manchu regime gradually absorbed the Chinese political philosophy of the Zongfan order into its understanding of its place within the constellation of polities. Aside from the Ming, other countries served as the Jin’s outer fan by presenting tribute to the khan, who occupied a position akin to that of a Chinese emperor. This quasi-Zongfan system matured to the point that in 1636, in their Chinese letter to Chosŏn, forty-nine princes of sixteen countries of Mongols under the Jin’s leadership termed themselves "Mongols as the outer fan of the Jin" (Ch., Jinguo waifan menggu), equivalent to the Manchu term tulergi goloi monggo ("Mongols as the outer fan ").⁴⁷ In the same year, the Jin founded Menggu yamen (M., Monggo jurgan, lit. the ministry of Mongolian affairs) on the basis of Chinese civil administrational concepts. As an institution parallel to the Ministry of Rites, this ministry enabled the regime to transform its relations with the Mongols and to build and govern an emerging empire.
The construction of this quasi-Zongfan discourse occurred primarily within the Jin’s borders, but the Jin found Chosŏn the best external resource to support its discursive revolution. Within the bilateral relationship, the Jin held the role of the supreme power, and it converted Chosŏn from a younger brother into a subordinate or outer fan. Students of Sino-Korean relations tend to assume that the Manchus adopted hierarchical discourse in 1637 after the second Manchu invasion, when the Manchu side imposed clear Zongfan terms on Chosŏn. However, in practice the process had begun much earlier. In the 1630s the scholars of the Jin had mined Chinese history for intellectual resources with which to manipulate the civilized–barbarian distinction in order to establish the centrality of the Jin.
Within the Zongfan framework, the central civilized country (Ch., Huaxia) and its counterpart, barbarians, were the two key concepts addressing the status of the Middle Kingdom and that of its outer fan. The two terms were derived from the notion of all-under-Heaven, developed in the Xia (ca. 2070–1600 BC), Shang (1600–1046 BC), and Zhou periods, through which the three dynasties sought to legitimize their rule as divine. At the same time, the political entities spanning China’s lands identified xia (referring not to the Xia Dynasty but to a larger area in which the regime once resided) as the symbol of a civilized community possessing the Mandate of Heaven, namely, Zhongguo, Zhongyuan (the central plain), or Zhongtu (the central lands). At that time, the term barbarians referred primarily to groups that resided along the periphery of the central plain and were reluctant to identify and embrace the concept of civilized China, as exemplified by the state relationship between the Qin and the Chu in the third century BC.⁴⁸ The originally geographic notion of barbarian became an instrument used by political forces to deprecate their antagonists during the movement of revering the court of the Zhou and expelling the barbarians (Ch., zunzhou rangyi) in the Eastern Zhou (770–256 BC), a chaotic time that led Confucius (551–479 BC) to call for restoring the ideal order of proper conduct (Ch., li) of the Western Zhou. Due to the fierce interstate rivalries, the civilized– barbarian distinction evolved into a politico-cultural ideology that the dynastic regimes of China continuously reinterpreted for the next two thousand years, until 1911.
After the Han Dynasty, with the official institutionalization of Confucianism and the expansion of the concept of all-under-Heaven, the civilized–barbarian distinction became a critical theoretical framework for the Chinese court’s management of its foreign relations. As northern barbarians gained ascendancy in the Northern Song (960–1127), the distinction presented itself as an essential cultural instrument with which Chinese elites endowed certain regimes with the pedigree of legitimate historical narratives (Ch., zhengshi) by expelling competing polities from these narratives.⁴⁹ Some scholars, such as Shi Jie (1005–45), the author of A Treatise on the Middle Kingdom (Ch., Zhongguo lun), and Ouyang Xiu (1007–72), the author of A Treatise on Orthodox Legitimacy (Ch., Zhengtong lun),
depicted the Song as the exclusive civilized center of the world and the polities on the Song’s northern border as uncivilized. One of the most influential histories, A Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government (Ch., Zizhi tongjian), edited by Sima Guang (1019–86), drew a clear lineage connecting states identified as China from 403 BC to AD 959. The efforts of these scholars to conceptualize the narrative of orthodox legitimacy eventually paid off, for their rhetoric triumphed over that of the northern regimes, especially when Neo-Confucianism, created and elaborated by such Song intellectual vanguards as Cheng Hao (1032–85), Cheng Yi (1033–1107), and Zhu Xi (1130–1200), became China’s official ideology under the Yuan Dynasty.
This intellectual history can help explain why the official historical narrative of the People’s Republic of China still celebrates the Song for its legitimate status as Zhongguo and marginalizes the Liao, the Xixia, and the Jin as regimes established by ethnic minorities (Ch., shaoshu minzu). It was against this historical backdrop that the scholars of the Manchu regime in the 1630s began to construct the regime’s orthodox legitimacy, which laid the foundation for the Manchu enterprise of governing a vast empire as the legitimate Middle Kingdom, Zhongguo.
The Practices of the Manchu-Chosŏn Quasi-Zongfan Order
The Manchu regime implemented its quasi-Zongfan discourse through the rituals that accompanied the exchange of emissaries with Chosŏn by imitating Ming-Chosŏn contacts. In Mukden, the Korean emissaries kowtowed five times to Hongtaiji. They were comfortably lodged in the city and enjoyed a welcome banquet (K., hama yŏn, lit. banquet for getting off a horse) and a farewell banquet (K., sangma yŏn, lit. banquet for getting on a horse). Hongtaiji dispensed gifts to the Korean king, emissaries, interpreters, and servants.⁵⁰ In exchange, the Jin sent Manchu emissaries to Hansŏng in the spring and autumn of every year. Before they entered the Korean capital, the Manchu emissaries were housed at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country (K., Mohwa gwan), a place that had previously accommodated Ming emissaries. The emissaries also had an audience with the king in the palace and were treated to official welcome and farewell banquets. Although Chosŏn did not want to treat the Manchu representatives like those of the Ming, the general ritual procedures of greeting were practically identical. The Manchu emissaries lacked only their Ming counterparts’ standing as imperial envoy or Heavenly envoy.
This de facto Zongfan relationship conflicted with the de jure one of equality between the two brothers, a contradiction strikingly manifested in the different formats of their sovereign letters to each other. In its letters to the Jin, Chosŏn placed the two sides on a fully equal political plane, which was hierarchically lower than the status of the Ming. According to the Chinese convention, whenever the characters for Heaven or the Ming emperor appeared, they were placed at the top of a new line, two character spaces higher than the characters for Chosŏn and the first characters of other lines. This honorific elevation acknowledged the emperor as the supreme human agent of Heaven with the highest spiritual position in the world. Hongtaiji also used honorific elevation in his letters, but he adopted a different arrangement of the hierarchy, as shown by his letters to the Ming general Yuan Chonghuan (1584–1630). Hongtaiji divided the hierarchy into four levels, among which his position was lower than that of Heaven and the Ming emperor but higher than that of Ming officials (see figure 1.1). For his part, General Yuan followed Ming custom in his letters to Hongtaiji (see figure 1.2). Frustrated by Yuan’s usage, Hongtaiji exclaimed that he was the monarch or the khan of another country (Ma., encu gurun i ejen han) and son of Heaven and the Buddha (Ma., abka fucihi i jui). He declared that he would not accept any letters from the Ming that addressed him with a status lower than or even equal to that of the Ming officials.⁵¹ Nevertheless, in his communications with the king of Chosŏn, Hongtaiji was more pragmatic, addressing the king as a near equal in order to avoid offending the Korean monarch (see figure 1.3).
The king followed the same format in his responses to Hongtaiji but avoided mention of the imposed brotherhood (see figure 1.4). Although Hongtaiji called the king younger brother, the king never referred to Hongtaiji as elder brother. When Hongtaiji questioned the king about this discrepancy in 1629, the king shifted to friend-to-friend expressions: The king of the country of Chosŏn, he wrote, presents this letter to the khan of the country of the Jin (K., Chosŏn
kugwang pongsŏ Kŭmguk han; Ma., Coohiyan gurun i wang ni bithe, Aisin gurun i han de unggimbi). This usage matched Hongtaiji’s wording: The khan of the country of the Jin sends this letter to the king of the country of Chosŏn (Ma., Aisin gurun i han i bithe, Coohiyan gurun i wang de unggimbi). Later, the king changed the verb present (K., pong; Ma., jafambi) to send (K., ch’i; Ma., unggimbi), eliminating the hierarchical connotations of the former term. This subtle change provoked the Jin, but Chosŏn explained that both terms were used between neighboring countries.⁵² To the Jin, Chosŏn’s pronounced pro-Ming attitude meant that the brotherhood was unstable. The Jin’s security would not be guaranteed so long as Chosŏn was a loyal subject of the Ming. The only way to solve this problem, the Jin believed, was with another war against Chosŏn.
FIGURE 1.1. The format of Hongtaiji’s letters to Yuan Chonghuan in 1627. In this and the three figures that follow, the Arabic numerals represent horizontal lines from the top down, the English letters represent vertical lines, and the direction of the writing is from right to left. X represents a Chinese character. MWLD, 821, 847; MBRT, 4:28, 72.
FIGURE 1.2. The format of Yuan Chonghuan’s letters to Hongtaiji in 1627. MWLD, 821; MBRT, 4:28.
FIGURE 1.3. The format of Hongtaiji’s letters to the king of Chosŏn, 1627–36. Kakyu gobu .
FIGURE 1.4. The format of the letters of the king of Chosŏn to Hongtaiji, 1627–36. Chosŏnguk raesoȈ bu, vol. 1.
From Elder Brother to Father of Chosŏn: The Second Manchu Invasion
Manchu-Chosŏn Conflicts over Orthodox Legitimacy
In the middle of the 1630s, many Han Chinese and Manchu officials of the Jin sought to persuade Hongtaiji to take the title of emperor. On February 4, 1636, these officials presented memorials to prompt Hongtaiji to follow the Mandate of Heaven by claiming the emperorship. Following Chinese ritual conventions, Hongtaiji ostensibly declined and suggested his officials send emissaries to Chosŏn to discuss the matter with the king, his younger brother.⁵³ Hongtaiji’s true motivation, as the Korean official Hong Ik-han (1586–1637) shrewdly recognized, was to use Chosŏn’s identity as Little China to assert before other countries that Chosŏn revered him as the Son of Heaven.
The Manchu officials Inggūldai and Mafuta (?–1640) arrived in Hansŏng on March 30, along with forty-seven Mongol princes, thirty generals, and ninety-eight soldiers. They brought with them five letters. The first three letters extended Hongtaiji’s condolences on the death of the queen of Chosŏn. The fourth letter, written by eight Manchu princes (Ma., hošoi beile) and seventeen high-ranking Manchu ministers (Ma., gūsai amban), and the fifth letter, by forty-nine Mongol princes under the Chinese name Jinguo waifan menggu (Mongols as the outer fan of the Jin), aimed to persuade the king to submit a memorial urging Hongtaiji to follow the Mandate of Heaven (Ma., Abkai gūnin) and to claim the great title (Ma., amba gebu)—namely, that of emperor. The letters emphasized that the Jin now possessed virtues (Ma., erdemu) that enabled it to manage the world.⁵⁴ But on March 31, 139 Korean Confucian students presented the king with a petition, calling
on him to kill the barbarian emissaries and burn the barbarian letters. Inggūldai and his followers were thrown into panic and fled the city.⁵⁵
Chosŏn’s stance was strengthened when the king dispatched Na Tŏk-hŏn as the spring emissary and Yi Kwak as the response emissary to Mukden in late April. On May 15 the Jin held a grand ceremony in which Hongtaiji assumed the title emperor of lenience, kindheartedness, beneficence, and brilliance (Ma., gosin onco huwaliyasun enduringge han; Ch., kuan wen ren sheng huangdi) and adopted the regnal title Chongde (Ma., Wesihun erdemungge, lit. worshiping virtues). The Jin renamed itself the Country of the Great Qing (Ma., Daicing gurun; Ch., Da Qing guo). Gathering on Hongtaiji’s left and right flanks, the Jin’s Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese officials knelt down three times, each time making three prostrations (Ma., ilan jergi niyakūrafi uyun jergi hengkilembi; Ch., san gui jiu koutou)—the highest level of kowtow during the Qing period. Although Na and Yi had performed a ceremony of four kowtows before Hongtaiji upon their arrival, they called this second ceremony a usurpation of the imperial title (K., ch’amho) and refused to perform it, expressing their strong opposition to Hongtaiji’s political ambitions.⁵⁶ Chosŏn was the only Confucian country that lay beyond the Manchu regime’s political control but maintained regular and official diplomatic communications with it. Since Hongtaiji had made his claim to be the Son of Heaven in observance of proper Chinese conduct, he desperately needed the support of Chosŏn to counteract the designation of the Manchus as barbarians and to legitimize his emperorship in the Chinese sense. The ritual conflict with the Korean emissaries thus posed a grave identity crisis for him. Without endorsement from Chosŏn, the Manchu regime’s political transformation would remain largely confined to its borders and would not significantly influence regional politics.
Hongtaiji sent Na and Yi back to Chosŏn with two Chinese-language letters to the king. In the letters Hongtaiji called himself emperor of the country of the Great Qing (Ch., Da Qing guo huangdi) rather than khan of the Jin and referred to Chosŏn as your country (Ch., erguo) instead of your honorable country (Ch., guiguo), signaling the end of the bilateral brotherly relationship. Invoking the time-honored notion that the Heaven does not belong to one person, but to all people under the Heaven (Ma., abkai fejergi emu niyalmai abkai fejergi waka, abkai fejergi niyalmai abkai fejergi), Hongtaiji sought to demonstrate that his regime could govern the space of all-under-Heaven (Ch., tianxia; Ma., abkai fejergi) by following the precedent set by previous dynasties: namely, the Liao, which had been founded by the northeastern barbarians (Ch., dongbei yi; Ma., dergi amargi jušen); the Jin, founded by the eastern barbarians (Ch., dongyi; Ma., dergi jušen); and the Yuan, established by the northern barbarians (Ch., beiyi; Ma., amargi monggo, northern Mongols). By chronicling the rise and fall of these dynasties, Hongtaiji located the Qing, the dynasty of the Manchu barbarians, within this lineage of rulership, with himself as the Son of Heaven. The Qing’s rule was justified, he argued, because the Qing possessed the virtue that the Ming had lost.⁵⁷ This assertion was based on the Chinese political view that the Great Heaven has no partial affections and it helps only the virtuous (Ch., huangtian wu qin, wei de shi fu), a theory articulated in The Classic of History (Ch., Shangshu), which had endowed more than thirty dynasties with legitimacy. In short, Hongtaiji hoped that Chosŏn would become the Great Qing’s outer fan, just as it had served the previous dynasties of China.
Chosŏn became the first external target of the Qing’s new, Qing-centric Zongfan doctrine. Yet Hongtaiji’s position was unpopular in Chosŏn because it conflicted with the orthodox legitimacy on which the Confucian country based its political and social principles. With the exception of several high-ranking officials who preferred the Manchus, the majority of the ruling elite resolutely called for revering China and expelling the barbarians (K., chon Chungguk, yang yichŏk) in accordance with the doctrine of revering the Zhou Dynasty (K., chonju ŭiri).⁵⁸ In the face of tremendous pressure, the king reaffirmed that Chosŏn would not endorse Hongtaiji’s emperorship. The Qing thus declared war for the sake of its name and legitimacy.
The Establishment of Manchu-Chosŏn Zongfan Relations
On December 28, 1636, Qing troops attacked Chosŏn. They captured Hansŏng on January 9, 1637, without encountering strong resistance. The king had escaped
to Namhan Mountain Fortress with the crown prince (K., seja; Ch., shizi; Ma., šidz) and some officials, while the remaining royal family members and other officials fled to Kanghwa Island. The Qing forces surrounded the Namhan Fortress and, as their precondition for negotiations, demanded that the king send the crown prince as hostage. The king refused and mobilized his forces to resist the invasion and protect the great justice under Heaven (K., ch’ŏnha taeŭi). While Hongtaiji marched on the fortress with reinforcements on January 19, the king and his officials performed ceremonies to celebrate the birthday of Emperor Chongzhen of the Ming. Yet the king realized that Chosŏn’s fate was now at a crossroads. Ch’oe Myŏng-gil (1586–1647), a minister who had assisted the king in assuming the throne in the coup of 1623 and served as the king’s close adviser since that time, argued for peaceful negotiation with the Qing as he had done in 1627, when the Manchus invaded Chosŏn for the first time. Ch’oe’s approach was not welcomed by the majority of his colleagues, but it was undeniably pragmatic. On January 26, the lunar New Year, the king, fulfilling Chosŏn’s duty as a subject of the Ming, performed vested rituals in the direction of Beijing. Once the ceremony was over, the king sent two officials to negotiate with the Qing.
Two days later the king presented a letter to Hongtaiji in which he called Hongtaiji the emperor of lenience, kindheartedness, beneficence, and brilliance of the country of the Great Qing and referred to the Qing as the big country (K., taeguk) and to Chosŏn as the small country (K., sobang). The presentation of the letter was defined as submitting the letter to the higher authority (K., songsŏ).⁵⁹ Hongtaiji insisted that the king should surrender to him in person, so the two sides negotiated for two more weeks, during which the Qing troops shelled the fortress and defeated Chosŏn reinforcements sent from provinces. On February 15 the king presented another letter, in which he called Hongtaiji Your Majesty and himself a subordinate (see figure 1.5). He dated the letter using the Qing regnal title Chongde.⁶⁰ His letter suggested that the king had decided to surrender before Kanghwa Island was conquered.⁶¹ On February 17 the king submitted a sovereign letter to Hongtaiji, declaring that Chosŏn would "present the humble palace memorial [K., p’yo; Ch., biao] as the subordinate and serve as a fan [K., pŏnbang; Ch., fanbang] of the Great Qing forever, while all rituals about serving the big country would be performed in the vested format."⁶²
On February 22, 1637, Inggūldai brought an imperial edict to the king and asked the Korean officials to perform the same rituals that they had done when receiving edicts from the southern dynasty (the Ming). This occasion marked the first time that the Qing replaced the Ming in ritual exchanges with Chosŏn on Korean territory. In his edict, Hongtaiji listed ten terms of submission, among which two stood out. First, the king had to surrender to the Qing the book of imperial investiture and the seal that he had received from the Ming, stop communicating with the Ming, and begin to use the regnal title of the Qing instead of that of the Ming to indicate dates in all documents. Second, the king had to dispatch officials to the Qing every year to bring humble palace memorials, present gifts, and perform rituals to celebrate occasions such as the winter solstice, the New Year, the birthdays of the emperor, empress, and crown prince, and any good news for the Qing, and to extend condolences on the loss of members of the Qing’s royal house. The format of these memorials was required to follow the established format of Chosŏn’s memorials to the Ming. The rituals of receiving imperial decrees, accommodating imperial envoys in Chosŏn, and paying formal visits to the Qing emperor through tributary emissaries were to dovetail precisely with the established way of the Ming country (Ch., Mingguo jiuli). Hongtaiji also listed the items and amounts of the tributes required of Chosŏn and specified that tribute submissions ought to begin in 1639.⁶³
FIGURE 1.5. The format of the king’s letters to Hongtaiji in February 1637. The Arabic numerals represent horizontal lines from the top down, the English letters represent vertical lines, and the direction of the writing is from right to left. X represents a Chinese character. Chosŏnguk raesoȈ bu, 2:26–38.
The king unconditionally accepted all of Hongtaiji’s terms. On February 24, 1637, he presented himself before Hongtaiji at Samjŏndo (lit. three fields ferry), near the Hangang River, where the Qing had built a massive altar for Hongtaiji to receive the king’s surrender. During the ceremony, presided over by the Qing’s Ministry of Rites, the king knelt down three times, each time bowing his head three times before the emperor, after which he handed in his seal issued by the Ming. This ceremony marked the official establishment of the Zongfan relationship between the Qing and Chosŏn, as the king confirmed in his palace memorial to Hongtaiji on December 16, 1637.⁶⁴ The Qing’s forces soon returned to Mukden, taking the crown prince of Chosŏn, Yi Wang (1612–45), and the king’s second son, Yi Ho (King Hyojong, 1619–59), as hostages. Beginning on March 24, 1637, Chosŏn used the regnal title of the Qing to express the date, thus incorporating the country into the Qing’s temporal realm.⁶⁵ Chosŏn became the Qing’s outer fan .
The establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship, which replaced the Ming-Chosŏn relationship that had been officially institutionalized in 1401, was extremely significant for the Qing. The Ming’s passionate endorsement of the Zhou Zongfan system meant that under the Qing, the system was likewise directly connected with the classical and ideal tenets of the Zhou. As its political rhetoric developed after 1644, the Manchu court began to define its relationship with Chosŏn’s court by using more sophisticated terms that were associated with the Zhou Zongfan system. As early as 1649, Emperor Shunzhi, in his imperial mandate to invest King Hyojong, emphasized that Chosŏn served as an "outer fan for the central court" (Ch., wangshi).⁶⁶ In 1659 Emperor Shunzhi began his imperial mandate to invest King Hyŏngjong with the traditional term dividing cogongrass (Ch., fenmao), a metaphor for the Zhou’s Zongfan investiture.⁶⁷ Meanwhile, the Manchu court came to define Chosŏn as a princely submission (Ch., houfu; Ma., jecen i golo) according to the conventional theory of the five submissions (Ch., wufu) of the Zhou.⁶⁸ This definition equated the status of the king with that of China’s princely minister, governor-general, and governor.⁶⁹
Along the same lines, the Qing side, emperors and officials alike, regarded Korean emissaries as "ministers of ministers of the outer fan " (Ch., waifan peichen).⁷⁰
These established Zongfan tenets determined the familistic nature of the Qing-Chosŏn relationship, which crystallized in a crisis of kingship in 1768. In August of that year, Yi Gŭm (King Yŏngjo) asked Emperor Qianlong to invest his grandson Yi San (later known as Chŏngjo) as the crown successor to the Chosŏn kingship in the wake of the deaths of Yi Gŭm’s two sons, including the crown prince. Because the Qing court had never before encountered this situation, Emperor Qianlong instructed the Grand Secretariat (Ch., Neige) and the Ministry of Rites to consult Confucian books and historical records in search of appropriate precedents for the title of crown grandson (Ch., shisun). The ministry cited Confucius’s interpretations in The Book of Rites (Ch., Liji) and historical precedents ranging from the Liu Song Dynasty (420–79) to the Ming Dynasty pertaining to the investment of a vassal’s grandson as crown grandson. Stressing that "the outer fan is fundamentally the same as Zongfan," the ministry recommended that the emperor invest Yi San as the crown grandson, and the emperor did so.⁷¹ As the Ming had done, the Qing regarded Chosŏn as an extended royal family member of the Middle Kingdom where the patriarch—the Son of Heaven—resided.
This ideology continued to exert profound influence over Qing-Chosŏn relations in the nineteenth century. In 1882, under the Qing’s supervision and mediation, Chosŏn signed a treaty with the United States that portrayed Chosŏn as an independent state with a sovereign equal to the American president. But regardless of the treaty’s legal implications based on international law, in 1883 the Chinese official Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), who had negotiated the 1882 treaty with the United States on Chosŏn’s behalf as governor-general of Zhili, superintendent of trade for the northern ports of China (Ch., Beiyang tongshang dachen, hereafter Beiyang superintendent), and China’s de facto foreign minister, cited the Western Zhou’s Zongfan tenets to declare that the king was an outer vassal (Ch., wai zhuhou) of the Son of Heaven in China. Li further pointed out that the king was equal to China’s governors-general and provincial governors, who were inner vassals (Ch., nei zhuhou), while the status of lower-ranking Korean officials corresponded to that of their Chinese counterparts.⁷² In 1886, when Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), Li’s protégé, who resided in Chosŏn as the Chinese imperial resident, asked Li what level of ritual he should perform in front of the king, Li replied that it would be courteous enough for Yuan to follow the rituals used by Chinese provincial officials when visiting first-degree princes (Ch., qinjunwang).⁷³ On the Korean side, the king, in a pre-1894 humble memorial to Emperor Guangxu, still referred to Chosŏn as China’s princely submission.⁷⁴ In their dealings with each other in the late nineteenth century, both China and Korea looked to Zongfan precedents from the Western Zhou down through the Ming, and their country-to-country contacts were subordinate to their familistic court-to-court hierarchy. All of these stories started in 1637, when the Qing formalized its Zongfan relationship with Chosŏn.
At this point it is necessary to explain further why this book prefers the Chinese term Zongfan over the oft-used English renderings tribute system or tributary system. In the twentieth century, the promulgation of the term tribute system, together with the concepts suzerain and vassal, owed a great debt to the popularity of a more neutral phrase, Chinese world order, proposed by the American historian John King Fairbank. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, Fairbank prompted a constellation of historians and political scientists to explore the rationale behind China’s foreign relations in the late imperial period. Although Fairbank was aware of the complexity of Sinocentric cosmopolitanism, or Sinocentrism, the term Chinese world order, which he used broadly to denote this system and to highlight its diversity, became a rough equivalent of tribute system. Acceptance of this English rendering has allowed scholars in a variety of fields to treat it as a counterpart to treaty system or treaty port system. Some scholars have questioned the appositeness of the terms tributary system and suzerain-vassal relations and criticized them as a nineteenth- and twentieth-century reinterpretation of an older form of symbolically asymmetric interstate relations, while others, likewise seeking to avoid the possible misunderstandings caused by English terminology, have proposed new terms, such as Pax Sinica, in a world history context.⁷⁵ But their combined efforts have not changed the entrenched renderings or paradigm, and the conventional English parlance still
profoundly influences scholars’ understanding of late imperial China’s foreign relations.⁷⁶
An underlying problem with the term tribute system, as chapter 2 shows, is that it can convey only some of the connotations of the comprehensive Zongfan system—namely, chaogong, or sending emissaries to pay tribute to China, the perennial activity that was the most sensational and visible part of the regular ritual contacts between Qing China and its fan. The term tribute system thus trims the entire mechanism down to a Sinocentric trade structure. As Peter C. Perdue points out in his study of Qing-Zunghar relations, Overly simplistic generalizations about the Qing ‘tribute system’ tend to single out one trading relationship as the orthodox, normative one, neglecting the great diversity of ritual, economic, and diplomatic conditions found in the Qing trading regime as a whole.⁷⁷ The submission of tribute should not be used loosely as a master concept to represent the entire structure and its core nature. This is not to suggest, however, that the term tribute system has no analytical utility as a conceptual interpretive tool. This is clear in the debate over the question of when the practices of the Sinocentric order became as mature, institutional, and systematic as they were in the Ming and Qing periods.⁷⁸
Cherishing the Small Country: The Qing’s Construction of Its Zhongguo Identity
The Qing’s Transformation into the Big Country
Within the new Zongfan relationship, the Qing was Chosŏn’s monarch and the patriarch of the big family principally consisting of the Qing, Chosŏn, and the Mongol states. Given its supreme authority, the Qing could use the subordination of Chosŏn to its advantage. The first and most direct effect of the relationship was the formation of a new military alliance between the two countries. By conquering Chosŏn, the Qing reinforced its home front in the war with the Ming by eliminating the potential military threat on its eastern flank. It also gained material assistance from Chosŏn in the form of warhorses, grain, warships, cannons, and soldiers. Two months after Chosŏn’s subordination, the Manchu forces conquered Ka Island, destroying the last Ming military base in Chosŏn. In the next few years, a number of Korean soldiers, particularly gunners, were forced to join the Manchus in their fight against the Ming and to garrison Jinzhou and other cities newly conquered by the Qing in Manchuria.⁷⁹
By transforming its relationship with Chosŏn into one between a monarch and a subordinate, or between a father and a son, the Qing obtained political legitimacy from Chosŏn, a Confucian country beyond the Qing’s geographical borders but within its political and cultural realm. Given that the Chinese perceived their Zongfan relationships with other countries or political entities within a model centered on China as the Middle Kingdom, the establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship defined the Qing as the Middle Kingdom. In other words, the identities of both China and the countries on its periphery within the Zongfan framework were mutually dependent and constitutive. This rationale provided the Qing with the political and cultural foundations that it desperately needed to legitimize its centrality in the Chinese world.
In practice, the change of the Qing’s position was materially corroborated by the intensive bilateral exchange of missions between 1637 and 1643. On May 13, 1637, Chosŏn sent its first tributary mission to Mukden, and in the documents submitted to the Qing the Korean side called the city capital (K., Kyŏngsa), a term previously reserved for Beijing. This terminological choice indicated that, at least on the surface, Chosŏn acknowledged Mukden as the new political center of the world.⁸⁰ The mission had 315 members, including three primary members: an envoy, an associate envoy, and a secretary. After traveling 517 miles along the conventional overland tributary route between Hansŏng and Beijing, the mission arrived in Mukden on July 8.⁸¹ The next day the Korean officials appeared before Hongtaiji to perform the highest level of kowtow. During the imperial audience, the Qing’s officials read the king’s humble memorials, written in the hierarchical format once used for the Ming emperor. By praising the admirable virtues of the big country that brought Chosŏn to life again, the text of the humble
memorials endowed the Qing with the position of the Middle Kingdom, adding that all far countries on the periphery [of the Qing] have willingly subordinated themselves (K., hwangbok hambin) and lauding the Qing for its virtuous act of cherishing the small. The Qing’s position was confirmed by the Qing itself in the emperor’s edict to the king, which defined the relationship clearly with reference to orthodox Zongfan principles such as serving the great and cherishing the small. Chosŏn became a far country, a small country, and the remote land on the periphery of the new civilized center.⁸² This framing of the two countries’ mutually constitutive identities consigned Chosŏn to the category of barbarians surrounding the civilized Middle Kingdom of the Qing.
At the same time, the frequent visits to Mukden by tributary emissaries from the Mongols and other ethnic-minority polities whose affairs were under the management of the Mongolian Superintendency highlighted the spread of the Qing-centric Zongfan circle. For the previous two decades, the Manchu regime had gradually eroded the Ming’s Zongfan network at the periphery and used the dislodged parts to construct a similar model with itself at the center. After establishing the Zongfan relationship with Chosŏn, the Qing sought to institutionalize its Zongfan mechanism by imitating the Ming’s policies and improving them to meet the Qing’s needs. The institutionalization of the system took place through the Ministry of Rites. Although the Ministries of Revenue, War, and Justice also exchanged official notes with the king over cases involving financial and military assistance or illegal border crossings, the Ministry of Rites constituted the most important channel between the emissaries and the Qing court. It forwarded the king’s humble memorials to the emperor, directed the emissaries’ visits, treated the emissaries to banquets, accommodated them at a dedicated residence in Mukden for forty days, forwarded imperial edicts to them, and issued official response notes to the king. With the ministry’s guidance, the Korean emissaries performed the highest level of kowtow to the emperor, presented tributes, and received imperial edicts and gifts. These highly programmed ritual practices demonstrated, institutionalized, and consolidated the two sides’ bilateral relationship and strict hierarchy.
To formalize the Zongfan relationship, the Qing sent ethnic Manchu emissaries to Chosŏn to invest the king and other core members of the royal family with certain titles. On January 4, 1638, the first imperial mission led by Inggūldai, Mafuta, and Daiyun arrived in Hansŏng to officially invest the king. The king greeted the envoys at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country outside the West Gate of the capital.⁸³ Later, in the palace, the king received the imperial edicts of investiture, a gold seal, and gifts, and performed established rituals for the occasion. The edicts stated that, with the establishment of investiture-subordinate (Ch., fanfeng) relations between the Qing and Chosŏn, the latter was expected to serve as a " fan and fence" (Ch., fanping) of the Great Qing until the Yellow River becomes as narrow as a belt and Mount Tai becomes as small as a grindstone (Ch., daihe lishan). The emperor’s mandate noted that both sides have an established name and status, which will regulate the relationship and hierarchy for ten thousand years (Ch., li yishi zhi mingfen, ding wanzai zhi gangchang).⁸⁴ Following the ceremony, the king visited the envoys at their residence, the South Palace Annex (K., Nambyŏl gung), where he treated them to banquets. All of these ritual procedures were identical to those that had been performed between Chosŏn and the Ming. The Qing’s investiture legitimatized the bilateral Zongfan relationship between the two countries, an arrangement that would last for 258 years.
The Establishment of the Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing
In the precise spot in Samjŏndo where the Korean king had subordinated himself to Hongtaiji in 1637, the Qing forced Chosŏn to erect a stele to commemorate Hongtaiji’s achievements. Despite the Koreans’ reluctance to memorialize the humiliating invasion, the Qing continued to advance the project, and the Korean official Yi Kyŏng-sŏk (1595–1671) eventually drafted a Chinese-language inscription based on the Korean letters to the Qing side during the war.⁸⁵ After the Chinese official Fan Wencheng approved the inscription, the Qing sent interpreters to Hansŏng to translate it into Manchu and Mongolian. In 1639 the stele, inscribed in three languages, was erected as the Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing (Ma., Daicing gurun i enduringge han i gung erdemui bei; Ch.,
Da Qing huangdi gongde bei) (see figure 1.6).
The inscription reviewed the history between the two countries from 1619 to 1637 from Chosŏn’s perspective and exalted the Qing’s great virtues in bringing Chosŏn to life again. It claimed that the king had surrendered in 1637 not to[the Qing’s] might but to [its] virtues (Ma., horon de gelere teile waka, erdemu de dahahangge kai), given that those virtues made all the far [people] subordinate themselves willingly (Ma., goroki ci aname gemu dahambi). The stele also stated that the bilateral relationship would last for ten thousand years under the emperor’s goodness. The most significant aspect was the official transformation of the identity of the Manchu regime as manifested in certain terms. The inscription called the Qing the big country (Ch., dabang, dachao; Ma., amba gurun) or the upper country (Ch., shangguo; Ma., dergi gurun), while terming Chosŏn the small country (Ch., xiaobang; Ma., ajige gurun) as well as a faraway country. The fact that the two countries geographically bordered each other did not prevent the Qing from redefining Chosŏn as faraway in the politico-cultural sense.
FIGURE 1.6. The Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing. The stele is now located in a small park next to Lotte World in Seoul. Photo taken by the author in 2015.
Among these terms, which had been used between Chosŏn and the Ming and were now grafted onto the Qing-Chosŏn relationship, the Manchu phrase amba gurun (big country) was particularly significant. As a literal translation of the Chinese dabang or dachao, the term had once referred exclusively to the Ming. More importantly, as chapter 2 shows, after 1644 the Qing adopted amba gurun as a key equivalent of the Chinese terms Zhongguo (Ma., Dulimbai gurun) and Tianchao (the Heavenly Dynasty; Ma., abkai gurun). The inscription of the Samjŏndo stele was probably the first instance in which the Qing publicly and officially called itself amba gurun; over the following two and a half centuries, this term would refer solely to Qing China.
Cherishing Men from Afar: Publicizing Qing Centrality, 1637–43
The Manchu invasion of 1636 and the king’s surrender to Hongtaiji, known in Chosŏn as Pyŏngja horan (lit. the invasion of the northern barbarians in the year of Pyŏngja), were humiliating to the Koreans and stimulated widespread anti-Manchu feeling in the country. Korean resentment is evident, for example, in an incident that took place in December 1637, when the Manchu envoys visiting Chosŏn asked Korean local officials to procure courtesans (K., panggi), but the women killed themselves to show their resistance (K., yisa kŏchi).⁸⁶ In order to win Chosŏn’s loyalty beyond mere lip service, the Qing quickly adopted the traditional Chinese policies of cherishing the small and cherishing men from afar (Ch., huairou yuanren; Ma., goroki niyalma be bilume gosimbi).⁸⁷
In addition to providing Chosŏn’s delegation with better accommodations in Mukden and bestowing more gifts on the king and his emissaries, the Qing progressively reduced the tribute required of Chosŏn beginning in the early 1640s, when the Qing controlled more resources as a result of its military triumphs over the Ming. In 1640, for instance, the Qing lowered the number of sacks of rice that Chosŏn was expected to offer as tribute from ten thousand to just one thousand. In 1643 the Qing further reduced the annual tribute and furthermore cut by more than half the gifts that Chosŏn gave to the Manchu envoys. Proclaiming that the two countries have become one family, the Shunzhi emperor also permanently abolished many tributary conventions, such as the requirement that Chosŏn provide the imperial envoys with official courtesans. These exemptions, the emperor suggested, embodied the Qing policy of cherishing the small with benevolence.⁸⁸ Compared with the late Ming, which tried to extract the maximum economic and military benefits from Chosŏn, the Qing took a deliberately placatory approach toward its outer fan, represented by the many exemptions. This benign policy substantially facilitated the Qing’s historical transformation into Zhongguo.
The Qing was characterized more by its actions than by its pronouncements. Its policy of appealing to the subordinate country was manifested above all in its frequent contacts with Chosŏn. From 1637 to 1643, the Qing sent twelve missions and twenty-eight emissaries to Chosŏn, an average of one and a half missions per year, while Chosŏn sent fifty-six missions and 102 emissaries to the Qing, an average of seven missions per year.⁸⁹ In this context, some Koreans changed their established understandings of the Qing. In the spring of 1643, for example, Yi Chŏng-hae from Kyŏngsang Province submitted a letter to the Qing envoys in Hansŏng, volunteering to go to Mukden to serve the Qing and our emperor (K., a hwangje).⁹⁰
The Qing used its intensive contacts with Chosŏn as a powerful tool to manage its relations with other political entities. In 1638, a year after it converted Chosŏn from a younger brother into an outer fan, the Qing changed the Chinese name of the Mongolian Superintendency from Menggu yamen to Lifan yuan, applying the Chosŏn precedent to add the Mongols, too, to the Qing-centric family of nations as a fan. This move was part of the Manchu leaders’ project of steadily transforming Mongol conceptualizations of their position in the Qing-dominated world.⁹¹ In this sense, it could be argued that the dramatic change in the
Manchu-Mongol relationship had deep roots in the Zongfan concepts promulgated by Han Chinese officials of the Manchu regime since the early 1630s. This shift could also indicate that the Qing was streamlining the administration of its outer fan in order to strengthen its centrality and pursue an imperial enterprise beyond Manchuria.
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2 BARBARIANIZING CHOSŎN The Chosŏn Model and the Chinese Empire, 1644–1761 The year 1644 marked the beginning of a new stage in the Qing’s exploitation of the “Chosŏn model” as an institutionalized policy for constructing a new imperial order within and beyond the Qing’s borders. Informed by Chosŏn’s status as the Qing’s prototypical outer fan, this model manifested itself in well-established and highly programmed formalities in the contacts between the Qing and its outer fan. Through the Chosŏn model, the Qing rulers initiated a twofold transfor- mation by reversing and institutionalizing the discourse of the civilized–barbarian distinction: they enshrined the Qing as the new Heavenly Dynasty at the center of the known universe and converted Chosŏn and other countries into countries of barbarians on its periphery. The Qing accomplished this transformation con- clusively in the middle of the eighteenth century, when the court published the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Ch., Huang Qing zhigong tu). This chapter reveals the prolonged process by which the Qing gradually reconstructed a Chinese empire in the post-Ming world by legitimizing, enhancing, and practicing its new dual identity as China/Zhongguo and the Heavenly Dynasty through the Chosŏn model in its foreign relations from the first half of the seven- teenth century to the second half of the eighteenth century. Over the course of this century and a half, the macrotransformation of the Manchu regime’s identity in the cosmopolitan politico-cultural context was deeply connected with its microtrans-formation in the Manchu-Chosŏn framework. If there was a tendency among China’s neighbors to decenter the Middle Kingdom after the Ming, this chapter brings to light the process of recentering the Middle Kingdom undertaken by the Qing.¹ Establishing a Dual Identity: The Qing as China and the Heavenly Dynasty On October 30, 1644, Emperor Shunzhi offered a grand sacrifice to Heaven and Earth in the Qing’s new capital, Beijing. He asserted that the Qing would “pacify China” (Ch., sui Zhongguo) and “set a good example for ten thousand countries” (Ch., biaozheng wanbang).² For many people, this event marked the rise of the Qing as the equivalent of China/Zhongguo. In 1767, after finding that a magistrate in Yunnan Province had failed to refer to the Qing as the “Heavenly Dynasty” or “China/Zhongguo” in an official note to the “foreign barbarians” of Burma, Emperor Qianlong furiously pointed out that “it is the rule for one to refer to the court as the ‘Heavenly Dynasty’ or ‘China’ when one mentions it to men from afar. Our country has unified the central area and external areas, and even the barbarians know the Great Qing’s virtue and civilization.”³ Emperor Qianlong’s pronouncement indicates that the terms “Heavenly Dynasty” and “Zhongguo” were interchangeable. Historians of the Qing and modern China tend to follow the emperor, or at least the Qing’s political discourse as developed by the emperor, by treating China/Zhongguo and the Heavenly Dynasty as synonymous terms, both referring to the political unit of the Qing. Yet what the emperor did not mention—or was perhaps not able to realize—was that the Qing did not acquire the two titles simultaneously when it replaced the Ming in the early seventeenth century. As the emperor indicated, the two terms were used for the Qing almost exclusively in the context of foreign relations with “men from afar” or “foreign barbarians,” which generally referred to foreigners. In the domestic context, these terms were replaced by others, such as “the Great Qing,” “our dynasty” (Ch., wochao, benchao, or guochao), “our country” (Ch., wo guojia), and “the imperial dynasty” (Ch., huangchao or shengchao). In the first years after 1644, some Qing officials described the new regime as the “Qing Dynasty” (Ch., Qingchao), a successor to the “Ming Dynasty” in the context of foreign communications; this usage is found in correspondence between officials in Guangzhou
(Canton) and Siam in 1653. But Qingchao remains rare in Qing documents.⁴ As the Qing took over Beijing in 1644 and consolidated its rule over inner China afterward, it completed its transformation into Zhongguo, but its refashioning into the Heavenly Dynasty had barely started. In the late 1640s, when the Manchu Eight Banners were marching into South China, Southwest China, and North- west China, the Qing began to use Chosŏn to construct its new image as the Heavenly Dynasty; however, the process turned out to be difficult and even embar- rassing. According to early Qing archives, Qing scholars may have called the Qing the “Heavenly Dynasty” for the first time in a draft imperial edict in 1649 invest- ing Yi Ho (King Hyojong) as the king of Chosŏn. The draft edict was written by Fu Yijian (1609–65), a Han Chinese literatus from Shandong Province who had won first place in the Qing’s first imperial civil-service examination in 1645.⁵ By emphasizing that the king of Chosŏn should be “an important subordinate serving the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., pinghan tianchao) and loyal to the “central civilized country” (Ch., Huaxia), Fu equated the Qing, which had become Zhongguo, with the Heavenly Dynasty and the civilized country. However, the final version of the edict that was sent to Chosŏn omitted the two latter terms and continued to use the term “upper country” to refer to the Qing, suggesting that the Qing was not yet prepared to claim to be the Heavenly Dynasty.⁶ China, or Zhongguo, could be defined in a general geographical sense by the Qing borders, regardless of how the borders were expanded and redrawn, so long as the Qing controlled the Ming’s territory, or at least the central plain (Ch., Zhongyuan).⁷ In fact, after 1644, when the Qing rulers began writing and revising their history, they deliberately deleted some Manchu terms referring to the Ming as Zhongguo. For example, Hongtaiji, in a letter to the Ming on July 29, 1632, had ex- plained that the Jin fought with the Ming because “the Ming officials in Liaodong did not follow the way of China” (Ma., Liyoodung i hafasa Dulimbai gurun i doroi tondoi beiderakū), using the Manchu term Dulimbai gurun in clear reference to China/Zhongguo. Later, the narrative written in Chinese replaced the phrase “the way of China” (Ch., Zhongguo/Zhongyuan zhi dao) with “the way of rightness” (Ch., zhengzhi zhi dao). While Hongtaiji in 1632 had called the Ming “your China” (Ma., suweni Dulimbai gurun), the post-1644 Chinese edition replaced this term with “your country” (Ch., erguo), deleting the word for “China.”⁸ The changing terminology shows that after 1644 the Qing deeply identified itself with China. Given the ethnic background of the ruling house of the Qing, many scholars have been interested in establishing when the Qing court officially used the Manchu term Dulimbai gurun to define itself as China/Zhongguo. Some cite the year 1689 and the Treaty of Nerchinsk that the Qing signed with Russia. In fact, the Qing court had used this Manchu term to represent its identity much earlier in its negotiations with Zheng Jing (1642–81), the eldest son of Zheng Chenggong (1624–62), who occupied Taiwan in 1662. While Zheng Jing never questioned the Qing’s identity as China, he argued that Taiwan was not a part of China in an ef- fort to secure for Taiwan an independent status like that of Chosŏn. Emperor Kangxi, however, reiterated in a decree in 1669 that Zheng belonged to the “people of China” (Ch., Zhongguo zhi ren; Ma., Dulimbai gurun i niyalma).⁹ In the late Kangxi period, the Qing presented itself as China in a favorable and definitive way. For example, in his travelogue, the Manchu official Tulišen, who was dispatched as an envoy to the Turgūt Mongols in Russia in 1712, generally referred to the Qing as Dulimbai gurun (“China”) or meni Dulimbai gurun (“our China”); these terms were rendered into Chinese as Zhongguo or Zhonghua when Tulišen’s jour- nal was published in 1723 in both languages. Tulišen also consistently translated terms such as “our place” (Ma., meni bade) as “our China” (Ch., wo Zhongguo) and referred to all people of the Great Qing, such as the Manchus, Han Chinese, and Mongols, as “people of China.” More importantly, following Emperor Kangx- i’s instructions, Tulišen emphasized China’s Confucian nature to Russia, claiming that “our country takes fidelity, filial piety, benevolence, justice, and sincerity as fundamentals” (Ma., meni gurun i banjire tondo hiyoošun, gosin, jurgan, akdun be fulehe da obumbi; Ch., wo guojia yi zhong xiao ren yi xin wei genben).¹⁰ By contrast, the Heavenly Dynasty, or Tianchao, could not be delineated in the same way, since it was based on the notion of all-under-Heaven—a China- centered politico-cultural term with no connection to borders in the geographical sense. Put another way, the Qing could define itself as China from within, but it
could not identify itself as the Heavenly Dynasty without support from outside the Qing: the new regime would first have to erect a new, Qing-centric, and multi- national Zongfan system. The expectation that the Qing would become a new imperial power required the regime to transform the countries that the Ming had represented as its fan into fan in the Qing’s orbit. The Ming had pursued the same policy when it “became the ruler of China” (Ch., zhu Zhongguo) in 1368, im- mediately sending envoys to the countries that had served as fan of its predecessor, the Yuan Dynasty, with the aim of converting them into fan of the Ming.¹¹ However, unlike the Ming, the Manchu rulers in 1644 faced the tremendous challenge of overcoming their previous status as barbarians, as defined by the civi- lized–bar-bar- distinction. Compared with the mission to identify the Qing as China and as the legitimate successor to the Ming within the Qing’s borders, the quest to construct the Qing as the new Heavenly Dynasty beyond its borders called for extraordinary effort. From the perspective of comparative philology, the Chinese term “Tianchao” was not initially widely adopted in the Manchu language, in which it was literally rendered as abkai gurun (“Heavenly country”).¹² The Manchu rulers had difficulty identifying with this term and the Chinese political concepts behind it. In July 1637, for example, after reviewing the draft edict of investiture to the king of Chosŏn, Hongtaiji commented that he did not like to equate himself with Heaven as the Ming had done, suggesting that his officials must have employed the Chinese word tian (“Heaven”) or the Manchu term abka (“Heaven”) in the draft.¹³ Nevertheless, the task of reconstructing the Qing as the new China in the seventeenth century left the Manchu rulers with no choice but to embrace the term and the rationale behind it. The intellectual transformation of the Qing ruling house is evident in the visit of the fifth Dalai Lama (1617–82) to Beijing in late 1652 and early 1653. The Qing’s Manchu officials supported Emperor Shunzhi’s plan to greet the Dalai Lama in Daiga in Inner Mongolia, arguing that the Ūlet Mongols, who controlled Tibet mili- tarily at the time, would be pacified by the emperor’s gracious behavior. But the Han Chinese officials argued that the emperor was “the ruler of all countries under Heaven” (Ch., tianxia guojia zhi zhu) and should not violate conventions by meeting with a lama, even the Dalai Lama, in person outside the capital. Still hesitant about going to Daiga, the emperor took part in a grand ceremony commemorating Confucius at the Directorate of Education (Ch., Guozi jian) in Beijing, where he knelt down twice, each time making three prostrations. The ceremony, attended by many high-ranking Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese officials and generals, conferred on the emperor the mantle of the supreme agent of Confucianism. Right after the ceremony, two Han Chinese grand secretaries, Hong Cheng- chou (1593–1665) and Chen Zhilin (1605–66), submitted a memorial to the emperor entreating him not to go to Daiga to welcome the Dalai Lama because astro- logical phenomena reported by the Imperial Astronomical Bureau suggested that intruders would threaten the emperorship. The two officials emphasized that “the way of Heaven is infinite” (Ch., tiandao shenyuan) and could not be predicted. After reading the memorial, the emperor immediately abandoned the idea of visiting Daiga. Instead he welcomed the Dalai Lama in the South Garden of Beijing.¹⁴ As this episode suggests, the Manchu emperor had to adjust to his role as the Son of Heaven in the Confucian sense in the post-1644 politico-cultural and ideological contexts, notwithstanding the Qing’s serious religious and military concerns over its western frontier in Inner Asia. Reconstructing the Chinese Empire: The Rise of the Chosŏn Model From East Asia to Southeast and Inner Asia: The Qing’s Presentation of the Chosŏn Model The Qing did not stand alone as it sought to construct its new dual identity. Chosŏn, the first Confucian outer fan of the Qing, played an unparalleled role in pro- viding the Manchu conquerors with resources to form and articulate the Qing’s new identity. As early as 1650, in a palace memorial to Emperor Shunzhi, the king called the Qing the “Heavenly Dynasty,” even though the Qing court itself was still reluctant to use the term.¹⁵ The development of Chosŏn’s essential role in the
Qing-centric Zongfan world can be divided into two historical phases: the seven years from 1637 to 1643 and the 251 years from 1644 to 1894. In the first phase, Chosŏn began serving as the outer fan of the Qing by adhering to the clearly formulated and institutionalized discipline of the Sino-Korean Zongfan system, which had functioned between the Ming and Chosŏn for more than two centuries. As chapter 1 described, the Qing was able to make a significant move toward the transformation of its identity by assuming the place of the Ming in the framework of Sino-Korean relations. The frequent visits of Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries to Mukden provided the Qing with good opportunities to emphasize and practice its centrality in the known world. After 1644, with its dramatic emergence as a Ming-style, nationwide regime and the extensive expansion of its territory, the Qing found itself in the position of having to manage relations with multiple neighboring countries, such as Annam, Ryukyu, Lanchang (Laos), Siam, Sulu (the Philippines), and Burma, that had served as subordinates to the Ming. Having inherited these fan from the Ming, what Qing China now needed to do was to resume and refashion the Zongfan sys- tem according to its own standards. On this front, the Qing had gained valuable experience from its institutionalized communications with Chosŏn since the 1630s and, through these communications, had developed a mature model of a Qing-centric Zongfan arrangement. The Chosŏn model laid out a path whereby a country or a political entity could follow Chosŏn into the Qingcentric system primarily by receiving imperial investitures from the Qing, adopting the regnal titles of the Qing in its calendar, and sending tributary emissaries to the Qing.¹⁶ The Chosŏn model was a pattern centered on rituals.¹⁷ Although the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship had been inaugurated by the Manchu military conquest of 1637, as a result of which the crown prince, another prince, and sons of high- ranking Chosŏn officials were detained in Mukden as hostages, the unpleasant situation began to change when the Qing released the hostages in 1644. The Qing also progressively reduced the tributes required of Chosŏn until, by the late 1730s, they were less than one-tenth of what they had been in the late 1630s and be- came a mere symbol of political subordination.¹⁸ What accompanied the tributes was the performance of a set of highly programmed and increasingly elaborate formalities that demonstrated the hierarchical Zongfan order and the Qing’s new normative identity. In the first years after 1644, the Qing found the Chosŏn model the most powerful and practical way of managing its relations with other countries and of extend- ing its influence and authority. Emperor Shunzhi articulated the importance of Chosŏn’s model role in 1647 after the Qing army conquered Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong Provinces and prepared to establish relations with Ryukyu, Annam, Siam, and Japan. On March 17 and August 25, the emperor announced that the Qing would “give preferential treatment to these countries as to Chosŏn” (Ch., yu Chaoxian yiti youdai) as long as they “subordinated themselves to ‘the civilized’ and paid tribute to the court” (Ch., qingxin xianghua, chengchen rugong).¹⁹ In this way, the Manchu rulers publicized Chosŏn’s prototypical fan status and estab- lished the Qing-Chosŏn relationship as the yardstick for relations between the Qing and other countries or political entities. Rather than adopting the aggressive colonial policy of the Yuan, the Qing learned from the Ming’s Zongfan mechanism, using the sophisticated and markedly Confucian Chosŏn model to maintain stability on its frontiers and to construct a new Chinese empire beyond them.²⁰ As a result of the Qing rulers’ efforts at promoting the Chosŏn model after 1644, political units beyond the Qing’s control also came to regard it as an ideal way of solving conflicts with the Qing while retaining their own privileges. Between 1662 and 1669, for example, when the Qing was trying to persuade Zheng Jing to surrender in Taiwan, Zheng insisted on “following the Chosŏn model” (Ch., zhao Chaoxian shili) into the Qing’s Zongfan system by “proclaiming subordination and paying tribute” (Ch., chengchen nagong) but refraining from cutting his hair in the Qing style.²¹ For Zheng, the Chosŏn model appeared to offer the most favorable and promising way to resolve the standoff with the Qing. Emperor Kangxi refused this proposal on the grounds that Chosŏn had been “always a foreign country” (Ch., conglai suoyou zhi waiguo; Ma., daci bihe encu gurun), whereas Zheng belonged to the “people of China.”²² These negotiations show the perceived broad applicability and coverage of the Chosŏn model in situations in which neither independence nor complete annexation was an immediate and acceptable
solution. The Chosŏn model provided the Manchu ruling house with a general blueprint for dealing with other political entities. Over the Qing period, two parallel central institutions were responsible for the affairs of outer fan : the Mongolian Superintendency mainly managed outer fan located to the north and west of Qing China, while the Ministry of Rites was in charge of fan in the east, the south, and the west. This book focuses on the outer fan under the management of the Ministry of Rites rather than those under the Mongolian Superintendency, although the two types of outer fan may have been associated through the Chosŏn model in the early years of the Qing’s expansion to Inner Asia and the development of its Eurasian empire. This inconspicuous connection between the eastern and western frontiers of the Qing empire had manifested itself at least by 1653, when the Qing invested the fifth Dalai Lama and the Gusi Khan of the Ūlet Mongols by incorporating them into the Qing-dominated extended family and placing them under the Qing’s juris- diction. At the time, the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites were administratively still closely connected with one another: it was a Manchu min- ister (Ch., shangshu; Ma., aliha amban) from the Ministry of Rites, Langkio, and a vice minister (Ch., shilang; Ma., ashan i amban) from the Mongolian Superin- tendency, Sidali, who together gave the Dalai Lama and the Gusi Khan the books of investiture. The imperial statement in the khan’s investiture book bore a re- markable resemblance to that issued to the new king of Chosŏn in 1649. It declared that the recipient must serve as the Qing’s “subordinate” or “fence” (Ch., pingfu) “until the Yellow River becomes as narrow as a belt and Mount Tai becomes as small as a grindstone” (Ch., daili shanhe).²³ In addition, the mechanism governing the “local products” and tributes that the lama and the khan presented to the emperor and the empress dowager in 1654 and the imperial gifts the lama and the khan received in return was much like that used between the Qing and Chosŏn.²⁴ Finally, the imperial mandates of investiture (Ch., gaoming; Ma., g’aoming) that the Qing issued to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni bore the same imperial seal—“Seal of declaring imperial mandate” (Ch., zhigao zhi bao; Ma., hese wasimbure boobai)—as had the mandate investing the new king of Chosŏn.²⁵ If we compare the imperial codes of the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites, it seems that the former borrowed institutional regulations from the latter to formalize the communications between the Manchu rulers and the Mongol fan in Inner Asia. The prototypical role of Chosŏn in the Qingcentric Zong- fan system may have contributed to the Qing’s policy of integrating the Inner Asian political and military entities into the Qing’s extended family.²⁶ On the surface, the geographical responsibilities of the Ministry of Rites did not overlap with those of the Mongolian Superintendency, as Qing officials confirmed in 1743, so Qing-Chosŏn contacts were ostensibly unrelated to Qing– Inner Asian contacts.²⁷ But on the political level, soon after 1644 the Qing rulers began to apply the Zongfan rationale behind the Chosŏn model to Inner Asia, along with the Manchu court’s promulgation of the discourse of “all-under-Heaven” and “people with- out difference between the outside and the inside,” as part of the long process of subordinating the Zunghar Mongols, whom the Qing rulers treated as people “beyond virtue and civilization.”²⁸ Administratively, the Ministry of Rites was also in charge of the affairs of some lamas in Gansu and Shaanxi until the 1740s, when it transferred this jurisdiction to the Mongolian Superintendency.²⁹ The Chosŏn model, in this sense, gradually became a normative, standard, and powerful soft weapon in the repertoire of the Qing. It allowed the Manchu rulers to govern the areas conquered by the formidable Eight Banners in Inner Asia, which ar- guably smoothed the way for the Qing to insert its civil administrative system into these areas during the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods. Who Were the Barbarians? The Imperial Code and the Qing’s Reforms Under the Qing, the Zongfan order was maintained and embodied by the exchange of emissaries between the Qing and its “subordinate countries” (Ch., shuguo; Ma., tulergi gurun or harangga gurun), which were generally described as “subordinate countries of foreign barbarians” (Ch., waiyi shuguo). All exchanges were conducted in accordance with The Universal Tributary Regulations (Ch., Chaogong tongli) codified by the Ministry of Rites, and the performance of the exchanges
was supervised by the Host-Guest Office (Ch., Zhuke qingli si) of the Ministry of Rites. These regulations primarily consisted of the following seven mandates:
1.Investiture (Ch., cefeng): The Qing emperor gave the new king of each fan a patent of appointment through an imperial mandate of investiture along with a decree (Ch., chiyu) and an official seal for use in correspondence.
2.Regnal titles (Ch., nianhao): The fan adopted the Qing’s regnal titles as the way to enumerate years.
3.Calendar (Ch., shuoli): The fan used the Qing’s calendar and celebrated Chinese festivals.
4.The dispatch of emissaries to pay tribute to the Qing (Ch., chaogong), with a frequency individually determined by the Qing.
5.The conferral of noble rank on a deceased king or privileged members of the royal house of the fan (Ch., fengshi).
6.Reporting events to the Qing (Ch., zoushi): Each fan informed the emperor of important domestic events but did not need to ask for instructions and could assume that the Qing would not intervene in its domestic affairs.
7.Trade (Ch., maoyi or hushi), including trade at the frontiers and at the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations (Ch., Huitong siyi guan; Ma., Acan- jime isanjire tulergi gurun i bithe ubaliyambure kuren) in Beijing.³⁰ The Qing made considerable changes to the Zongfan system that it inherited from the Ming. The Ming had also relied on The Universal Tributary Regulations, by which the Ministry of Rites managed routine exchanges between China and the “subordinate barbarian countries in the four quarters” (Ch., fanguo or siyi)—Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, the Jurchens, Mongolia, and other countries and political entities—as well as interactions between the Ming and “indigenous chieftains” (Ch., tuguan or tusi), including local chieftains in Yunnan, Guangxi, Guizhou, Sichuan, Hunan, and Hubei.³¹ But two significant changes distinguished the list of “foreign barbarian countries” in the new Qing regulations from the Ming’s list. First, the Qing excluded “indigenous chieftains” from its list of tribu- taries because of its policy toward “barbarian chieftains” (Ch., yimu) in southwestern China. Known as “replacing the hereditary indigenous chieftains with rotat- ing officials” (Ch., gaitu guiliu), the policy had been inaugurated by the Yuan and the Ming, but only in the Yongzheng period of the Qing was it carried out on a truly large scale.³² The areas and populations under the chieftains’ control were integrated simultaneously into the Qing’s territory and into its household regis- tration system.³³ The indigenous chieftains were thus outside the supervision of the Ministry of Rites. The line between barbarians belonging to these political units and barbarians from other countries was clear in the minds of the Manchu rulers at court and their deputies in the provinces.³⁴ Second, the Western coun- tries gradually disappeared from the list of foreign barbarians in the tributary regulations. By the late fourteenth century, the Ming had fifteen outer fan countries, and the majority of these became the Qing’s outer fan, including Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, Lanchang, Siam, Sulu, and Burma.³⁵ From the 1760s to the 1840s dur- ing the Qing period, the list also included the Netherlands and the countries of the Western Ocean (Ch., Xiyang), but by the 1890s only these seven Asian coun- tries remained on the list.³⁶ Whereas in the Qianlong period the Mongolian, Tibetan, and Muslim areas under the management of the Mongolian Superintendency had “all entered [the Qing’s] map and registers” (Ch., xianru bantu) and were presented “like prefectures and counties” (Ch., youru junxian),³⁷ the “subordinate countries of foreign bar- barians” under the supervision of the Ministry of Rites were not integrated into the Qing’s core territory. Nor would these countries be treated as parts of the Republic or the People’s Republic of China in the twentieth century. By the same token, the dual management system for the outer fan—the Mongolian Superin- tendency and the Ministry of Rites—under the Qing made it difficult for people outside this institutional mechanism to draw a clear line between them. This might explain why, as discussed in chapter 5, some Qing officials in the late nineteenth century responded to complications involving Chosŏn by suggesting that
Beijing apply its policy vis-à-vis Mongolia and Tibet to Chosŏn by converting Chosŏn into prefectures and counties, as they supposed Chosŏn had been in the Qianlong period. The rationale behind this suggestion applied the basic structure of the Qing empire on its western frontier to the management of its eastern one, highlighting Chosŏn’s prominent subordinate position within the empire. The role of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship is thus significant. This relationship should not be treated simply as a specific instance of the Zongfan sys- tem, as scholars have typically done. Rather, it is best understood as a prototype that shaped the formation of the Qing’s Zongfan system and helped the Manchu regime transform its political identity for the purpose of claiming centrality and accessing orthodox legitimacy in the process of reshuffling the Chinese world. In short, the Qing-Chosŏn relationship was the seedbed of the Qing’s entire Zongfan arrangement, from which the political legitimacy of both sides—the Qing and its outer fan—sprang. Civilizing the Center: The Practice of the Chosŏn Model Five aspects of the Qing’s practice of the Chosŏn model, aspects embodied in and undergirded by ritual practices and documentary discourse, showcased the Qing’s identity as the civilized center. These aspects concern the frequency and composition of missions; the overland route and the Sino-Korean geographical boundaries; humble palace memorials, imperial mandates and decrees, and orthodox legitimacy; tributes, gifts, and court-to-court interactions; and receptions and rituals. The Frequency and Composition of Imperial and Tributary Missions The exchange of missions between the Qing and Chosŏn started in 1637 and continued without interruption until the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. The fre- quency of Chosŏn’s missions to the Qing was higher than that of any other country. Whereas other subordinate countries sent tributary missions to Beijing every other year (Ryukyu), every three years (Siam), every four years (Annam), every five years (Sulu), or every ten years (Lanchang and Burma), Chosŏn dispatched sev- eral missions every year.³⁸ Although the imperial code required Chosŏn to send an annual tributary mission at the end of each year that would simultaneously serve as the mission for the winter solstice, the imperial birthday, and the lunar New Year, Chosŏn never hesitated to send more emissaries under different names, dispatching a new mission before the previous one had even returned in order to nourish its relationship with the Qing.³⁹ From 1637 to 1894, Chosŏn sent about 698 official missions to the Qing for twenty-six different purposes, an average of 2.71 missions per year.⁴⁰ In 1784 and 1788, Emperor Qianlong commented jubilantly that in this respect Chosŏn was a peer of the Qing’s inner fan.⁴¹ According to the imperial regulations, a Korean mission was to have thirty members: an envoy, an associate envoy, a secretary, three interpreters, and twenty- four tribute guard officers. The envoy, associate envoy, and secretary were the three key members. As a special privilege to Chosŏn, the number of attendants and servants attached to the mission was not limited. By contrast, the missions from Ryukyu, Lanchang, Burma, and the Netherlands were not to exceed twenty mem- bers; those from other Western countries were limited to twenty-two, those from Siam to twenty-six, and those from Annam to thirty.⁴² Many Korean scholars and businessmen visited Beijing as mission attendants or servants in order to experience Chinese culture or to seek their fortunes, so a Korean mission often num- bered several hundred people. For example, the annual tributary mission of 1653 had a total of 225 members, the gratitude mission of 1777 a total of 310, the grat- itude mission of 1803 a total of 213, and the congratulatory mission of 1889 a total of 311.⁴³ In 1829, two missions with more than six hundred people combined ar- rived in Beijing at the same time, forcing the Ministry of Rites and the Ministry of Works to borrow twenty large tents from the Imperial Household Department (Ch., Neiwu fu) to house the additional visitors. Until the late nineteenth century, the legions of Chosŏn’s missions continued their pilgrimages to Beijing every
year with a large number of tributes and horses.⁴⁴ By contrast, the Qing sent far fewer and smaller imperial missions to Chosŏn. From 1637 to 1894, the Qing undertook 172 missions to Hansŏng, an average of 0.67 missions per year. In the early Qing, the Manchu court frequently dispatched emissaries to investigate cases of homicide and smuggling at the border, to negotiate resolutions to these cases with the king, and sometimes to discuss the punishment of Korean officials who failed to satisfy the Qing. As early as the Shunzhi period, the Manchu court began to reduce the number of its envoys, the rationale behind the change being the Zongfan idea of “cherishing the small.” In May 1653, for example, in the course of investigating a cross-border case of homicide, the Ministry of Rites proposed to ask the Korean emissary in Beijing to carry the imperial documents to the king instead of dispatching an imperial envoy for the purpose, given that “Chosŏn is a country of men from afar” (Ch., Chaoxian guo xi yuanren). Emperor Shunzhi endorsed this proposal, declaring that “hereafter, do not propose to send envoys to disturb the fan [Ch., fanbang] with minor matters.”⁴⁵ By the middle period of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, such envoys to Hansŏng disappeared entirely.⁴⁶ From this point on, imperial missions to Chosŏn were of two primary types: missions for investiture and missions to confer noble rank, both relating to power shifts that required the Chinese emperor’s bestowal of legitimacy. In the early period, an imperial mission contained around a hundred men, many of whom were Manchu bannermen of the Eight Banners who joined the mission for the purpose of trade. In 1658 Emperor Shunzhi significantly trimmed the size of the mis- sions by calling for the end of Manchu trade in Hansŏng. After that, a mission comprised an envoy, an associate envoy, four interpreters, and eighteen attendants.⁴⁷ In 1845 and 1846, Emperor Daoguang further reduced the number of core members to four.⁴⁸ Taking attendants into account, after the early nine- teenth century an imperial mission had fewer than thirty members in total. The mission in 1876 comprised twenty members, and the last mission, in 1890, had twenty-eight.⁴⁹ All imperial envoys to Chosŏn—from the first envoy in 1637, Inggūldai, to the last one in 1890, Xuchang (1838–92)—were Manchu officials. They included some members of the Mongol and Han Chinese Eight Banners but no non-banner Han Chinese, whereas envoys to Annam and Ryukyu were mainly non-banner Han Chinese rather than Manchus. By at least the 1760s, Han Chinese scholars were fully aware of this ethnic discrepancy, though some of their Korean counterparts were not.⁵⁰ The door was never opened for Han Chinese to participate in tributary affairs in Korea. The exclusion was perhaps rooted in the implicit demands of the civilized–barbarian distinction and the Qing’s need to transcend the pre-1644 Manchu-Korean relationship: the Manchu court had to demonstrate, maintain, and consolidate its legitimacy as the human and institutional agent of the Mandate of Heaven and to strengthen its claim to civilized centrality and Chineseness through the hierarchical relationship. Still, some Manchu envoys, such as Akdun (1685–1756) in 1717, broadly identified themselves from a cultural perspective as “Han envoys” (Ch., hanjie) from the “central civilized country” (Ch., Zhonghua, Zhongxia).⁵¹ The Overland Route, the Willow Palisade, and Geographical Boundaries In the post-1644 period, the emissaries of the two countries traveled on an overland route, which was about 950 miles (3,000 Chinese li) long and linked Han- sŏng and Beijing via around eighty-two stations. The route passed through P’yŏngyang, Ŭiju, the Yalu River, Fenghuang City, Mukden, Shanhai Pass, Fengrun, and Tongzhou (see map 2.1). From 1644 to 1894, both Korean and Manchu emissaries were required to follow the overland route, the sole exception being the last imperial mission in 1890, which took a maritime route due to exceptional circumstances. In general, a mission took forty to sixty days to reach Beijing from Hansŏng, and an imperial mission from Beijing faced the same trudge to Hansŏng.⁵² In Manchuria the overland route skirted the long Willow Palisade (Ch., Liutiao bian)—a system of levees and trenches planted with willow trees, their branches tied together—from Fenghuang City to Shanhai Pass, where it almost connected with the Great Wall. The Manchu rulers built the palisade from the late 1630s to
the 1680s in order to preserve their economic privileges by demarcating domestic boundaries between Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese regions. In the early period of Kangxi’s reign, the palisade connecting Shanhai Pass in the west and Fenghuang City in the east, known as the Old Fence, was around 590 miles (1,900 li) long and had sixteen fence gates, while in the north the New Fence between Weiyuan Village and Fateha Mountain was 215 miles (690 li) with four gates.⁵³ Fenghuang City, located at the southeastern corner of the east wing of the Old Fence, was under the supervision of the Manchu General of Mukden (Ch., Shengjing jiangjun) and had a gate (K., ch’akmun; Ch., zhamen), known as Feng huang Gate, about three miles (eight li) to the southeast of the city.⁵⁴ The Qing built Fenghuang Gate between 1638 and 1639 and extended it southeast toward the Yalu River between 1685 and 1690 up to a location about nine miles (thirty li) from the city.⁵⁵ The gate was the only pass through which Korean emissaries could enter the Qing’s “ancestral territory” (Ch., genben zhongdi) in Manchuria.
Map 2.1 The overland route between Beijing and Ŭiju in the late eighteenth century. The line connecting points A, B, C, and D on the map marks the Willow Pal- isade, which started at Fenghuang City (A) and ended near the Great Wall (the line connecting points D, E, and F). The line connecting points A, G (Mukden), H (Shanhai Pass), I (Fengrun), and J (Tongzhou) forms the overland route that Chosŏn’s emissaries took to Beijing after crossing the Yalu River. Yŏji to, hand- written map, preserved at the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University. Copyright Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies. Between the gate and the boundary river lay a Qing-controlled area in which no one was allowed to live. In the late seventeenth century, this area spanned about thirty-four miles.⁵⁶ The Korean emissaries could pass through this area freely and were not subjected to security checks until they reached Fenghuang Gate. The garrison major of the Manchu bannermen at Fenghuang City did not welcome, check, or send off the missions beyond the gate, which may help explain why Ko- rean emissaries were occasionally robbed by Chinese bandits outside the gate.⁵⁷ For the Korean visitors, Fenghuang Gate was thus more like a borderline than the Yalu River was, although the geographical borderline ran along the middle course of the river. After entering Fenghuang Gate, the Koreans were to proceed to Beijing within twenty-eight days under the escort of Qing soldiers, passing through thirty-nine transfer stations (Ch., gongshi guanshe; Ma., alban jafara elcin i tatara guwan i boo). In fact, however, the visitors were so familiar with the route that generally no Chinese soldiers accompanied them to Beijing. The absence of Chinese monitors endowed the Koreans with fair freedom to visit places along their route and interview local people, enriching their travel journals, which eventually constituted a voluminous collection known as Yŏnhaengnok (The records of the journey to Beijing). All emissaries of the Qing’s fan were required to follow specific tributary routes and dared not deviate from them. For example, Ryukyu’s emissaries were instructed to arrive at Min’an in Fujian, Sulu’s at Xiamen in Fujian, those of Western countries at Macau in Guangdong, Siam’s at Humen in Guangdong, An- nam’s at Taiping in Guangxi, and Burma’s at Yongchang in Yunnan. After the emissaries reached the designated places, the governor-general and the governor of the province would report their arrival to the Ministry of Rites and instruct subordinate officials to send them on to Beijing. Chosŏn’s emissaries had no such rela- tions with officials in the provinces through which they passed, and they communicated directly with the Ministry of Rites. In other words, Chosŏn’s contacts with the Qing were under Beijing’s direct control, which enabled Beijing to use Chosŏn to portray the harmony of its Zongfan system whenever necessary. Along the overland route, the high frequency and large size of Chosŏn’s missions produced considerable and lucrative commercial opportunities for merchants from both countries. What flowed into the Qing realm in massive quantities, in addition to Korean and Japanese goods, was silver. The mission of 1712, for in- stance, carried more than two hundred thousand taels of silver to Beijing, while the one in 1777 brought more than ninety-three thousand taels. The bulk of the sil- ver was originally from Japan, acquired through trade between Tsushima and Chosŏn. The Hansŏng–Fenghuang City–Mukden–Beijing overland trade route was an extension of the Kyoto–Osaka–Tsushima–Pusan–Hansŏng overland and maritime trade route, with Hansŏng and Beijing the two major entrepôts on the com- bined route. Financially, the three nations made up an integrated international silver network, and in the eighteenth century the amount of silver that poured into the Qing from Chosŏn annually could reach five hundred thousand to six hundred thousand taels, which contributed to the Qing’s prosperity but aroused serious concerns among Korean officials.⁵⁸ In this sense, it is not an exaggeration to say that the Beijing–Hansŏng overland route was the most prosperous and most lucrative long-distance and international trade route in East Asia before Chosŏn opened treaty ports in the 1870s and 1880s. Humble Palace Memorials, Imperial Mandates and Decrees, and Orthodox Legitimacy The imperial court in Beijing and the royal court in Hansŏng interacted through meticulously formatted court documents written in accordance with highly institu- tionalized hierarchical norms. From 1637 on, the most important category among the documents that Chosŏn submitted to the Qing was the king’s humble
palace memorials (K., p’yo; Ch., biao). In 1705 the Ministry of Rites in Beijing laid down a set of new criteria for the syntax of these memorials that Chosŏn adhered to for the next 190 years, but the king was still free to use his own terms in composing other kinds of palace memorials.⁵⁹ The humble memorials were aimed at strengthening the Qing’s authority by reiterating and affirming the reciprocal and hierarchical relationship between the emperor and the king. The memorial sub- mitted by the crown prince and deputy king of Chosŏn, Yi Yun (King Gyŏngjong), on April 14, 1721, in the sixtieth year of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, to congratulate the emperor on his birthday, is a typical example. The memorial was written on a sheet of well-made Korean paper in tiny, narrow Chinese characters evenly ar- ranged in twenty-three vertical lines from right to left—although a memorial could, on occasion, exceed fifty lines—and it carefully followed the rules of honorific elevation, exactly as the Qing had mandated in 1705.⁶⁰ Refer ring to himself as “your minister” (K., sin; Ch., chen) of a vassal (Ch., fanfu), who could hardly bear his separation from the court (Ch., queting), Yi proclaimed that “Your Majesty raises all people of the world by assuming the Mandate of Heaven. The world is peaceful and imperial civilization extends to all places. Your Majesty has pacified the four seas, and ten thousand countries have come to revere Your Majesty [Ch., sihai yi er wanguo laiwang].”⁶¹ In such highly formalized memorials, the king frequently called himself “subordinate” or “minister,” Chosŏn the “small country,” and the Qing the “big coun- try,” the “upper country,” the “big dynasty,” the “central dynasty,” or the “Heavenly Dynasty.”⁶² These Qing-mandated terms exploited Chosŏn’s subordinate sta- tus to highlight the Qing’s centrality in the early eighteenth century. Year after year, Chosŏn, as the representative of the others, helped consolidate the Qing’s supreme cultural identity as well as Qing hegemony through its performance of such written subservience. Upon receipt of the king’s humble memorials, the em- peror generally wrote on the cover in red ink, “I have learned of the appreciative memorial that you, the king, respectfully presented. Let the relevant ministry [the Ministry of Rites] know.” The comments were made either in Manchu (“Wang sini kesi de hengkileme wesimbuhe be saha, harangga jurgan sa.”) or Chinese (“Lanwang zouxie. Zhidao liao. Gaibu zhidao.”). On the Qing side, the imperial decrees granting a deceased king noble rank or investing a new king with a patent of appointment also served to consolidate the hierarchy. The special terms used in these edicts had their own rules, which underwent a process of institutionalization after 1644. When the Qing invested Yi Chong as king in January 1638 (the first investiture that the Qing performed), the decree stated only that Chosŏn would be recognized as fan to the Qing forever.⁶³ But after 1644 the Manchu court began to include additional terms with strong political meanings in the Zongfan context. For example, the decree of investiture in 1649 clearly defined Chosŏn as an outer fan in a “remote area” (Ch., xiahuang) that submitted itself to the Qing’s virtues and civilization. In 1675 the phrase “cher- ishing the eastern country” (Ch., huairou dongtu) appeared in the decrees.⁶⁴ These terms substantially broadened the scope of the Qing’s political and cultural ide- ology and transformed its identity in the context of the civilized–barbarian dichotomy. On March 6, 1725, Emperor Yongzheng issued a mandate and a decree to Yi Gŭm to invest him as the king and his wife as the queen. The mandate of investi- ture (Ch., fengtian gaoming; Ma., abkai hesei g’aoming) consisted of five connected pieces of dyed ramie cloth in red, blue, black, white, and yellow from right to left. Each of the five sections was surrounded by a pattern of flying dragons (see figures 2.1 and 2.2). In the mandate Emperor Yongzheng stated, “The great strat- egy is simply to extend civilization [Ch., jiaohua; Ma., tacihiyan wen] to the countries from afar [Ch., haibang; Ma., goroki gurun]…. Generations of your court have been sincerely loyal and trustworthy and have been paying tribute diligently [Ch., zhigong qinxiu; Ma., tušan alban be kiceme faššambi].” In investing Yi Gŭm the “king of Chosŏn” (Ch., Chaoxian guowang; Ma., Coohiyan gurun i wang), the emperor emphasized that the king “shall serve as the fence on the eastern land [Ch., pinghan dongfan; Ma., dergi bade fiyanji dalikū], devoutly use the imperial calendar [Ch., qiangong zhengshuo; Ma., forgon ton be olhošome ginggulembi], pacify the land, and assist the imperial house forever [Ch., jiafu yu huangjia; Ma., ejen i boode aisilame wehiyembi].” The emperor advised the king to “use a pure and genuine
mind to serve the Heavenly court [Ch., tianshi; Ma., abkai gurun].”⁶⁵ A decree to the king articulated this point again by stating, “You should be loyal forever and efficiently govern the land as a minister from afar [Ch., houfu; Ma., jecen i golo], while you should be loyal and obedient and serve as a fence [Ch., pinghan; Ma., fiyanji dalikū] for the Heavenly house [Ch., tianjia; Ma., gurun boo].”⁶⁶ The Chinese and Manchu terms of the imperial edicts portrayed the king as a family member of the Qing court, and they became more sophisticated in the Qianlong period. The imperial edicts to the king in 1757, for instance, referred to Chosŏn as a “fence,” a “subordinate country” (Ch., shuguo; Ma., harangga gurun), a “remote submission” (Ch., yuanfu; Ma., goroki i jecen), and a “lower country” (Ch., xiaguo; Ma., fejergi gurun) of the “Middle Kingdom” (Ch., Zhongchao, Z hongbang; M., Dulimbai gurun). The edicts also emphasized that the king’s court (M., wang ni boo) had been loyal to and received special rewards from the “Heav- enly court” (Ch., tianshi; Ma., han i hargašan).⁶⁷ By invoking these norms, the Qing explicitly presented itself as the civilized center—China and the Heavenly Dy- nasty—in both Chinese and Manchu terms. In his memorials to the emperor, the king used a gold seal received from the Qing. From early 1637 to early 1653, the seal had only Manchu characters, which read Coohiyan gurun i wang ni doron (seal of the king of the country of Chosŏn). On April 22, 1653, Emperor Shunzhi, evidently displeased by the absence of Chi- nese script from the seal, instructed the Ministry of Rites to make a new seal that included “Chinese characters” (Ch., hanzi). As a result, the words Chaoxian guowang zhi yin (seal of the king of the country of Chosŏn) were added to the seal.⁶⁸ The emperor did not explain his rationale for the change, but his decision underscored the new dynasty’s Chineseness. On the Qing side, the emperors, in their mandates to Chosŏn, always used the “seal of declaring imperial mandate,” which carried both a Chinese text, Zhigao zhi bao, and a Manchu one, Hese wasimbure boobai, exactly the same text that appeared on the imperial mandates issued to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni in Tibet. The combination of languages reflected the polyglot politics of a multiethnic empire.⁶⁹
FIGURE 2.1. The Manchu section of the imperial mandate to invest the king of Chosŏn in 1725. Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, preserved at Jangseogak, the Academy of Korean Studies, Korea. Copyright Academy of Korean Studies.
FIGURE 2.2. The Chinese section of the imperial mandate to invest the king of Chosŏn in 1725. Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, preserved at Jangseogak, the Academy of Korean Studies, Korea. Copyright Academy of Korean Studies. The imperial investiture of the king helps explain a paradox in the Qing period: certain Confucian countries, in particular Chosŏn and Annam, were privately reluctant to identify the Qing as the supreme representative of Chinese culture, but in practice they never challenged its status as the superior country and fre- quently sent tributary missions to Beijing to display their deference. The explanation for the apparent paradox lies in the fact that the missions fulfilled a dual pur- pose in establishing not only the legitimacy of the Qing but also that of the monarchs of the fan. The Zongfan relationship between the Qing and its fan was an incarnation of this symbiotic and synergistic legitimacy, namely, the orthodox legitimacy embodied in the highly programmed rituals involved in the exchange of emissaries. This orthodox legitimacy was the goal for which King Taksin (r. 1767–82) of the Thonburi regime of Siam sent tributary missions to Beijing to pursue investiture after the fall of the Ayutthaya regime (1350–1767), even though King Taksin’s understanding of “paying tribute” (Ch., jingong) was very different from that of the Qing.⁷⁰ The need for legitimacy could also explain why Nguyễn Huệ, the leader of the peasant rebellion against the Lê Dynasty (1428–1788) of Annam, defeated the Qing army in 1789 but nonetheless accepted the Qing’s investiture in 1790. It was also in 1790 that Burma accepted the Qing investiture after winning the Burmese-Qing War in the early 1770s.⁷¹ In addition to pragmatic concerns reflecting geopolitics and China’s military might, securing political legit- imacy from China proved crucial for these regimes’ own rule. Tributes, Gifts, and Court-to-Court Interactions The Qing ritual code clearly listed the types and quantities of tribute that Chosŏn had to present for different purposes. After 1644, these fell into eight major cate- gories. Beyond the most official category of annual tribute, designated as “standard tribute” (Ch., zhenggong), the king generally referred to the items in the other seven categories, such as those marking the imperial birthday, the lunar New Year, and the winter solstice, as “gifts” or “local products.” The Qing accepted all of the submitted items and did not challenge the king’s choice of terms, although it preferred to refer to the items as “tribute.”⁷² While the annual tribute marked a country-to-country relationship, all other categories of tribute, which were presented specifically to the emperor, the empress, and the dowager empress, suggested a strong court-to-court connection. The Ministry of Rites accepted the annual tribute as a routine matter, but it had to sub- mit memorials to the emperor for instructions on how to handle tribute in other categories. In the early Qing, the Ministry of Rites forwarded all tribute items to the Ministry of Revenue and later to the Imperial Household Department, which was in charge of the affairs of the Manchu royal house and had its own financial system independent of the one managed by the Ministry of Revenue.⁷³ Therefore, although the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship seemed to manifest itself main- ly in hierarchical country-to-country interactions, in reality it was a dual system involving the two countries and the two courts. The gifts that the imperial envoys carried to Chosŏn were directed at specific members of the royal family, including the king, the queen, the crown prince, and the dowager queen. Usually the envoys brought first-rate silk for official robes. When imperial missions were dispatched to extend the emperor’s condolences on the deaths of core royalty, some gifts were consumed at the funeral ceremonies, while others were converted into 150 to 300 taels of silver by the Ministry of Rev- enue and delivered to the Korean royal house. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, imperial envoys followed a precise routine to deliver their condolences and gifts. The last such mission occurred in 1890, and it is explored in detail in chapter 5. Receptions, Ritual Performances, and the Civilized Qing Chosŏn’s emissaries were well accommodated at each transfer station after they entered China, but they had to prepare food for themselves until they arrived in
Beijing. Upon reaching their residence in Beijing, the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations, the emissaries first visited the Ministry of Rites to present the king’s memorials and the list of tribute items. All emissaries from Chosŏn and from other countries, as well as the kings they represented, had to submit their documents to the emperor through the ministry, with which they could communicate via official notes (Ch., ziwen). In the main hall of the ministry, the emis- saries would pass the memorials to the head officials, who would place the memorials in front of the imperial tablet on a table in the middle of the hall. The emis- saries would then kneel down once to make three prostrations toward the head officials, who would in turn bow three times to the emissaries with their hands folded in front (Ch., zuoyi, a ritual practiced between officials of equal ranks). Once they had finished, the emissaries would kneel down three times, each time making three prostrations toward the tablet.⁷⁴ The ministry would submit the documents to the emperor the next day, while the emissaries returned to their resi- dence to wait for the imperial audience. The Qing’s commander general of the Metropolitan Infantry Brigade Yamen (Ch., Bujun tongling yamen) sent soldiers to guard the emissaries’ residence.⁷⁵ Three additional institutions were involved in hosting the guests: the Court of Imperial Entertainments (Ch., Guanglu si) delivered daily food and drink, distrib- uted to each member of the mission according to rank; the Ministry of Revenue brought fodder for the Koreans’ horses; and the Ministry of Works provided char- coal. These meticulous regulations embodied the Qing’s policy of “cherishing men from afar.” During their stay in Beijing, the emissaries had various responsibilities to fulfill. If there was a grand court assembly of officials in the Forbidden City, the emis- saries had to attend and pay homage at the end of the wing of the Qing civil officials. A major task was to pay a formal visit to the emperor at either the Summer Palace in Beijing or the Summer Palace in Rehe (Chengde). After the audience, the emissaries would be invited to attend certain events, such as banquets in the Forbidden City, performances of Chinese operas, or fireworks shows at the Summer Palace.⁷⁶ All ritual procedures, in particular the highest level of kowtow, were minutely regulated and fastidiously practiced. Such rituals between the Chinese emperor and foreign emissaries had been defined and institutionalized at least since the “great rituals” laid out in The Rituals of the Great Tang (Ch., Da Tang Kaiyuan li), compiled in the eighth century.⁷⁷ In the Ming and the Qing, the rituals became extremely elaborate, and the Korean emissaries were required to rehearse the complicated ceremonies in advance as a sign of their loyalty and as part of the process that would “civilize the barbarians in the four quarters” (Ch., feng siyi).⁷⁸ Rituals helped maintain the political arrangement and strengthen the iden- tities of all participants.⁷⁹ In grand court gatherings, emissaries from Chosŏn were usually the first representatives of the outer fan to perform the rituals for the emperor, as on February 9, 1675, at the Lantern Festival, where the Chosŏn emissaries congratulated Kangxi ahead of their Russian, Kalka Mongol, and Ūlet Mon- gol counterparts.⁸⁰ Chosŏn’s role as an exemplar was particularly prominent in the late eighteenth century during the Qianlong period, when the Qing in many cases “followed the model for Chosŏn” (Ch., zhao Chaoxian zhi li) in managing its bilateral exchanges with Annam, Ryukyu, and Siam.⁸¹ Chinese scholars at the time also widely regarded Chosŏn as the “model for other countries” (Ch., zhuguo zhi zhang).⁸² The emissaries also attended two major official banquets, one held at the Ministry of Rites and the other at the emissaries’ residence. An astonishing number of institutions were involved in their organization: the Court of Imperial Entertainments; the Food Supply Office (Ch., Jingshan qingli si) of the Ministry of Rites; the Ministries of Revenue, Works, and War; Shuntian Prefecture; and the Revenue Superintendent of Chongwen Gate (Ch., Liangyi shuiwu jiandu). Royal contractors (Ch., hanghu) were also assigned specific tasks. Each of the three key members of the mission was treated to what was known as a fifth-level Manchu banquet and the other members to a sixth-level one, preferential treatment not afforded to emissaries from any other country. The high cost of the banquets was fully covered by the Qing and, not surprisingly, the banquets were replete with ritual performances reinforcing the bilateral hierarchical order.⁸³ The imperial code included an “illustration of the banquets for Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries” (Ch., Chaoxian gongshi yantu) and specified that the seating arrangements for banquets held for
emissaries from other countries should follow the Chosŏn pattern (Ch., geguo gongshi fangci).⁸⁴ During their sojourn in Beijing, the emissaries, particularly scholars without official status or responsibilities, were enthusiastic about socializing with Qing literati. The tradition of such interactions had started in Ming times but had been suspended in the Ming-Qing transition period because of the anti-Manchu atti- tudes that were prevalent in Chosŏn. Indeed, before the eighteenth century, the three key members of the tributary mission barely left their residence to meet with Chinese officials or scholars because many Korean scholars embracing Neo-Confucianism saw the Qing as a barbarous country and regarded the tributary mis- sion as a humiliation.⁸⁵ In the 1760s, however, literary social gatherings involving Korean emissaries again became frequent and continued until the 1890s. In the 1860s, many Chinese officials, such as Dong Wenhuan (1833–77) of the Imperial Academy (Ch., Hanlin yuan), who was known for calligraphy and epigraphy, ac- tively socialized with Koreans.⁸⁶ On the Korean side, Pak Kyusu (1807–76), an emissary who visited Beijing in 1872, befriended more than a hundred famous Chi- nese scholars through social gatherings.⁸⁷ Versed in the same Confucian classics, adhering to the same Neo-Confucianism, and using the same Chinese characters, the Qing and Chosŏn scholars could easily identify one another as men of the same caliber. They met for drinks, composed poems, and exchanged their own compositions and calligraphy. That Chosŏn was known as “Little China” might also have lent these transnational literary social gatherings a homogenous cultural identity. These savants formed an informal perennial club in which they exchanged ideas about history and literature and improved their perceptions of each other’s countries. According to Key- hiuk Kim, their communications also “assured Korea of a constant stream of information and knowledge concerning the latest intellectual trends in China.”⁸⁸ When they gathered with their Han Chinese friends, the Korean guests usually showed an aversion to Manchu customs, such as the Manchu-style official robe and hairstyle, and were very proud of their Ming-style robes and hats, in keeping with the civilized–barbarian dichotomy. But in 1766, when Hong Tae-yong (1731– 83) expressed contempt for the Manchus’ control of China, he found to his surprise that his Han Chinese counterparts, such as Yan Cheng (1733–67), did not appreciate his anti-Manchu sentiments; instead, Yan and his colleagues applauded the Qing’s support for civilization. After intensive conversation with his Chi- nese friends, Hong conceded that Koreans on a fundamental level still belonged to the “barbarians by the sea” (K., haesang chi iin). By concluding that “the civi- lized and the barbarians are the same” (K., Hwa–I il ya), he acknowledged the Qing’s civilized status.⁸⁹ Through such interactions, many Korean and Chinese scholars became close friends and continued to correspond even after the emissaries returned to Chosŏn. When Yan Cheng was on the brink of death, he laid a letter from Hong on his abdomen to indicate how deeply he treasured their friendship. When news of Yan’s death reached Hansŏng, Hong burst into tears and commented that he had lost a brother to whom he was as attached as he was to his right arm.⁹⁰ Like the emissaries from Hansŏng who experienced a combination of hardship and comfort as they made their way to Beijing, Qing imperial envoys also had to endure discomfort until they passed through Fenghuang Gate on their journey toward Ŭiju. There they were welcomed and treated well by the Korean side. Al- though the land between the gate and the Yalu River was Qing territory, the Korean prefect of Ŭiju was able to dispatch Korean officers, Manchu interpreters, and servants to welcome the envoys at the three stations in this area: Congxiu, Mazhuan, and Sanjiang. At each station the Koreans would set up temporary houses for the envoys and provide hearty meals that could feature more than thirty different dishes. In Ŭiju the prefect treated each envoy to a banquet with more than 130 kinds of food.⁹¹ Receptions along the way from Ŭiju to P’yŏngyang and then to Hansŏng were even more luxurious, and the cost was significant.⁹² In contrast to their Korean counterparts in Beijing, the Manchu envoys in Hansŏng confined themselves to ritual exchanges. Beijing-style literary social gath- erings did take place in Shuri, the capital of Ryukyu, but not in Hansŏng, where the envoys, along with their assistants, never left their lodgings to converse with local officials or scholars.⁹³ No transnational literati club like the one in Beijing ever formed in Hansŏng. After 1658, when Emperor Shunzhi put an end to
Manchu trade in Hansŏng, the imperial envoys were always temporary visitors who returned home as soon as their mission was accomplished. In addition, al- most all imperial envoys before the early eighteenth century made a point of visiting the Samjŏndo stele in a southern suburb of Hansŏng. The Koreans regarded the stele, with its inscriptions celebrating the Manchu conquest of Chosŏn, as a humiliation, and some Confucian scholars and students argued that it should be destroyed, so the envoys’ visits were sensitive and made the stele a barometer of the two countries’ relationship. In 1723 the Qing’s two envoys made a formal visit to the stele with a number of Korean officials. At the site, the vice envoy knelt down three times, each time bowing his head three times. In 1724 and 1729, the imperial envoys also paid formal visits to the stele, again accompanied by a group of Koreans. On these occasions both the Manchu envoys and their Korean interpreters kowtowed to the stele. In 1731, however, instead of visiting Samjŏndo, the envoys simply asked for copies of the inscriptions on the stele, and after 1762, they no longer even requested transcripts. By the late nineteenth century, Qing officials had only a vague understanding of the stele and were uncertain whether it featured a Manchu inscription.⁹⁴ During their sojourn in Hansŏng, the Qing envoys performed four major ceremonies in which the king participated. The first was the welcome at the Gate of Receiving Imperial Favors (K., Yŏngŭn mun) outside the West Gate of the city. The king bowed once to the imperial documents, then returned to his palace in the city. The second, conducted inside the king’s palace, was the transfer of the imperial documents and other items to the king. The king kowtowed four times to the imperial edicts. In addition, the king and the envoys bowed once or twice to each other with their hands folded in front. The king, on his own territory, did not need to perform the highest level of kowtow toward the imperial decrees or other documents and gifts, as his ministers would do in Beijing. The third ceremony was the king’s visit to the envoys at their residence, the South Palace Annex, where the Koreans honored the envoys with several tea banquets. Finally, there was the send-off at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country on the city’s outskirts, where the king provided a tea ceremony for the departing envoys. Contact between the two sides was always conducted through the Korean Ministry of Rites. All of the procedures in these ceremonies were regulated by ritual codes and were executed until the early 1890s. The Korean side had no obligation to report any domestic affairs to the envoys, nor would the envoys intervene in such affairs. Rather, this stylized interaction in Hansŏng endowed the monarch of Chosŏn with political legitimacy, continuously consolidating the reciprocal and hierarchical Zongfan relations between the two countries. Celebrating the Relationship: The Qing Emperor’s Roles in the Zongfan System As the institutional agent at the highest level of the Zongfan hierarchy, the emperor could exploit the occasions of imperial audiences and his patriarchal authority to modify and lubricate the mechanism from the top down. As the following sections show, he could freely endow tributary emissaries with various extra gifts, supervise and admonish the Manchu envoys to Chosŏn and the Manchus along the border in Manchuria, and make final decisions about border conflicts. Consolidating the System through Imperial Gifts and Extra Gifts After Chosŏn’s emissaries presented their tribute gifts to the emperor, the sovereign would bestow “routine gifts” (Ch., lishang) on them and the king. At least since the Shunzhi period, the Qing presented the tribute missions with gifts whose value exceeded that of the tribute, based on detailed calculations.⁹⁵ The gifts and their quantities varied according to the category of the mission, and when the Korean envoy was a member of the royal house, the amount and quality of the gifts would increase. The silk and satin among the gifts were taken from the Imperial Household Department, rather than the Ministry of Revenue, in order to show the emperor’s personal favor toward the “king of the fan ” (Ch., fanwang). To mark the imperial birthday and the lunar New Year, the Qing would give the king a second-class horse with bridle and each of the two envoys a third-class horse with bridle, highlighting the Manchu character of the Qing regime. The Qing
would also give the envoys silver in the average amount of at least 680 taels (for annual tributary missions and winter solstice missions) or 850 taels (for imperial birthday missions and lunar New Year missions), along with other gifts.⁹⁶ Some scholars have argued that the routine gifts were an institutionalized part of the overall Zongfan mechanism and hence afforded little flexibility.⁹⁷ Yet the emperor could break this routine at his discretion by awarding the emissaries extra gifts during audiences. For instance, in early 1795 Emperor Qianlong awarded the king a hundred copies of the Chinese character for “happiness” (Ch., fu) that he had written on small squares of red paper.⁹⁸ This sort of largesse was seem- ingly random,⁹⁹ but it did not simply represent imperial prerogative or a deviation from the flowcharts of ritual codes. Rather, the practice of giving supererogatory gifts highlighted the Qing policy of “giving more to the visitors and benefiting less from them” (Ch., houwang bolai), as Emperor Qian-long explained it to Chosŏn in 1736.¹⁰⁰ The emperor thus moderated the system by lending it flexibility and novelty. In the late eighteenth century, Emperor Qianlong disbursed an increasing quantity of extra gifts, while the amount of the tribute sent by Chosŏn remained remarkably stable. The extra imperial gifts reached their peak in the 1790s, a time when Emperor Qianlong was particularly keen to enhance the image of his dynasty as the Heavenly Dynasty. Given these priorities, the Qing court was not con- cerned about maintaining a balance between the value of the tributes and that of the imperial gifts. In 1793 a Korean emissary acknowledged that the Qing treated Chosŏn in such a favorable way that the Qing’s spending on accommodations for the tributary emissaries and the value of the various imperial gifts far exceeded the value of the Korean “local products.”¹⁰¹ Constructing a Positive Image of the Qing and Highlighting the Envoys’ Manchu Identity The Qing emperor sought to further burnish his dynasty’s image in his contacts with Chosŏn by taking steps to prevent the Manchu envoys to Chosŏn and the bannermen who resided along the border in Manchuria from compromising the dignity of the Heavenly Dynasty through open degeneracy. Emperor Qianlong, for example, felt it necessary to extend the Qing’s prolonged campaign to maintain Manchu traditions and identity to the field of the Sino-Korean communications by closely monitoring his envoys’ behavior. His first reform aimed to bolster the Manchu envoys’ integrity by discouraging corruption during their trip to Chosŏn. In 1736, after reducing by half the amount of the gifts the Koreans were expected to provide to the imperial envoys, the emperor punished two envoys who violated the new rules. He decreed that in the fu- ture the garrison generals at Mukden and Shanhai Pass should check the envoys’ luggage when they returned from Hansŏng to make sure they had not received unauthorized gifts.¹⁰² Until the last imperial mission in 1890, subsequent emperors continued to admonish their envoys to Chosŏn to remain upright and honest. Compared with their pre-1637 Ming counterparts, who had exploited Chosŏn for maximum profit, the Manchu envoys, in particular after the Kangxi period, be- haved well on their visits to Chosŏn, which helped reduce the tension between the two countries caused by the Qing invasions in the 1630s. The Korean scholar Hong Tae-yong acknowledged in 1766 that the Qing was much more generous and kind to Chosŏn than the Ming had been.¹⁰³ The Qianlong emperor also believed that the Manchu officers and soldiers in Manchuria should focus on border security. In 1737, under the claim of “giving kindness to the people from afar,” he decided to prohibit the Manchus from trading with Koreans in the Middle River area of the Yalu River and to ask “merchants and commoners of inner China” (Ch., neidi shangmin) to undertake this trade instead. The Middle River market had been established in 1592 between Chosŏn and the Ming; it had barely opened during the Ming-Qing war but was restored as a major trading center between the Qing and Chosŏn after 1646. Manchu ban- nermen and merchants near Fenghuang City had thereafter constituted the Qing’s traders in the market. Now the Qianlong emperor abruptly concluded that the bannermen were “not good at doing business” and sought to direct his Manchu warriors back to the military realm. The king, however, was deeply concerned about the potential arrival of the people of “inner China,” so he petitioned the emperor to maintain the trade with the bannermen. The emperor granted the
petition but explained that by people of “inner China” he meant only those living near the banner garrisons in Manchuria, not those south of the Great Wall or in Beijing.¹⁰⁴ This episode shows that in the border area the Manchu court was concerned more about political consequences and border security than about the economic interests of the local bannermen. It also suggests that at least by the 1730s the Qing had come to integrate Manchuria into its concept of “inner China” (Ch., neidi), further nullifying the border function of the Great Wall within the multiethnic empire. Emperor Qianlong’s more dramatic reform took place in 1763, when he dictated that all Manchu envoys to Chosŏn from that moment onward should ride hors- es instead of taking sedan chairs in Chosŏn. The emperor explained that although Chosŏn had provided sedan chairs for the missions to show its obedience to and respect for the “imperial envoys of the Heavenly Dynasty,” the Manchu officials were expert horsemen and should not ride in sedan chairs. The emperor in- structed the king to end permanently the convention of welcoming the imperial envoys with sedan chairs and to provide only horses instead. The Qing docu- ments do not explain why the emperor suddenly changed this longstanding convention. But according to the first-rank translator of the mission led by Hongying (1707–71), Xu Zongmen, who was a Beijing resident of Korean background, the emperor had originally picked another Manchu official as the envoy but, realizing how obese the chosen official was, asked him how he would make the long trip to Chosŏn. The envoy replied that since he would ride in a sedan chair, his weight would not be a problem. The emperor became angry, and to underline the Manchu martial spirit, he immediately replaced the envoy with Hongying, who was an excellent horseman. The emperor admonished Hongying to display “righteousness” (Ch., zhengda) in the outer fan and to avoid any “wretchedness” (Ch., weisuo). Meanwhile, the Korean emissaries, the emperor said, were exempt from the new rules and could maintain their custom of taking carriages to Beijing.¹⁰⁵ The Qianlong emperor’s quest to maintain and strengthen the Manchuness of the Manchus under his supervision thus helped the Qing improve its image in the eyes of its subordinate and to showcase its virtues in practice. Arbitrating Border Disputes The Qing emperor also served as the highest arbitrator in border conflicts and border-crossing disputes. In each case of border conflict with Chosŏn, it was the emperor—rather than the king, a historical precedent, or a border rule—who made the final decision. The geographical connection between the two countries occasioned a considerable number of illegal border crossings from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. These thorny cases posed a challenge to the Qing, in particular to the emperors, in terms of balancing the Qing’s lofty Zongfan discourse and its practical concerns. This aspect of the Qing’s policy underwent a major change from the Kangxi to the Qianlong period. In the Shunzhi and early Kangxi periods, the Manchu monarchs often doled out severe pun- ishments to the king or his officials over border disputes and often sent special envoys to Chosŏn for in-person investigation. The emperors embraced this ap- proach primarily because the Qing had not yet consolidated its rule in the wake of the Southern Ming (1644–62) and its influences and was worried about the possibility of a Chosŏn rebellion against the Qing. But after the Kangxi emperor suppressed the revolt of the Three Feudatories in the 1680s, the Qing praised Chosŏn for its loyalty and adopted a more relaxed policy on border conflicts with the country, eventually ceasing to send special investigative envoys. The Qing court in the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods following Kangxi governed a country that had been unified to an unprecedented degree since 1644. The court consequently focused on reinforcing the cosmopolitan ideology of all-under-Heaven in the Qing’s foreign relations. Although the emperors had clear views on the Qing’s geographical borders, they preferred to rely on traditional Zongfan norms in settling border disputes with Chosŏn. The Qing’s border policy toward Chosŏn thus became more conservative than aggressive, forming a sharp contrast with the Qing’s contemporary policy in the southwest and northwest, where the new empire continued to expand its territory. On the Chosŏn side, the savvy king and local officials applied the same Zongfan norms in their sophisticated ne- gotiations with their Qing counterparts, leaving the emperor in Beijing with no option but to endorse one Korean proposal after another.
The Mangniushao case provides a good example. In 1745 the Manchu general of Mukden, Daldangga (?–1760), suggested to Emperor Qianlong that the Qing set up a border outpost at Mangniushao near the Yalu River in order to prevent Koreans from illegally crossing the border river to sell or buy grains or to search for ginseng in Manchuria. Although in 1731 Daldangga’s predecessor, Nasutu (?–1749), had likewise proposed an outpost at Mangniushao, Emperor Yongzheng had rejected the proposal because of the king’s opposition and upheld his father’s policy, in place since 1715, of prohibiting all construction in this area.¹⁰⁶ Prompted by an increase in illegal border crossings, Daldangga resurrected Nasutu’s plan and proposed to repair the broken parts of the Willow Palisade and to open lands outside the palisade for cultivation. Emperor Qianlong initially supported Daldangga’s plan and sent a Mongol minister, Bandi (?–1755), to visit the area to confirm that Mangniushao was indeed inside China’s borders and that it would be appropriate for China to establish an outpost there. At the last moment, however, the emperor reversed his stance, invoking the precedents set by the decisions of his grandfather in 1715 and his father in 1731, as well as a decision he himself had made in another case in 1737. To justify his rejection of the proposal, he cited the imperative of “cherishing the small.” Furthermore, the emperor told Daldangga that no further such proposals should be made to the court and that Daldangga and his successors in Mukden should follow established rules in managing border affairs with Chosŏn.¹⁰⁷ In this way, the emperor reduced the possibility of further conflicts in this border area and helped stabilize the two coun- tries’ relationship from the top down. Barbarianizing the Periphery: The Qing’s Institutional Zongfan Discourse The Changing Meaning of Barbarians from Yongzheng to Qianlong The Qing interpretation of the civilized–barbarian distinction underwent a sharp change in the transitional days between the reigns of Yongzheng and Qianlong. In the late 1720s, Emperor Yongzheng had made the putative barbarity of the Qing a public issue among Qing scholars because of his response to the case of Zeng Jing (1679–1735). Encouraged by the civilized–barbarian discourse, Zeng had plotted to rebel against the Manchu “barbarians,” but after he was prosecuted, he re- versed his stance and endorsed the Qing, whereupon the emperor released him from prison. In June 1733, while Zeng was in the provinces giving lectures on the dynasty’s virtues, the emperor issued an edict to prohibit the practice of changing Chinese characters with the meaning of “barbarian” (Ch., hu, lu, yi, di) in books. The Manchu monarch defined the term “barbarian” geographically and confessed that the ancestors of the current dynasty could be called “eastern barbarians,” like ancient Chinese saints. This tone had been set by his great-grandfather Hongtaiji in 1636 in his letter to the king of Chosŏn, and Yongzheng himself had re- peated the same points in his book responding to Zeng, Great Righteousness Resolving Confusion (Ch., Dayi juemi lu) in 1729.¹⁰⁸ By proclaiming that “people living both within and outside China belong to the same family” (Ch., Zhong Wai yijia), Yongzheng insisted that the civilized–barbarian distinction should not be under- stood in a cultural sense, and even if it were, only those who were “beyond civilization” (Ch., wanghua zhi wai), like the Zunghar, might truly be called “barbarians.”¹⁰⁹ Under this definition, the outer fan of the Qing also seemed to be excluded from the category of barbarians. Yongzheng’s statements suggest that the Manchu rulers embraced cultural egalitarianism in order to redistribute cultural resources within the multiethnic empire.¹¹⁰ It is safe to say that the Manchu emperor was trying to overcome the prejudice inherent in the stereotypical civilized–barbarian distinction among Han Chinese intellectuals in the process of consolidating the Manchu regime’s orthodox legitimacy. This sustained effort can also be seen in the move by Yongzheng’s father and grandfather to expand considerably the list of Chinese monarchs who were enshrined in the Temple of Ancient Monarchs (Ch., Lidai di- wang miao), with the goal of establishing the Qing as the legitimate successor to previous dynasties that had likewise been identified as “China.”¹¹¹ With Yongzheng’s policy, the yardstick for judging “barbarians” suddenly snapped, as the ruling dynasty now identified itself both with the ancient rulers and with the
eastern barbarians. After assuming the throne in 1735, the Qianlong emperor not only quickly revoked his father’s pardon and executed Zeng but also reversed Yongzheng’s ap- proach by clearly differentiating the “civilized” Qing from the “barbarian” countries surrounding it. Qianlong thus brought the civilized–barbarian discourse back to its pre-Yongzheng meaning, in which cultural factors played a pivotal role. He exploited his father’s heritage by turning the latter’s policy of permitting the free and public use of all Chinese characters for “barbarian” into a tool for propagating the opposite message in the context of the civilized– barbarian discourse— namely, one that excluded the Qing from this category. No longer would the Great Qing downgrade itself to the rank of barbarian.¹¹² Consequently, in the Qian- long period the use of the term “foreign barbarians” in official documents reached its historical zenith.¹¹³ Through this terminology, the Qing combined its civi- lized centrality with cultural superiority. Qianlong achieved this symbolic goal by formally designating all other countries as barbarians, along with the majority of the ethnic groups under his rule, and one of the most important targets of this barbarianization at the normative level was Chosŏn. At the time when Yongzheng published his book on the definition of “barbarian,” some Manchu envoys to Chosŏn had taken to visiting Jizi Shrine in P’yŏngyang on their way back from Hansŏng.¹¹⁴ As mentioned in the introduction, Jizi was said to be the founding father of the ancient Korean regime, invested by the Chinese monarch of the Zhou Dynasty with the lands of Chosŏn, where he maintained a familistic and tributary relationship with the central court of China. Given the intense debate around ethnicity and the civilized–barbarian dichotomy in the late years of Yongzheng’s reign, the Manchu envoys’ visits to Jizi Shrine could help the Manchu regime bolster its Chineseness and its claims to legitimacy beyond its borders. When the Qing overcame the challenge of the civilized– barbarian distinction within China in the first half of the Qianlong period, visits to Jizi Shrine ceased, although Chinese historical records continued to celebrate the familial relationship between the Chinese and the Koreans. The Qing’s Systematic, Institutional Barbarianization of Chosŏn and Others In June 1751 the Qianlong emperor instructed the governors-general and governors of border provinces to draw and submit pictures of “domestic and foreign bar- barians” (Ch., neiwai miaoyi, waiyi fanzhong) in order to demonstrate the flourishing of the Qing.¹¹⁵ The emperor was following a precedent set by Emperor Taizong (r. 627–49) of the Tang Dynasty, who was believed to have brought China its most prosperous days in the pre-Qing era. Since Tang Taizong had commis- sioned paintings of the barbarians to celebrate the great moment in which “ten thousand countries came to revere the emperor” (Ch., wanguo laichao),¹¹⁶ Qian- long had every reason to commemorate his dynasty’s accomplishments in the same way. Even during the Qing expansion into Central Asia, Qianlong identified “the efforts of the Han and Tang dynasties to extend Chinese power into Central Asia” as “historical milestones” by which to measure his own progress.¹¹⁷ Beyond the obvious political factors, contemporary popular culture may also have motivated Qianlong’s desire for an illustrated record of the Qing’s imperial expansion. As a big fan of Chinese opera who contributed to the birth of Peking opera, Qianlong may have been influenced by popular operas that extolled the virtues of the civilized center of the world. These operas can be dated at least to the Yuan, but in the Ming and early Qing they were still being performed in cities such as Beijing. Their scripts described the Ming as the “Heavenly Dynasty,” the “upper country,” or the “central civilized country,” bordered by “barbarians in four directions” (primarily represented as Chosŏn, Annam, and political units in Inner Asia) who paid tribute and presented palace memorials to the great em- peror of China.¹¹⁸ In 1761, ten years after Qianlong ordered the drawings, the first edition of the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Ch., Huang Qing zhigong tu) was published in four volumes, featuring six hundred pictures of people from the Qing’s outer fan and from “barbarian places” within Qing territory or on its periphery. The first picture in the collection was of a Korean official who wore a Ming-style official robe but was labeled “a barbarian official of the country of
Chosŏn” (Ch., Chaoxian guo yiguan) (see figure 2.3). Once again, Chosŏn served as the model for others in the collection, and its prototypical role was made clear by Qing scholars in the Essentials of Complete Books of the Four Storehouses Catalog (Ch., Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao).¹¹⁹ Chosŏn, “Little China,” was thus institu- tionally converted into a country of barbarians by the Qing’s political discourse and imperial documentary mechanism. Following Chosŏn, other countries, including Ryukyu, Annam, Siam, Sulu, Lanchang, Burma, Britain, France, Japan, the Netherlands, and Russia, likewise be- came barbarians in the Qing nomenclature, as did many of the diverse peoples within Qing territory. In nearly every case, the Qing narrative constructed an impe- rial pedigree by reviewing a long history of Zongfan relations with the foreign “country” (Ch., guo; Ma., gurun) or domestic “tribe” (Ch., buluo; Ma., aiman) from the Zhou to the Ming Dynasties and emphasized that it was the Qing’s merits that prompted the “barbarians” to “send emissaries to come and pay tribute” (Ch., qianshi rugong; Ma., elcin takūrafi albabun jafanjimbi) or “come to kowtow with tribute” (Ch., chaogong; Ma., albabun jafame hengkilenjimbi).¹²⁰ In this way, the Qing systematically assimilated the historical legacies of previous dynasties into its own Zongfan relations with these countries and tribes and consolidated its legitimacy as the civilized center, or Zhongguo (Ma., Dulimbai gurun).¹²¹ Also in 1761, in order to celebrate the empress dowager’s seventieth birthday, the Qing published another magnificent collection, Illustrations of the Great Celebration (Ch., Luhuan huijing tu). The first illustration carried the title “Ten thousand coun- tries came to revere the emperor,” the precise phrase the Tang Dynasty had used, and Chosŏn’s emissaries occupied a distinguished position within it.¹²² If there was a “documentary institutionalization” for the Qing,¹²³ in terms of the Qing’s construction of its civilized identity, this process was substantially accomplished in 1761.
FIGURE 2.3. A Chosŏn official in the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Huang Qing zhigong tu, 33).
Behind the cheerful facade of the great multiethnic empire lay the axiom of the Qing’s centrality in the world. And that world, of course, often found its way to the Qing threshold. Britain, which the Qing knew as “the country of Ying ji li” (“Ying ji li” is a transliteration of “England”; Ch., Yingjili guo; Ma., Ing gi lii gurun), was one of the countries portrayed as barbarian in the collection of 1761. At the end of that year, the Qianlong emperor instructed his representatives in Guangzhou to notify the “men from afar” and “foreign barbarians” there—the British merchants—that “the Heavenly Dynasty has everything it needs, so it does not need foreign barbarians to bring trivial goods for trade.”¹²⁴ The edict was a response to petitions from James Flint in 1759 and Nicholas Skottowe in 1761. The two were representatives of the British merchants who wanted to change the Canton system of trade, which channeled all trade with the West through that south- ern port. Their efforts not only were futile but in fact led to stricter regulations on Western traders in China.¹²⁵ In this sense, the rebuff that George Macartney’s mission later received from the emperor in 1793 was merely a repetition of the institutionalized rhetoric that had been directed at the British in China more than three decades earlier. Popularizing Chosŏn’s Status as Foreign Barbarians in Imperial Discourse The prolonged construction of the Qing’s new identity and the reorientation of its political discourse vis-à-vis other countries was not just the result of the emper- or’s personal activities or political motivations, imposed on the administration from the top down. Nor should they be understood purely as the outcome of implementing the political will of the Manchu court. Rather, Qing officials at the local level, from counties to prefectures to provinces, also contributed to this construction from the bottom up. As a result, in the eighteenth century, Chosŏn’s status as foreign barbarians was popularized within the norms of Qing foreign relations. This point is illustrated by the Qing policy toward shipwrecked fishermen from Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, and other countries who were rescued by local Chi- nese officials along the coast. At least from the early Qianlong period, Qing officials called these victims “barbarians who suffered from storms” (Ch., zaofeng nanyi; Ma., edun de lasihibufi jobolon de tušaha i niyalma) and sent them to Beijing or to the nearest provincial capital, from whence they could return home with embassies from their countries. From the 1730s to the 1880s, the Qing archives were full of such reports of local officials looking after shipwrecked fishermen; re- ports concerning fishermen from Chosŏn were particularly prominent.¹²⁶ By accommodating these victims on humanitarian grounds, the Qing sought to high- light its policy of “cherishing men from afar” and to “display the deep and outstanding merits of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., zhao tianchao rouyuan shenren; Ma., abkai gurun i goroki urse be gosire šumin gosin be iletulembi). This sort of rhetoric, aimed at justifying and consolidating the “way of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao tizhi; Ma., abkai gurun i doro yoso), reached its peak in the Qianlong period.¹²⁷ Chosŏn again represented the best example of the “way of the Heavenly Dynasty,” a fact that permeated many aspects of Qing-Chosŏn contacts. For instance, in 1776, one thousand taels of silver belonging to a Korean mission were stolen by Chinese thieves near Mukden. Emperor Qianlong instructed the Manchu gen- eral of Mukden, Hūngšang (1718–81), to compensate the mission for its losses in order to “uphold the way of our Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., he wo tianchao tizhi; Ma. musei amba gurun i doro de acanambi). The emperor emphasized in his Chinese edict that “the Chosŏn are a people of foreign barbarians” (Ch., Chaoxian nai waiyi zhi ren), further elucidating in the Manchu version of the edict that “the people of the country of Chosŏn are a people of foreign barbarians” (Ma., Coohiyan gurun i niyalma serengge, tulergi aiman i niyalma).¹²⁸ This case was not exceptional, and the wealth of similar cases indicates the maturation of the Qing’s Zongfan discourse.¹²⁹ Despite the harmonious imperial picture the Qing painted, its model fan was simultaneously creating an alternate vision. While Chosŏn continued publicly to display its obedience to the Qing, sending tributary missions to Beijing over and above what imperial edicts demanded, in private the Chosŏn king and his
officials, along with Chosŏn intellectuals, were reluctant to identify the Qing as the supreme representative of Chinese culture. This story is explored in the next chapter.
2
BARBARIANIZING CHOSŎN
The Chosŏn Model and the Chinese Empire, 1644–1761
The year 1644 marked the beginning of a new stage in the Qing’s exploitation of the Chosŏn model as an institutionalized policy for constructing a new imperial order within and beyond the Qing’s borders. Informed by Chosŏn’s status as the Qing’s prototypical outer fan, this model manifested itself in well-established and highly programmed formalities in the contacts between the Qing and its outer fan. Through the Chosŏn model, the Qing rulers initiated a twofold transformation by reversing and institutionalizing the discourse of the civilized–barbarian distinction: they enshrined the Qing as the new Heavenly Dynasty at the center of the known universe and converted Chosŏn and other countries into countries of barbarians on its periphery. The Qing accomplished this transformation conclusively in the middle of the eighteenth century, when the court published the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Ch., Huang Qing zhigong tu).
This chapter reveals the prolonged process by which the Qing gradually reconstructed a Chinese empire in the post-Ming world by legitimizing, enhancing, and practicing its new dual identity as China/Zhongguo and the Heavenly Dynasty through the Chosŏn model in its foreign relations from the first half of the seventeenth century to the second half of the eighteenth century. Over the course of this century and a half, the macrotransformation of the Manchu regime’s identity in the cosmopolitan politico-cultural context was deeply connected with its microtrans-formation in the Manchu-Chosŏn framework. If there was a tendency among China’s neighbors to decenter the Middle Kingdom after the Ming, this chapter brings to light the process of recentering the Middle Kingdom undertaken by the Qing.¹
Establishing a Dual Identity: The Qing as China and the Heavenly Dynasty
On October 30, 1644, Emperor Shunzhi offered a grand sacrifice to Heaven and Earth in the Qing’s new capital, Beijing. He asserted that the Qing would pacify China (Ch., sui Zhongguo) and set a good example for ten thousand countries (Ch., biaozheng wanbang).² For many people, this event marked the rise of the Qing as the equivalent of China/Zhongguo. In 1767, after finding that a magistrate in Yunnan Province had failed to refer to the Qing as the Heavenly Dynasty or China/Zhongguo in an official note to the foreign barbarians of Burma, Emperor Qianlong furiously pointed out that it is the rule for one to refer to the court as the ‘Heavenly Dynasty’ or ‘China’ when one mentions it to men from afar. Our country has unified the central area and external areas, and even the barbarians know the Great Qing’s virtue and civilization.³
Emperor Qianlong’s pronouncement indicates that the terms Heavenly Dynasty and Zhongguo were interchangeable. Historians of the Qing and modern China tend to follow the emperor, or at least the Qing’s political discourse as developed by the emperor, by treating China/Zhongguo and the Heavenly Dynasty as synonymous terms, both referring to the political unit of the Qing. Yet what the emperor did not mention—or was perhaps not able to realize—was that the Qing did not acquire the two titles simultaneously when it replaced the Ming in the early seventeenth century. As the emperor indicated, the two terms were used for the Qing almost exclusively in the context of foreign relations with men from afar or foreign barbarians, which generally referred to foreigners. In the domestic context, these terms were replaced by others, such as the Great Qing, our dynasty (Ch., wochao, benchao, or guochao), our country (Ch., wo guojia), and the imperial dynasty (Ch., huangchao or shengchao). In the first years after 1644, some Qing officials described the new regime as the Qing Dynasty (Ch., Qingchao), a successor to the Ming Dynasty in the context of foreign communications; this usage is found in correspondence between officials in Guangzhou
(Canton) and Siam in 1653. But Qingchao remains rare in Qing documents.⁴
As the Qing took over Beijing in 1644 and consolidated its rule over inner China afterward, it completed its transformation into Zhongguo, but its refashioning into the Heavenly Dynasty had barely started. In the late 1640s, when the Manchu Eight Banners were marching into South China, Southwest China, and Northwest China, the Qing began to use Chosŏn to construct its new image as the Heavenly Dynasty; however, the process turned out to be difficult and even embarrassing. According to early Qing archives, Qing scholars may have called the Qing the Heavenly Dynasty for the first time in a draft imperial edict in 1649 investing Yi Ho (King Hyojong) as the king of Chosŏn. The draft edict was written by Fu Yijian (1609–65), a Han Chinese literatus from Shandong Province who had won first place in the Qing’s first imperial civil-service examination in 1645.⁵ By emphasizing that the king of Chosŏn should be an important subordinate serving the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., pinghan tianchao) and loyal to the central civilized country (Ch., Huaxia), Fu equated the Qing, which had become Zhongguo, with the Heavenly Dynasty and the civilized country. However, the final version of the edict that was sent to Chosŏn omitted the two latter terms and continued to use the term upper country to refer to the Qing, suggesting that the Qing was not yet prepared to claim to be the Heavenly Dynasty.⁶
China, or Zhongguo, could be defined in a general geographical sense by the Qing borders, regardless of how the borders were expanded and redrawn, so long as the Qing controlled the Ming’s territory, or at least the central plain (Ch., Zhongyuan).⁷ In fact, after 1644, when the Qing rulers began writing and revising their history, they deliberately deleted some Manchu terms referring to the Ming as Zhongguo. For example, Hongtaiji, in a letter to the Ming on July 29, 1632, had explained that the Jin fought with the Ming because the Ming officials in Liaodong did not follow the way of China (Ma., Liyoodung i hafasa Dulimbai gurun i doroi tondoi beiderakū), using the Manchu term Dulimbai gurun in clear reference to China/Zhongguo. Later, the narrative written in Chinese replaced the phrase the way of China (Ch., Zhongguo/Zhongyuan zhi dao) with the way of rightness (Ch., zhengzhi zhi dao). While Hongtaiji in 1632 had called the Ming your China (Ma., suweni Dulimbai gurun), the post-1644 Chinese edition replaced this term with your country (Ch., erguo), deleting the word for China.⁸ The changing terminology shows that after 1644 the Qing deeply identified itself with China.
Given the ethnic background of the ruling house of the Qing, many scholars have been interested in establishing when the Qing court officially used the Manchu term Dulimbai gurun to define itself as China/Zhongguo. Some cite the year 1689 and the Treaty of Nerchinsk that the Qing signed with Russia. In fact, the Qing court had used this Manchu term to represent its identity much earlier in its negotiations with Zheng Jing (1642–81), the eldest son of Zheng Chenggong (1624–62), who occupied Taiwan in 1662. While Zheng Jing never questioned the Qing’s identity as China, he argued that Taiwan was not a part of China in an effort to secure for Taiwan an independent status like that of Chosŏn. Emperor Kangxi, however, reiterated in a decree in 1669 that Zheng belonged to the people of China (Ch., Zhongguo zhi ren; Ma., Dulimbai gurun i niyalma).⁹ In the late Kangxi period, the Qing presented itself as China in a favorable and definitive way. For example, in his travelogue, the Manchu official Tulišen, who was dispatched as an envoy to the Turgūt Mongols in Russia in 1712, generally referred to the Qing as Dulimbai gurun (China) or meni Dulimbai gurun (our China); these terms were rendered into Chinese as Zhongguo or Zhonghua when Tulišen’s journal was published in 1723 in both languages. Tulišen also consistently translated terms such as our place (Ma., meni bade) as our China (Ch., wo Zhongguo) and referred to all people of the Great Qing, such as the Manchus, Han Chinese, and Mongols, as people of China. More importantly, following Emperor Kangxi’s instructions, Tulišen emphasized China’s Confucian nature to Russia, claiming that our country takes fidelity, filial piety, benevolence, justice, and sincerity as fundamentals (Ma., meni gurun i banjire tondo hiyoošun, gosin, jurgan, akdun be fulehe da obumbi; Ch., wo guojia yi zhong xiao ren yi xin wei genben).¹⁰
By contrast, the Heavenly Dynasty, or Tianchao, could not be delineated in the same way, since it was based on the notion of all-under-Heaven—a China-centered politico-cultural term with no connection to borders in the geographical sense. Put another way, the Qing could define itself as China from within, but it
could not identify itself as the Heavenly Dynasty without support from outside the Qing: the new regime would first have to erect a new, Qing-centric, and multinational Zongfan system. The expectation that the Qing would become a new imperial power required the regime to transform the countries that the Ming had represented as its fan into fan in the Qing’s orbit. The Ming had pursued the same policy when it became the ruler of China (Ch., zhu Zhongguo) in 1368, immediately sending envoys to the countries that had served as fan of its predecessor, the Yuan Dynasty, with the aim of converting them into fan of the Ming.¹¹ However, unlike the Ming, the Manchu rulers in 1644 faced the tremendous challenge of overcoming their previous status as barbarians, as defined by the civilized–barbarian distinction. Compared with the mission to identify the Qing as China and as the legitimate successor to the Ming within the Qing’s borders, the quest to construct the Qing as the new Heavenly Dynasty beyond its borders called for extraordinary effort.
From the perspective of comparative philology, the Chinese term Tianchao was not initially widely adopted in the Manchu language, in which it was literally rendered as abkai gurun (Heavenly country).¹² The Manchu rulers had difficulty identifying with this term and the Chinese political concepts behind it. In July 1637, for example, after reviewing the draft edict of investiture to the king of Chosŏn, Hongtaiji commented that he did not like to equate himself with Heaven as the Ming had done, suggesting that his officials must have employed the Chinese word tian (Heaven) or the Manchu term abka (Heaven) in the draft.¹³ Nevertheless, the task of reconstructing the Qing as the new China in the seventeenth century left the Manchu rulers with no choice but to embrace the term and the rationale behind it.
The intellectual transformation of the Qing ruling house is evident in the visit of the fifth Dalai Lama (1617–82) to Beijing in late 1652 and early 1653. The Qing’s Manchu officials supported Emperor Shunzhi’s plan to greet the Dalai Lama in Daiga in Inner Mongolia, arguing that the Ūlet Mongols, who controlled Tibet militarily at the time, would be pacified by the emperor’s gracious behavior. But the Han Chinese officials argued that the emperor was the ruler of all countries under Heaven (Ch., tianxia guojia zhi zhu) and should not violate conventions by meeting with a lama, even the Dalai Lama, in person outside the capital. Still hesitant about going to Daiga, the emperor took part in a grand ceremony commemorating Confucius at the Directorate of Education (Ch., Guozi jian) in Beijing, where he knelt down twice, each time making three prostrations. The ceremony, attended by many high-ranking Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese officials and generals, conferred on the emperor the mantle of the supreme agent of Confucianism. Right after the ceremony, two Han Chinese grand secretaries, Hong Chengchou (1593–1665) and Chen Zhilin (1605–66), submitted a memorial to the emperor entreating him not to go to Daiga to welcome the Dalai Lama because astrological phenomena reported by the Imperial Astronomical Bureau suggested that intruders would threaten the emperorship. The two officials emphasized that the way of Heaven is infinite (Ch., tiandao shenyuan) and could not be predicted. After reading the memorial, the emperor immediately abandoned the idea of visiting Daiga. Instead he welcomed the Dalai Lama in the South Garden of Beijing.¹⁴ As this episode suggests, the Manchu emperor had to adjust to his role as the Son of Heaven in the Confucian sense in the post-1644 politico-cultural and ideological contexts, notwithstanding the Qing’s serious religious and military concerns over its western frontier in Inner Asia.
Reconstructing the Chinese Empire: The Rise of the Chosŏn Model
From East Asia to Southeast and Inner Asia: The Qing’s Presentation of the Chosŏn Model
The Qing did not stand alone as it sought to construct its new dual identity. Chosŏn, the first Confucian outer fan of the Qing, played an unparalleled role in providing the Manchu conquerors with resources to form and articulate the Qing’s new identity. As early as 1650, in a palace memorial to Emperor Shunzhi, the king called the Qing the Heavenly Dynasty, even though the Qing court itself was still reluctant to use the term.¹⁵ The development of Chosŏn’s essential role in the
Qing-centric Zongfan world can be divided into two historical phases: the seven years from 1637 to 1643 and the 251 years from 1644 to 1894. In the first phase, Chosŏn began serving as the outer fan of the Qing by adhering to the clearly formulated and institutionalized discipline of the Sino-Korean Zongfan system, which had functioned between the Ming and Chosŏn for more than two centuries. As chapter 1 described, the Qing was able to make a significant move toward the transformation of its identity by assuming the place of the Ming in the framework of Sino-Korean relations. The frequent visits of Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries to Mukden provided the Qing with good opportunities to emphasize and practice its centrality in the known world.
After 1644, with its dramatic emergence as a Ming-style, nationwide regime and the extensive expansion of its territory, the Qing found itself in the position of having to manage relations with multiple neighboring countries, such as Annam, Ryukyu, Lanchang (Laos), Siam, Sulu (the Philippines), and Burma, that had served as subordinates to the Ming. Having inherited these fan from the Ming, what Qing China now needed to do was to resume and refashion the Zongfan system according to its own standards. On this front, the Qing had gained valuable experience from its institutionalized communications with Chosŏn since the 1630s and, through these communications, had developed a mature model of a Qing-centric Zongfan arrangement. The Chosŏn model laid out a path whereby a country or a political entity could follow Chosŏn into the Qingcentric system primarily by receiving imperial investitures from the Qing, adopting the regnal titles of the Qing in its calendar, and sending tributary emissaries to the Qing.¹⁶ The Chosŏn model was a pattern centered on rituals.¹⁷ Although the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship had been inaugurated by the Manchu military conquest of 1637, as a result of which the crown prince, another prince, and sons of high-ranking Chosŏn officials were detained in Mukden as hostages, the unpleasant situation began to change when the Qing released the hostages in 1644. The Qing also progressively reduced the tributes required of Chosŏn until, by the late 1730s, they were less than one-tenth of what they had been in the late 1630s and became a mere symbol of political subordination.¹⁸ What accompanied the tributes was the performance of a set of highly programmed and increasingly elaborate formalities that demonstrated the hierarchical Zongfan order and the Qing’s new normative identity.
In the first years after 1644, the Qing found the Chosŏn model the most powerful and practical way of managing its relations with other countries and of extending its influence and authority. Emperor Shunzhi articulated the importance of Chosŏn’s model role in 1647 after the Qing army conquered Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong Provinces and prepared to establish relations with Ryukyu, Annam, Siam, and Japan. On March 17 and August 25, the emperor announced that the Qing would give preferential treatment to these countries as to Chosŏn (Ch., yu Chaoxian yiti youdai) as long as they subordinated themselves to ‘the civilized’ and paid tribute to the court (Ch., qingxin xianghua, chengchen rugong).¹⁹ In this way, the Manchu rulers publicized Chosŏn’s prototypical fan status and established the Qing-Chosŏn relationship as the yardstick for relations between the Qing and other countries or political entities. Rather than adopting the aggressive colonial policy of the Yuan, the Qing learned from the Ming’s Zongfan mechanism, using the sophisticated and markedly Confucian Chosŏn model to maintain stability on its frontiers and to construct a new Chinese empire beyond them.²⁰
As a result of the Qing rulers’ efforts at promoting the Chosŏn model after 1644, political units beyond the Qing’s control also came to regard it as an ideal way of solving conflicts with the Qing while retaining their own privileges. Between 1662 and 1669, for example, when the Qing was trying to persuade Zheng Jing to surrender in Taiwan, Zheng insisted on following the Chosŏn model (Ch., zhao Chaoxian shili) into the Qing’s Zongfan system by proclaiming subordination and paying tribute (Ch., chengchen nagong) but refraining from cutting his hair in the Qing style.²¹ For Zheng, the Chosŏn model appeared to offer the most favorable and promising way to resolve the standoff with the Qing. Emperor Kangxi refused this proposal on the grounds that Chosŏn had been always a foreign country (Ch., conglai suoyou zhi waiguo; Ma., daci bihe encu gurun), whereas Zheng belonged to the people of China.²² These negotiations show the perceived broad applicability and coverage of the Chosŏn model in situations in which neither independence nor complete annexation was an immediate and acceptable
solution.
The Chosŏn model provided the Manchu ruling house with a general blueprint for dealing with other political entities. Over the Qing period, two parallel central institutions were responsible for the affairs of outer fan : the Mongolian Superintendency mainly managed outer fan located to the north and west of Qing China, while the Ministry of Rites was in charge of fan in the east, the south, and the west. This book focuses on the outer fan under the management of the Ministry of Rites rather than those under the Mongolian Superintendency, although the two types of outer fan may have been associated through the Chosŏn model in the early years of the Qing’s expansion to Inner Asia and the development of its Eurasian empire.
This inconspicuous connection between the eastern and western frontiers of the Qing empire had manifested itself at least by 1653, when the Qing invested the fifth Dalai Lama and the Gusi Khan of the Ūlet Mongols by incorporating them into the Qing-dominated extended family and placing them under the Qing’s jurisdiction. At the time, the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites were administratively still closely connected with one another: it was a Manchu minister (Ch., shangshu; Ma., aliha amban) from the Ministry of Rites, Langkio, and a vice minister (Ch., shilang; Ma., ashan i amban) from the Mongolian Superintendency, Sidali, who together gave the Dalai Lama and the Gusi Khan the books of investiture. The imperial statement in the khan’s investiture book bore a remarkable resemblance to that issued to the new king of Chosŏn in 1649. It declared that the recipient must serve as the Qing’s subordinate or fence (Ch., pingfu) until the Yellow River becomes as narrow as a belt and Mount Tai becomes as small as a grindstone (Ch., daili shanhe).²³ In addition, the mechanism governing the local products and tributes that the lama and the khan presented to the emperor and the empress dowager in 1654 and the imperial gifts the lama and the khan received in return was much like that used between the Qing and Chosŏn.²⁴ Finally, the imperial mandates of investiture (Ch., gaoming; Ma., g’aoming) that the Qing issued to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni bore the same imperial seal—Seal of declaring imperial mandate (Ch., zhigao zhi bao; Ma., hese wasimbure boobai)—as had the mandate investing the new king of Chosŏn.²⁵
If we compare the imperial codes of the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites, it seems that the former borrowed institutional regulations from the latter to formalize the communications between the Manchu rulers and the Mongol fan in Inner Asia. The prototypical role of Chosŏn in the Qingcentric Zongfan system may have contributed to the Qing’s policy of integrating the Inner Asian political and military entities into the Qing’s extended family.²⁶ On the surface, the geographical responsibilities of the Ministry of Rites did not overlap with those of the Mongolian Superintendency, as Qing officials confirmed in 1743, so Qing-Chosŏn contacts were ostensibly unrelated to Qing– Inner Asian contacts.²⁷ But on the political level, soon after 1644 the Qing rulers began to apply the Zongfan rationale behind the Chosŏn model to Inner Asia, along with the Manchu court’s promulgation of the discourse of all-under-Heaven and people without difference between the outside and the inside, as part of the long process of subordinating the Zunghar Mongols, whom the Qing rulers treated as people beyond virtue and civilization.²⁸ Administratively, the Ministry of Rites was also in charge of the affairs of some lamas in Gansu and Shaanxi until the 1740s, when it transferred this jurisdiction to the Mongolian Superintendency.²⁹ The Chosŏn model, in this sense, gradually became a normative, standard, and powerful soft weapon in the repertoire of the Qing. It allowed the Manchu rulers to govern the areas conquered by the formidable Eight Banners in Inner Asia, which arguably smoothed the way for the Qing to insert its civil administrative system into these areas during the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods.
Who Were the Barbarians? The Imperial Code and the Qing’s Reforms
Under the Qing, the Zongfan order was maintained and embodied by the exchange of emissaries between the Qing and its subordinate countries (Ch., shuguo; Ma., tulergi gurun or harangga gurun), which were generally described as subordinate countries of foreign barbarians (Ch., waiyi shuguo). All exchanges were conducted in accordance with The Universal Tributary Regulations (Ch., Chaogong tongli) codified by the Ministry of Rites, and the performance of the exchanges
was supervised by the Host-Guest Office (Ch., Zhuke qingli si) of the Ministry of Rites. These regulations primarily consisted of the following seven mandates:
Investiture (Ch., cefeng): The Qing emperor gave the new king of each fan a patent of appointment through an imperial mandate of investiture along with a decree (Ch., chiyu) and an official seal for use in correspondence.
Regnal titles (Ch., nianhao): The fan adopted the Qing’s regnal titles as the way to enumerate years.
Calendar (Ch., shuoli): The fan used the Qing’s calendar and celebrated Chinese festivals.
The dispatch of emissaries to pay tribute to the Qing (Ch., chaogong), with a frequency individually determined by the Qing.
The conferral of noble rank on a deceased king or privileged members of the royal house of the fan (Ch., fengshi).
Reporting events to the Qing (Ch., zoushi): Each fan informed the emperor of important domestic events but did not need to ask for instructions and could assume that the Qing would not intervene in its domestic affairs.
Trade (Ch., maoyi or hushi), including trade at the frontiers and at the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations (Ch., Huitong siyi guan; Ma., Acanjime isanjire tulergi gurun i bithe ubaliyambure kuren) in Beijing.³⁰
The Qing made considerable changes to the Zongfan system that it inherited from the Ming. The Ming had also relied on The Universal Tributary Regulations, by which the Ministry of Rites managed routine exchanges between China and the subordinate barbarian countries in the four quarters (Ch., fanguo or siyi)—Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, the Jurchens, Mongolia, and other countries and political entities—as well as interactions between the Ming and indigenous chieftains (Ch., tuguan or tusi), including local chieftains in Yunnan, Guangxi, Guizhou, Sichuan, Hunan, and Hubei.³¹ But two significant changes distinguished the list of foreign barbarian countries in the new Qing regulations from the Ming’s list. First, the Qing excluded indigenous chieftains from its list of tributaries because of its policy toward barbarian chieftains (Ch., yimu) in southwestern China. Known as replacing the hereditary indigenous chieftains with rotating officials (Ch., gaitu guiliu), the policy had been inaugurated by the Yuan and the Ming, but only in the Yongzheng period of the Qing was it carried out on a truly large scale.³² The areas and populations under the chieftains’ control were integrated simultaneously into the Qing’s territory and into its household registration system.³³ The indigenous chieftains were thus outside the supervision of the Ministry of Rites. The line between barbarians belonging to these political units and barbarians from other countries was clear in the minds of the Manchu rulers at court and their deputies in the provinces.³⁴ Second, the Western countries gradually disappeared from the list of foreign barbarians in the tributary regulations. By the late fourteenth century, the Ming had fifteen outer fan countries, and the majority of these became the Qing’s outer fan, including Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, Lanchang, Siam, Sulu, and Burma.³⁵ From the 1760s to the 1840s during the Qing period, the list also included the Netherlands and the countries of the Western Ocean (Ch., Xiyang), but by the 1890s only these seven Asian countries remained on the list.³⁶
Whereas in the Qianlong period the Mongolian, Tibetan, and Muslim areas under the management of the Mongolian Superintendency had all entered [the Qing’s] map and registers (Ch., xianru bantu) and were presented like prefectures and counties (Ch., youru junxian),³⁷ the subordinate countries of foreign barbarians under the supervision of the Ministry of Rites were not integrated into the Qing’s core territory. Nor would these countries be treated as parts of the Republic or the People’s Republic of China in the twentieth century. By the same token, the dual management system for the outer fan—the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites—under the Qing made it difficult for people outside this institutional mechanism to draw a clear line between them. This might explain why, as discussed in chapter 5, some Qing officials in the late nineteenth century responded to complications involving Chosŏn by suggesting that
Beijing apply its policy vis-à-vis Mongolia and Tibet to Chosŏn by converting Chosŏn into prefectures and counties, as they supposed Chosŏn had been in the Qianlong period. The rationale behind this suggestion applied the basic structure of the Qing empire on its western frontier to the management of its eastern one, highlighting Chosŏn’s prominent subordinate position within the empire.
The role of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship is thus significant. This relationship should not be treated simply as a specific instance of the Zongfan system, as scholars have typically done. Rather, it is best understood as a prototype that shaped the formation of the Qing’s Zongfan system and helped the Manchu regime transform its political identity for the purpose of claiming centrality and accessing orthodox legitimacy in the process of reshuffling the Chinese world. In short, the Qing-Chosŏn relationship was the seedbed of the Qing’s entire Zongfan arrangement, from which the political legitimacy of both sides—the Qing and its outer fan—sprang.
Civilizing the Center: The Practice of the Chosŏn Model
Five aspects of the Qing’s practice of the Chosŏn model, aspects embodied in and undergirded by ritual practices and documentary discourse, showcased the Qing’s identity as the civilized center. These aspects concern the frequency and composition of missions; the overland route and the Sino-Korean geographical boundaries; humble palace memorials, imperial mandates and decrees, and orthodox legitimacy; tributes, gifts, and court-to-court interactions; and receptions and rituals.
The Frequency and Composition of Imperial and Tributary Missions
The exchange of missions between the Qing and Chosŏn started in 1637 and continued without interruption until the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. The frequency of Chosŏn’s missions to the Qing was higher than that of any other country. Whereas other subordinate countries sent tributary missions to Beijing every other year (Ryukyu), every three years (Siam), every four years (Annam), every five years (Sulu), or every ten years (Lanchang and Burma), Chosŏn dispatched several missions every year.³⁸ Although the imperial code required Chosŏn to send an annual tributary mission at the end of each year that would simultaneously serve as the mission for the winter solstice, the imperial birthday, and the lunar New Year, Chosŏn never hesitated to send more emissaries under different names, dispatching a new mission before the previous one had even returned in order to nourish its relationship with the Qing.³⁹ From 1637 to 1894, Chosŏn sent about 698 official missions to the Qing for twenty-six different purposes, an average of 2.71 missions per year.⁴⁰ In 1784 and 1788, Emperor Qianlong commented jubilantly that in this respect Chosŏn was a peer of the Qing’s inner fan.⁴¹
According to the imperial regulations, a Korean mission was to have thirty members: an envoy, an associate envoy, a secretary, three interpreters, and twenty-four tribute guard officers. The envoy, associate envoy, and secretary were the three key members. As a special privilege to Chosŏn, the number of attendants and servants attached to the mission was not limited. By contrast, the missions from Ryukyu, Lanchang, Burma, and the Netherlands were not to exceed twenty members; those from other Western countries were limited to twenty-two, those from Siam to twenty-six, and those from Annam to thirty.⁴² Many Korean scholars and businessmen visited Beijing as mission attendants or servants in order to experience Chinese culture or to seek their fortunes, so a Korean mission often numbered several hundred people. For example, the annual tributary mission of 1653 had a total of 225 members, the gratitude mission of 1777 a total of 310, the gratitude mission of 1803 a total of 213, and the congratulatory mission of 1889 a total of 311.⁴³ In 1829, two missions with more than six hundred people combined arrived in Beijing at the same time, forcing the Ministry of Rites and the Ministry of Works to borrow twenty large tents from the Imperial Household Department (Ch., Neiwu fu) to house the additional visitors. Until the late nineteenth century, the legions of Chosŏn’s missions continued their pilgrimages to Beijing every
year with a large number of tributes and horses.⁴⁴
By contrast, the Qing sent far fewer and smaller imperial missions to Chosŏn. From 1637 to 1894, the Qing undertook 172 missions to Hansŏng, an average of 0.67 missions per year. In the early Qing, the Manchu court frequently dispatched emissaries to investigate cases of homicide and smuggling at the border, to negotiate resolutions to these cases with the king, and sometimes to discuss the punishment of Korean officials who failed to satisfy the Qing. As early as the Shunzhi period, the Manchu court began to reduce the number of its envoys, the rationale behind the change being the Zongfan idea of cherishing the small. In May 1653, for example, in the course of investigating a cross-border case of homicide, the Ministry of Rites proposed to ask the Korean emissary in Beijing to carry the imperial documents to the king instead of dispatching an imperial envoy for the purpose, given that Chosŏn is a country of men from afar (Ch., Chaoxian guo xi yuanren). Emperor Shunzhi endorsed this proposal, declaring that "hereafter, do not propose to send envoys to disturb the fan [Ch., fanbang] with minor matters."⁴⁵ By the middle period of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, such envoys to Hansŏng disappeared entirely.⁴⁶
From this point on, imperial missions to Chosŏn were of two primary types: missions for investiture and missions to confer noble rank, both relating to power shifts that required the Chinese emperor’s bestowal of legitimacy. In the early period, an imperial mission contained around a hundred men, many of whom were Manchu bannermen of the Eight Banners who joined the mission for the purpose of trade. In 1658 Emperor Shunzhi significantly trimmed the size of the missions by calling for the end of Manchu trade in Hansŏng. After that, a mission comprised an envoy, an associate envoy, four interpreters, and eighteen attendants.⁴⁷ In 1845 and 1846, Emperor Daoguang further reduced the number of core members to four.⁴⁸ Taking attendants into account, after the early nineteenth century an imperial mission had fewer than thirty members in total. The mission in 1876 comprised twenty members, and the last mission, in 1890, had twenty-eight.⁴⁹
All imperial envoys to Chosŏn—from the first envoy in 1637, Inggūldai, to the last one in 1890, Xuchang (1838–92)—were Manchu officials. They included some members of the Mongol and Han Chinese Eight Banners but no non-banner Han Chinese, whereas envoys to Annam and Ryukyu were mainly non-banner Han Chinese rather than Manchus. By at least the 1760s, Han Chinese scholars were fully aware of this ethnic discrepancy, though some of their Korean counterparts were not.⁵⁰ The door was never opened for Han Chinese to participate in tributary affairs in Korea. The exclusion was perhaps rooted in the implicit demands of the civilized–barbarian distinction and the Qing’s need to transcend the pre-1644 Manchu-Korean relationship: the Manchu court had to demonstrate, maintain, and consolidate its legitimacy as the human and institutional agent of the Mandate of Heaven and to strengthen its claim to civilized centrality and Chineseness through the hierarchical relationship. Still, some Manchu envoys, such as Akdun (1685–1756) in 1717, broadly identified themselves from a cultural perspective as Han envoys (Ch., hanjie) from the central civilized country (Ch., Zhonghua, Zhongxia).⁵¹
The Overland Route, the Willow Palisade, and Geographical Boundaries
In the post-1644 period, the emissaries of the two countries traveled on an overland route, which was about 950 miles (3,000 Chinese li) long and linked Hansŏng and Beijing via around eighty-two stations. The route passed through P’yŏngyang, Ŭiju, the Yalu River, Fenghuang City, Mukden, Shanhai Pass, Fengrun, and Tongzhou (see map 2.1). From 1644 to 1894, both Korean and Manchu emissaries were required to follow the overland route, the sole exception being the last imperial mission in 1890, which took a maritime route due to exceptional circumstances. In general, a mission took forty to sixty days to reach Beijing from Hansŏng, and an imperial mission from Beijing faced the same trudge to Hansŏng.⁵²
In Manchuria the overland route skirted the long Willow Palisade (Ch., Liutiao bian)—a system of levees and trenches planted with willow trees, their branches tied together—from Fenghuang City to Shanhai Pass, where it almost connected with the Great Wall. The Manchu rulers built the palisade from the late 1630s to
the 1680s in order to preserve their economic privileges by demarcating domestic boundaries between Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese regions. In the early period of Kangxi’s reign, the palisade connecting Shanhai Pass in the west and Fenghuang City in the east, known as the Old Fence, was around 590 miles (1,900 li) long and had sixteen fence gates, while in the north the New Fence between Weiyuan Village and Fateha Mountain was 215 miles (690 li) with four gates.⁵³ Fenghuang City, located at the southeastern corner of the east wing of the Old Fence, was under the supervision of the Manchu General of Mukden (Ch., Shengjing jiangjun) and had a gate (K., ch’akmun; Ch., zhamen), known as Feng huang Gate, about three miles (eight li) to the southeast of the city.⁵⁴ The Qing built Fenghuang Gate between 1638 and 1639 and extended it southeast toward the Yalu River between 1685 and 1690 up to a location about nine miles (thirty li) from the city.⁵⁵ The gate was the only pass through which Korean emissaries could enter the Qing’s ancestral territory (Ch., genben zhongdi) in Manchuria.
Map 2.1 The overland route between Beijing and Ŭiju in the late eighteenth century. The line connecting points A, B, C, and D on the map marks the Willow Palisade, which started at Fenghuang City (A) and ended near the Great Wall (the line connecting points D, E, and F). The line connecting points A, G (Mukden), H (Shanhai Pass), I (Fengrun), and J (Tongzhou) forms the overland route that Chosŏn’s emissaries took to Beijing after crossing the Yalu River. Yŏji to, handwritten map, preserved at the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University. Copyright Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies.
Between the gate and the boundary river lay a Qing-controlled area in which no one was allowed to live. In the late seventeenth century, this area spanned about thirty-four miles.⁵⁶ The Korean emissaries could pass through this area freely and were not subjected to security checks until they reached Fenghuang Gate. The garrison major of the Manchu bannermen at Fenghuang City did not welcome, check, or send off the missions beyond the gate, which may help explain why Korean emissaries were occasionally robbed by Chinese bandits outside the gate.⁵⁷ For the Korean visitors, Fenghuang Gate was thus more like a borderline than the Yalu River was, although the geographical borderline ran along the middle course of the river.
After entering Fenghuang Gate, the Koreans were to proceed to Beijing within twenty-eight days under the escort of Qing soldiers, passing through thirty-nine transfer stations (Ch., gongshi guanshe; Ma., alban jafara elcin i tatara guwan i boo). In fact, however, the visitors were so familiar with the route that generally no Chinese soldiers accompanied them to Beijing. The absence of Chinese monitors endowed the Koreans with fair freedom to visit places along their route and interview local people, enriching their travel journals, which eventually constituted a voluminous collection known as Yŏnhaengnok (The records of the journey to Beijing). All emissaries of the Qing’s fan were required to follow specific tributary routes and dared not deviate from them. For example, Ryukyu’s emissaries were instructed to arrive at Min’an in Fujian, Sulu’s at Xiamen in Fujian, those of Western countries at Macau in Guangdong, Siam’s at Humen in Guangdong, Annam’s at Taiping in Guangxi, and Burma’s at Yongchang in Yunnan. After the emissaries reached the designated places, the governor-general and the governor of the province would report their arrival to the Ministry of Rites and instruct subordinate officials to send them on to Beijing. Chosŏn’s emissaries had no such relations with officials in the provinces through which they passed, and they communicated directly with the Ministry of Rites. In other words, Chosŏn’s contacts with the Qing were under Beijing’s direct control, which enabled Beijing to use Chosŏn to portray the harmony of its Zongfan system whenever necessary.
Along the overland route, the high frequency and large size of Chosŏn’s missions produced considerable and lucrative commercial opportunities for merchants from both countries. What flowed into the Qing realm in massive quantities, in addition to Korean and Japanese goods, was silver. The mission of 1712, for instance, carried more than two hundred thousand taels of silver to Beijing, while the one in 1777 brought more than ninety-three thousand taels. The bulk of the silver was originally from Japan, acquired through trade between Tsushima and Chosŏn. The Hansŏng–Fenghuang City–Mukden–Beijing overland trade route was an extension of the Kyoto–Osaka–Tsushima–Pusan–Hansŏng overland and maritime trade route, with Hansŏng and Beijing the two major entrepôts on the combined route. Financially, the three nations made up an integrated international silver network, and in the eighteenth century the amount of silver that poured into the Qing from Chosŏn annually could reach five hundred thousand to six hundred thousand taels, which contributed to the Qing’s prosperity but aroused serious concerns among Korean officials.⁵⁸ In this sense, it is not an exaggeration to say that the Beijing–Hansŏng overland route was the most prosperous and most lucrative long-distance and international trade route in East Asia before Chosŏn opened treaty ports in the 1870s and 1880s.
Humble Palace Memorials, Imperial Mandates and Decrees, and Orthodox Legitimacy
The imperial court in Beijing and the royal court in Hansŏng interacted through meticulously formatted court documents written in accordance with highly institutionalized hierarchical norms. From 1637 on, the most important category among the documents that Chosŏn submitted to the Qing was the king’s humble
palace memorials (K., p’yo; Ch., biao). In 1705 the Ministry of Rites in Beijing laid down a set of new criteria for the syntax of these memorials that Chosŏn adhered to for the next 190 years, but the king was still free to use his own terms in composing other kinds of palace memorials.⁵⁹ The humble memorials were aimed at strengthening the Qing’s authority by reiterating and affirming the reciprocal and hierarchical relationship between the emperor and the king. The memorial submitted by the crown prince and deputy king of Chosŏn, Yi Yun (King Gyŏngjong), on April 14, 1721, in the sixtieth year of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, to congratulate the emperor on his birthday, is a typical example. The memorial was written on a sheet of well-made Korean paper in tiny, narrow Chinese characters evenly arranged in twenty-three vertical lines from right to left—although a memorial could, on occasion, exceed fifty lines—and it carefully followed the rules of honorific elevation, exactly as the Qing had mandated in 1705.⁶⁰ Refer ring to himself as your minister (K., sin; Ch., chen) of a vassal (Ch., fanfu), who could hardly bear his separation from the court (Ch., queting), Yi proclaimed that "Your Majesty raises all people of the world by assuming the Mandate of Heaven. The world is peaceful and imperial civilization extends to all places. Your Majesty has pacified the four seas, and ten thousand countries have come to revere Your Majesty [Ch., sihai yi er wanguo laiwang]."⁶¹
In such highly formalized memorials, the king frequently called himself subordinate or minister, Chosŏn the small country, and the Qing the big country, the upper country, the big dynasty, the central dynasty, or the Heavenly Dynasty.⁶² These Qing-mandated terms exploited Chosŏn’s subordinate status to highlight the Qing’s centrality in the early eighteenth century. Year after year, Chosŏn, as the representative of the others, helped consolidate the Qing’s supreme cultural identity as well as Qing hegemony through its performance of such written subservience. Upon receipt of the king’s humble memorials, the emperor generally wrote on the cover in red ink, I have learned of the appreciative memorial that you, the king, respectfully presented. Let the relevant ministry [the Ministry of Rites] know. The comments were made either in Manchu (Wang sini kesi de hengkileme wesimbuhe be saha, harangga jurgan sa.) or Chinese (Lanwang zouxie. Zhidao liao. Gaibu zhidao.).
On the Qing side, the imperial decrees granting a deceased king noble rank or investing a new king with a patent of appointment also served to consolidate the hierarchy. The special terms used in these edicts had their own rules, which underwent a process of institutionalization after 1644. When the Qing invested Yi Chong as king in January 1638 (the first investiture that the Qing performed), the decree stated only that Chosŏn would be recognized as fan to the Qing forever.⁶³ But after 1644 the Manchu court began to include additional terms with strong political meanings in the Zongfan context. For example, the decree of investiture in 1649 clearly defined Chosŏn as an outer fan in a remote area (Ch., xiahuang) that submitted itself to the Qing’s virtues and civilization. In 1675 the phrase cherishing the eastern country (Ch., huairou dongtu) appeared in the decrees.⁶⁴ These terms substantially broadened the scope of the Qing’s political and cultural ideology and transformed its identity in the context of the civilized–barbarian dichotomy.
On March 6, 1725, Emperor Yongzheng issued a mandate and a decree to Yi Gŭm to invest him as the king and his wife as the queen. The mandate of investiture (Ch., fengtian gaoming; Ma., abkai hesei g’aoming) consisted of five connected pieces of dyed ramie cloth in red, blue, black, white, and yellow from right to left. Each of the five sections was surrounded by a pattern of flying dragons (see figures 2.1 and 2.2). In the mandate Emperor Yongzheng stated, "The great strategy is simply to extend civilization [Ch., jiaohua; Ma., tacihiyan wen] to the countries from afar [Ch., haibang; Ma., goroki gurun]…. Generations of your court have been sincerely loyal and trustworthy and have been paying tribute diligently [Ch., zhigong qinxiu; Ma., tušan alban be kiceme faššambi]. In investing Yi Gŭm the king of Chosŏn" (Ch., Chaoxian guowang; Ma., Coohiyan gurun i wang), the emperor emphasized that the king "shall serve as the fence on the eastern land [Ch., pinghan dongfan; Ma., dergi bade fiyanji dalikū], devoutly use the imperial calendar [Ch., qiangong zhengshuo; Ma., forgon ton be olhošome ginggulembi], pacify the land, and assist the imperial house forever [Ch., jiafu yu huangjia; Ma., ejen i boode aisilame wehiyembi]. The emperor advised the king to use a pure and genuine
mind to serve the Heavenly court [Ch., tianshi; Ma., abkai gurun]."⁶⁵ A decree to the king articulated this point again by stating, "You should be loyal forever and efficiently govern the land as a minister from afar [Ch., houfu; Ma., jecen i golo], while you should be loyal and obedient and serve as a fence [Ch., pinghan; Ma., fiyanji dalikū] for the Heavenly house [Ch., tianjia; Ma., gurun boo]."⁶⁶
The Chinese and Manchu terms of the imperial edicts portrayed the king as a family member of the Qing court, and they became more sophisticated in the Qianlong period. The imperial edicts to the king in 1757, for instance, referred to Chosŏn as a fence, a subordinate country (Ch., shuguo; Ma., harangga gurun), a remote submission (Ch., yuanfu; Ma., goroki i jecen), and a lower country (Ch., xiaguo; Ma., fejergi gurun) of the Middle Kingdom (Ch., Zhongchao, Z hongbang; M., Dulimbai gurun). The edicts also emphasized that the king’s court (M., wang ni boo) had been loyal to and received special rewards from the Heavenly court (Ch., tianshi; Ma., han i hargašan).⁶⁷ By invoking these norms, the Qing explicitly presented itself as the civilized center—China and the Heavenly Dynasty—in both Chinese and Manchu terms.
In his memorials to the emperor, the king used a gold seal received from the Qing. From early 1637 to early 1653, the seal had only Manchu characters, which read Coohiyan gurun i wang ni doron (seal of the king of the country of Chosŏn). On April 22, 1653, Emperor Shunzhi, evidently displeased by the absence of Chinese script from the seal, instructed the Ministry of Rites to make a new seal that included Chinese characters (Ch., hanzi). As a result, the words Chaoxian guowang zhi yin (seal of the king of the country of Chosŏn) were added to the seal.⁶⁸ The emperor did not explain his rationale for the change, but his decision underscored the new dynasty’s Chineseness. On the Qing side, the emperors, in their mandates to Chosŏn, always used the seal of declaring imperial mandate, which carried both a Chinese text, Zhigao zhi bao, and a Manchu one, Hese wasimbure boobai, exactly the same text that appeared on the imperial mandates issued to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni in Tibet. The combination of languages reflected the polyglot politics of a multiethnic empire.⁶⁹
FIGURE 2.1. The Manchu section of the imperial mandate to invest the king of Chosŏn in 1725. Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, preserved at Jangseogak, the Academy of Korean Studies, Korea. Copyright Academy of Korean Studies.
FIGURE 2.2. The Chinese section of the imperial mandate to invest the king of Chosŏn in 1725. Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, preserved at Jangseogak, the Academy of Korean Studies, Korea. Copyright Academy of Korean Studies.
The imperial investiture of the king helps explain a paradox in the Qing period: certain Confucian countries, in particular Chosŏn and Annam, were privately reluctant to identify the Qing as the supreme representative of Chinese culture, but in practice they never challenged its status as the superior country and frequently sent tributary missions to Beijing to display their deference. The explanation for the apparent paradox lies in the fact that the missions fulfilled a dual purpose in establishing not only the legitimacy of the Qing but also that of the monarchs of the fan. The Zongfan relationship between the Qing and its fan was an incarnation of this symbiotic and synergistic legitimacy, namely, the orthodox legitimacy embodied in the highly programmed rituals involved in the exchange of emissaries. This orthodox legitimacy was the goal for which King Taksin (r. 1767–82) of the Thonburi regime of Siam sent tributary missions to Beijing to pursue investiture after the fall of the Ayutthaya regime (1350–1767), even though King Taksin’s understanding of paying tribute (Ch., jingong) was very different from that of the Qing.⁷⁰ The need for legitimacy could also explain why Nguyễn Huệ, the leader of the peasant rebellion against the Lê Dynasty (1428–1788) of Annam, defeated the Qing army in 1789 but nonetheless accepted the Qing’s investiture in 1790. It was also in 1790 that Burma accepted the Qing investiture after winning the Burmese-Qing War in the early 1770s.⁷¹ In addition to pragmatic concerns reflecting geopolitics and China’s military might, securing political legitimacy from China proved crucial for these regimes’ own rule.
Tributes, Gifts, and Court-to-Court Interactions
The Qing ritual code clearly listed the types and quantities of tribute that Chosŏn had to present for different purposes. After 1644, these fell into eight major categories. Beyond the most official category of annual tribute, designated as standard tribute (Ch., zhenggong), the king generally referred to the items in the other seven categories, such as those marking the imperial birthday, the lunar New Year, and the winter solstice, as gifts or local products. The Qing accepted all of the submitted items and did not challenge the king’s choice of terms, although it preferred to refer to the items as tribute.⁷²
While the annual tribute marked a country-to-country relationship, all other categories of tribute, which were presented specifically to the emperor, the empress, and the dowager empress, suggested a strong court-to-court connection. The Ministry of Rites accepted the annual tribute as a routine matter, but it had to submit memorials to the emperor for instructions on how to handle tribute in other categories. In the early Qing, the Ministry of Rites forwarded all tribute items to the Ministry of Revenue and later to the Imperial Household Department, which was in charge of the affairs of the Manchu royal house and had its own financial system independent of the one managed by the Ministry of Revenue.⁷³ Therefore, although the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship seemed to manifest itself mainly in hierarchical country-to-country interactions, in reality it was a dual system involving the two countries and the two courts.
The gifts that the imperial envoys carried to Chosŏn were directed at specific members of the royal family, including the king, the queen, the crown prince, and the dowager queen. Usually the envoys brought first-rate silk for official robes. When imperial missions were dispatched to extend the emperor’s condolences on the deaths of core royalty, some gifts were consumed at the funeral ceremonies, while others were converted into 150 to 300 taels of silver by the Ministry of Revenue and delivered to the Korean royal house. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, imperial envoys followed a precise routine to deliver their condolences and gifts. The last such mission occurred in 1890, and it is explored in detail in chapter 5.
Receptions, Ritual Performances, and the Civilized Qing
Chosŏn’s emissaries were well accommodated at each transfer station after they entered China, but they had to prepare food for themselves until they arrived in
Beijing. Upon reaching their residence in Beijing, the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations, the emissaries first visited the Ministry of Rites to present the king’s memorials and the list of tribute items. All emissaries from Chosŏn and from other countries, as well as the kings they represented, had to submit their documents to the emperor through the ministry, with which they could communicate via official notes (Ch., ziwen). In the main hall of the ministry, the emissaries would pass the memorials to the head officials, who would place the memorials in front of the imperial tablet on a table in the middle of the hall. The emissaries would then kneel down once to make three prostrations toward the head officials, who would in turn bow three times to the emissaries with their hands folded in front (Ch., zuoyi, a ritual practiced between officials of equal ranks). Once they had finished, the emissaries would kneel down three times, each time making three prostrations toward the tablet.⁷⁴ The ministry would submit the documents to the emperor the next day, while the emissaries returned to their residence to wait for the imperial audience.
The Qing’s commander general of the Metropolitan Infantry Brigade Yamen (Ch., Bujun tongling yamen) sent soldiers to guard the emissaries’ residence.⁷⁵ Three additional institutions were involved in hosting the guests: the Court of Imperial Entertainments (Ch., Guanglu si) delivered daily food and drink, distributed to each member of the mission according to rank; the Ministry of Revenue brought fodder for the Koreans’ horses; and the Ministry of Works provided charcoal. These meticulous regulations embodied the Qing’s policy of cherishing men from afar.
During their stay in Beijing, the emissaries had various responsibilities to fulfill. If there was a grand court assembly of officials in the Forbidden City, the emissaries had to attend and pay homage at the end of the wing of the Qing civil officials. A major task was to pay a formal visit to the emperor at either the Summer Palace in Beijing or the Summer Palace in Rehe (Chengde). After the audience, the emissaries would be invited to attend certain events, such as banquets in the Forbidden City, performances of Chinese operas, or fireworks shows at the Summer Palace.⁷⁶ All ritual procedures, in particular the highest level of kowtow, were minutely regulated and fastidiously practiced. Such rituals between the Chinese emperor and foreign emissaries had been defined and institutionalized at least since the great rituals laid out in The Rituals of the Great Tang (Ch., Da Tang Kaiyuan li), compiled in the eighth century.⁷⁷ In the Ming and the Qing, the rituals became extremely elaborate, and the Korean emissaries were required to rehearse the complicated ceremonies in advance as a sign of their loyalty and as part of the process that would civilize the barbarians in the four quarters (Ch., feng siyi).⁷⁸ Rituals helped maintain the political arrangement and strengthen the identities of all participants.⁷⁹ In grand court gatherings, emissaries from Chosŏn were usually the first representatives of the outer fan to perform the rituals for the emperor, as on February 9, 1675, at the Lantern Festival, where the Chosŏn emissaries congratulated Kangxi ahead of their Russian, Kalka Mongol, and Ūlet Mongol counterparts.⁸⁰ Chosŏn’s role as an exemplar was particularly prominent in the late eighteenth century during the Qianlong period, when the Qing in many cases followed the model for Chosŏn (Ch., zhao Chaoxian zhi li) in managing its bilateral exchanges with Annam, Ryukyu, and Siam.⁸¹ Chinese scholars at the time also widely regarded Chosŏn as the model for other countries (Ch., zhuguo zhi zhang).⁸²
The emissaries also attended two major official banquets, one held at the Ministry of Rites and the other at the emissaries’ residence. An astonishing number of institutions were involved in their organization: the Court of Imperial Entertainments; the Food Supply Office (Ch., Jingshan qingli si) of the Ministry of Rites; the Ministries of Revenue, Works, and War; Shuntian Prefecture; and the Revenue Superintendent of Chongwen Gate (Ch., Liangyi shuiwu jiandu). Royal contractors (Ch., hanghu) were also assigned specific tasks. Each of the three key members of the mission was treated to what was known as a fifth-level Manchu banquet and the other members to a sixth-level one, preferential treatment not afforded to emissaries from any other country. The high cost of the banquets was fully covered by the Qing and, not surprisingly, the banquets were replete with ritual performances reinforcing the bilateral hierarchical order.⁸³ The imperial code included an illustration of the banquets for Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries (Ch., Chaoxian gongshi yantu) and specified that the seating arrangements for banquets held for
emissaries from other countries should follow the Chosŏn pattern (Ch., geguo gongshi fangci).⁸⁴
During their sojourn in Beijing, the emissaries, particularly scholars without official status or responsibilities, were enthusiastic about socializing with Qing literati. The tradition of such interactions had started in Ming times but had been suspended in the Ming-Qing transition period because of the anti-Manchu attitudes that were prevalent in Chosŏn. Indeed, before the eighteenth century, the three key members of the tributary mission barely left their residence to meet with Chinese officials or scholars because many Korean scholars embracing Neo-Confucianism saw the Qing as a barbarous country and regarded the tributary mission as a humiliation.⁸⁵ In the 1760s, however, literary social gatherings involving Korean emissaries again became frequent and continued until the 1890s. In the 1860s, many Chinese officials, such as Dong Wenhuan (1833–77) of the Imperial Academy (Ch., Hanlin yuan), who was known for calligraphy and epigraphy, actively socialized with Koreans.⁸⁶ On the Korean side, Pak Kyusu (1807–76), an emissary who visited Beijing in 1872, befriended more than a hundred famous Chinese scholars through social gatherings.⁸⁷
Versed in the same Confucian classics, adhering to the same Neo-Confucianism, and using the same Chinese characters, the Qing and Chosŏn scholars could easily identify one another as men of the same caliber. They met for drinks, composed poems, and exchanged their own compositions and calligraphy. That Chosŏn was known as Little China might also have lent these transnational literary social gatherings a homogenous cultural identity. These savants formed an informal perennial club in which they exchanged ideas about history and literature and improved their perceptions of each other’s countries. According to Key-hiuk Kim, their communications also assured Korea of a constant stream of information and knowledge concerning the latest intellectual trends in China.⁸⁸
When they gathered with their Han Chinese friends, the Korean guests usually showed an aversion to Manchu customs, such as the Manchu-style official robe and hairstyle, and were very proud of their Ming-style robes and hats, in keeping with the civilized–barbarian dichotomy. But in 1766, when Hong Tae-yong (1731–83) expressed contempt for the Manchus’ control of China, he found to his surprise that his Han Chinese counterparts, such as Yan Cheng (1733–67), did not appreciate his anti-Manchu sentiments; instead, Yan and his colleagues applauded the Qing’s support for civilization. After intensive conversation with his Chinese friends, Hong conceded that Koreans on a fundamental level still belonged to the barbarians by the sea (K., haesang chi iin). By concluding that the civilized and the barbarians are the same (K., Hwa–I il ya), he acknowledged the Qing’s civilized status.⁸⁹ Through such interactions, many Korean and Chinese scholars became close friends and continued to correspond even after the emissaries returned to Chosŏn. When Yan Cheng was on the brink of death, he laid a letter from Hong on his abdomen to indicate how deeply he treasured their friendship. When news of Yan’s death reached Hansŏng, Hong burst into tears and commented that he had lost a brother to whom he was as attached as he was to his right arm.⁹⁰
Like the emissaries from Hansŏng who experienced a combination of hardship and comfort as they made their way to Beijing, Qing imperial envoys also had to endure discomfort until they passed through Fenghuang Gate on their journey toward Ŭiju. There they were welcomed and treated well by the Korean side. Although the land between the gate and the Yalu River was Qing territory, the Korean prefect of Ŭiju was able to dispatch Korean officers, Manchu interpreters, and servants to welcome the envoys at the three stations in this area: Congxiu, Mazhuan, and Sanjiang. At each station the Koreans would set up temporary houses for the envoys and provide hearty meals that could feature more than thirty different dishes. In Ŭiju the prefect treated each envoy to a banquet with more than 130 kinds of food.⁹¹ Receptions along the way from Ŭiju to P’yŏngyang and then to Hansŏng were even more luxurious, and the cost was significant.⁹²
In contrast to their Korean counterparts in Beijing, the Manchu envoys in Hansŏng confined themselves to ritual exchanges. Beijing-style literary social gatherings did take place in Shuri, the capital of Ryukyu, but not in Hansŏng, where the envoys, along with their assistants, never left their lodgings to converse with local officials or scholars.⁹³ No transnational literati club like the one in Beijing ever formed in Hansŏng. After 1658, when Emperor Shunzhi put an end to
Manchu trade in Hansŏng, the imperial envoys were always temporary visitors who returned home as soon as their mission was accomplished. In addition, almost all imperial envoys before the early eighteenth century made a point of visiting the Samjŏndo stele in a southern suburb of Hansŏng. The Koreans regarded the stele, with its inscriptions celebrating the Manchu conquest of Chosŏn, as a humiliation, and some Confucian scholars and students argued that it should be destroyed, so the envoys’ visits were sensitive and made the stele a barometer of the two countries’ relationship. In 1723 the Qing’s two envoys made a formal visit to the stele with a number of Korean officials. At the site, the vice envoy knelt down three times, each time bowing his head three times. In 1724 and 1729, the imperial envoys also paid formal visits to the stele, again accompanied by a group of Koreans. On these occasions both the Manchu envoys and their Korean interpreters kowtowed to the stele. In 1731, however, instead of visiting Samjŏndo, the envoys simply asked for copies of the inscriptions on the stele, and after 1762, they no longer even requested transcripts. By the late nineteenth century, Qing officials had only a vague understanding of the stele and were uncertain whether it featured a Manchu inscription.⁹⁴
During their sojourn in Hansŏng, the Qing envoys performed four major ceremonies in which the king participated. The first was the welcome at the Gate of Receiving Imperial Favors (K., Yŏngŭn mun) outside the West Gate of the city. The king bowed once to the imperial documents, then returned to his palace in the city. The second, conducted inside the king’s palace, was the transfer of the imperial documents and other items to the king. The king kowtowed four times to the imperial edicts. In addition, the king and the envoys bowed once or twice to each other with their hands folded in front. The king, on his own territory, did not need to perform the highest level of kowtow toward the imperial decrees or other documents and gifts, as his ministers would do in Beijing. The third ceremony was the king’s visit to the envoys at their residence, the South Palace Annex, where the Koreans honored the envoys with several tea banquets. Finally, there was the send-off at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country on the city’s outskirts, where the king provided a tea ceremony for the departing envoys. Contact between the two sides was always conducted through the Korean Ministry of Rites. All of the procedures in these ceremonies were regulated by ritual codes and were executed until the early 1890s. The Korean side had no obligation to report any domestic affairs to the envoys, nor would the envoys intervene in such affairs. Rather, this stylized interaction in Hansŏng endowed the monarch of Chosŏn with political legitimacy, continuously consolidating the reciprocal and hierarchical Zongfan relations between the two countries.
Celebrating the Relationship: The Qing Emperor’s Roles in the Zongfan System
As the institutional agent at the highest level of the Zongfan hierarchy, the emperor could exploit the occasions of imperial audiences and his patriarchal authority to modify and lubricate the mechanism from the top down. As the following sections show, he could freely endow tributary emissaries with various extra gifts, supervise and admonish the Manchu envoys to Chosŏn and the Manchus along the border in Manchuria, and make final decisions about border conflicts.
Consolidating the System through Imperial Gifts and Extra Gifts
After Chosŏn’s emissaries presented their tribute gifts to the emperor, the sovereign would bestow routine gifts (Ch., lishang) on them and the king. At least since the Shunzhi period, the Qing presented the tribute missions with gifts whose value exceeded that of the tribute, based on detailed calculations.⁹⁵ The gifts and their quantities varied according to the category of the mission, and when the Korean envoy was a member of the royal house, the amount and quality of the gifts would increase. The silk and satin among the gifts were taken from the Imperial Household Department, rather than the Ministry of Revenue, in order to show the emperor’s personal favor toward the "king of the fan " (Ch., fanwang). To mark the imperial birthday and the lunar New Year, the Qing would give the king a second-class horse with bridle and each of the two envoys a third-class horse with bridle, highlighting the Manchu character of the Qing regime. The Qing
would also give the envoys silver in the average amount of at least 680 taels (for annual tributary missions and winter solstice missions) or 850 taels (for imperial birthday missions and lunar New Year missions), along with other gifts.⁹⁶
Some scholars have argued that the routine gifts were an institutionalized part of the overall Zongfan mechanism and hence afforded little flexibility.⁹⁷ Yet the emperor could break this routine at his discretion by awarding the emissaries extra gifts during audiences. For instance, in early 1795 Emperor Qianlong awarded the king a hundred copies of the Chinese character for happiness (Ch., fu) that he had written on small squares of red paper.⁹⁸ This sort of largesse was seemingly random,⁹⁹ but it did not simply represent imperial prerogative or a deviation from the flowcharts of ritual codes. Rather, the practice of giving supererogatory gifts highlighted the Qing policy of giving more to the visitors and benefiting less from them (Ch., houwang bolai), as Emperor Qian-long explained it to Chosŏn in 1736.¹⁰⁰ The emperor thus moderated the system by lending it flexibility and novelty. In the late eighteenth century, Emperor Qianlong disbursed an increasing quantity of extra gifts, while the amount of the tribute sent by Chosŏn remained remarkably stable. The extra imperial gifts reached their peak in the 1790s, a time when Emperor Qianlong was particularly keen to enhance the image of his dynasty as the Heavenly Dynasty. Given these priorities, the Qing court was not concerned about maintaining a balance between the value of the tributes and that of the imperial gifts. In 1793 a Korean emissary acknowledged that the Qing treated Chosŏn in such a favorable way that the Qing’s spending on accommodations for the tributary emissaries and the value of the various imperial gifts far exceeded the value of the Korean local products.¹⁰¹
Constructing a Positive Image of the Qing and Highlighting the Envoys’ Manchu Identity
The Qing emperor sought to further burnish his dynasty’s image in his contacts with Chosŏn by taking steps to prevent the Manchu envoys to Chosŏn and the bannermen who resided along the border in Manchuria from compromising the dignity of the Heavenly Dynasty through open degeneracy. Emperor Qianlong, for example, felt it necessary to extend the Qing’s prolonged campaign to maintain Manchu traditions and identity to the field of the Sino-Korean communications by closely monitoring his envoys’ behavior.
His first reform aimed to bolster the Manchu envoys’ integrity by discouraging corruption during their trip to Chosŏn. In 1736, after reducing by half the amount of the gifts the Koreans were expected to provide to the imperial envoys, the emperor punished two envoys who violated the new rules. He decreed that in the future the garrison generals at Mukden and Shanhai Pass should check the envoys’ luggage when they returned from Hansŏng to make sure they had not received unauthorized gifts.¹⁰² Until the last imperial mission in 1890, subsequent emperors continued to admonish their envoys to Chosŏn to remain upright and honest. Compared with their pre-1637 Ming counterparts, who had exploited Chosŏn for maximum profit, the Manchu envoys, in particular after the Kangxi period, behaved well on their visits to Chosŏn, which helped reduce the tension between the two countries caused by the Qing invasions in the 1630s. The Korean scholar Hong Tae-yong acknowledged in 1766 that the Qing was much more generous and kind to Chosŏn than the Ming had been.¹⁰³
The Qianlong emperor also believed that the Manchu officers and soldiers in Manchuria should focus on border security. In 1737, under the claim of giving kindness to the people from afar, he decided to prohibit the Manchus from trading with Koreans in the Middle River area of the Yalu River and to ask merchants and commoners of inner China (Ch., neidi shangmin) to undertake this trade instead. The Middle River market had been established in 1592 between Chosŏn and the Ming; it had barely opened during the Ming-Qing war but was restored as a major trading center between the Qing and Chosŏn after 1646. Manchu bannermen and merchants near Fenghuang City had thereafter constituted the Qing’s traders in the market. Now the Qianlong emperor abruptly concluded that the bannermen were not good at doing business and sought to direct his Manchu warriors back to the military realm. The king, however, was deeply concerned about the potential arrival of the people of inner China, so he petitioned the emperor to maintain the trade with the bannermen. The emperor granted the
petition but explained that by people of inner China he meant only those living near the banner garrisons in Manchuria, not those south of the Great Wall or in Beijing.¹⁰⁴ This episode shows that in the border area the Manchu court was concerned more about political consequences and border security than about the economic interests of the local bannermen. It also suggests that at least by the 1730s the Qing had come to integrate Manchuria into its concept of inner China (Ch., neidi), further nullifying the border function of the Great Wall within the multiethnic empire.
Emperor Qianlong’s more dramatic reform took place in 1763, when he dictated that all Manchu envoys to Chosŏn from that moment onward should ride horses instead of taking sedan chairs in Chosŏn. The emperor explained that although Chosŏn had provided sedan chairs for the missions to show its obedience to and respect for the imperial envoys of the Heavenly Dynasty, the Manchu officials were expert horsemen and should not ride in sedan chairs. The emperor instructed the king to end permanently the convention of welcoming the imperial envoys with sedan chairs and to provide only horses instead. The Qing documents do not explain why the emperor suddenly changed this longstanding convention. But according to the first-rank translator of the mission led by Hongying (1707–71), Xu Zongmen, who was a Beijing resident of Korean background, the emperor had originally picked another Manchu official as the envoy but, realizing how obese the chosen official was, asked him how he would make the long trip to Chosŏn. The envoy replied that since he would ride in a sedan chair, his weight would not be a problem. The emperor became angry, and to underline the Manchu martial spirit, he immediately replaced the envoy with Hongying, who was an excellent horseman. The emperor admonished Hongying to display righteousness (Ch., zhengda) in the outer fan and to avoid any wretchedness (Ch., weisuo). Meanwhile, the Korean emissaries, the emperor said, were exempt from the new rules and could maintain their custom of taking carriages to Beijing.¹⁰⁵ The Qianlong emperor’s quest to maintain and strengthen the Manchuness of the Manchus under his supervision thus helped the Qing improve its image in the eyes of its subordinate and to showcase its virtues in practice.
Arbitrating Border Disputes
The Qing emperor also served as the highest arbitrator in border conflicts and border-crossing disputes. In each case of border conflict with Chosŏn, it was the emperor—rather than the king, a historical precedent, or a border rule—who made the final decision. The geographical connection between the two countries occasioned a considerable number of illegal border crossings from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. These thorny cases posed a challenge to the Qing, in particular to the emperors, in terms of balancing the Qing’s lofty Zongfan discourse and its practical concerns. This aspect of the Qing’s policy underwent a major change from the Kangxi to the Qianlong period. In the Shunzhi and early Kangxi periods, the Manchu monarchs often doled out severe punishments to the king or his officials over border disputes and often sent special envoys to Chosŏn for in-person investigation. The emperors embraced this approach primarily because the Qing had not yet consolidated its rule in the wake of the Southern Ming (1644–62) and its influences and was worried about the possibility of a Chosŏn rebellion against the Qing. But after the Kangxi emperor suppressed the revolt of the Three Feudatories in the 1680s, the Qing praised Chosŏn for its loyalty and adopted a more relaxed policy on border conflicts with the country, eventually ceasing to send special investigative envoys.
The Qing court in the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods following Kangxi governed a country that had been unified to an unprecedented degree since 1644. The court consequently focused on reinforcing the cosmopolitan ideology of all-under-Heaven in the Qing’s foreign relations. Although the emperors had clear views on the Qing’s geographical borders, they preferred to rely on traditional Zongfan norms in settling border disputes with Chosŏn. The Qing’s border policy toward Chosŏn thus became more conservative than aggressive, forming a sharp contrast with the Qing’s contemporary policy in the southwest and northwest, where the new empire continued to expand its territory. On the Chosŏn side, the savvy king and local officials applied the same Zongfan norms in their sophisticated negotiations with their Qing counterparts, leaving the emperor in Beijing with no option but to endorse one Korean proposal after another.
The Mangniushao case provides a good example. In 1745 the Manchu general of Mukden, Daldangga (?–1760), suggested to Emperor Qianlong that the Qing set up a border outpost at Mangniushao near the Yalu River in order to prevent Koreans from illegally crossing the border river to sell or buy grains or to search for ginseng in Manchuria. Although in 1731 Daldangga’s predecessor, Nasutu (?–1749), had likewise proposed an outpost at Mangniushao, Emperor Yongzheng had rejected the proposal because of the king’s opposition and upheld his father’s policy, in place since 1715, of prohibiting all construction in this area.¹⁰⁶ Prompted by an increase in illegal border crossings, Daldangga resurrected Nasutu’s plan and proposed to repair the broken parts of the Willow Palisade and to open lands outside the palisade for cultivation. Emperor Qianlong initially supported Daldangga’s plan and sent a Mongol minister, Bandi (?–1755), to visit the area to confirm that Mangniushao was indeed inside China’s borders and that it would be appropriate for China to establish an outpost there. At the last moment, however, the emperor reversed his stance, invoking the precedents set by the decisions of his grandfather in 1715 and his father in 1731, as well as a decision he himself had made in another case in 1737. To justify his rejection of the proposal, he cited the imperative of cherishing the small. Furthermore, the emperor told Daldangga that no further such proposals should be made to the court and that Daldangga and his successors in Mukden should follow established rules in managing border affairs with Chosŏn.¹⁰⁷ In this way, the emperor reduced the possibility of further conflicts in this border area and helped stabilize the two countries’ relationship from the top down.
Barbarianizing the Periphery: The Qing’s Institutional Zongfan Discourse
The Changing Meaning of Barbarians from Yongzheng to Qianlong
The Qing interpretation of the civilized–barbarian distinction underwent a sharp change in the transitional days between the reigns of Yongzheng and Qianlong. In the late 1720s, Emperor Yongzheng had made the putative barbarity of the Qing a public issue among Qing scholars because of his response to the case of Zeng Jing (1679–1735). Encouraged by the civilized–barbarian discourse, Zeng had plotted to rebel against the Manchu barbarians, but after he was prosecuted, he reversed his stance and endorsed the Qing, whereupon the emperor released him from prison. In June 1733, while Zeng was in the provinces giving lectures on the dynasty’s virtues, the emperor issued an edict to prohibit the practice of changing Chinese characters with the meaning of barbarian (Ch., hu, lu, yi, di) in books. The Manchu monarch defined the term barbarian geographically and confessed that the ancestors of the current dynasty could be called eastern barbarians, like ancient Chinese saints. This tone had been set by his great-grandfather Hongtaiji in 1636 in his letter to the king of Chosŏn, and Yongzheng himself had repeated the same points in his book responding to Zeng, Great Righteousness Resolving Confusion (Ch., Dayi juemi lu) in 1729.¹⁰⁸ By proclaiming that people living both within and outside China belong to the same family (Ch., Zhong Wai yijia), Yongzheng insisted that the civilized–barbarian distinction should not be understood in a cultural sense, and even if it were, only those who were beyond civilization (Ch., wanghua zhi wai), like the Zunghar, might truly be called barbarians.¹⁰⁹ Under this definition, the outer fan of the Qing also seemed to be excluded from the category of barbarians.
Yongzheng’s statements suggest that the Manchu rulers embraced cultural egalitarianism in order to redistribute cultural resources within the multiethnic empire.¹¹⁰ It is safe to say that the Manchu emperor was trying to overcome the prejudice inherent in the stereotypical civilized–barbarian distinction among Han Chinese intellectuals in the process of consolidating the Manchu regime’s orthodox legitimacy. This sustained effort can also be seen in the move by Yongzheng’s father and grandfather to expand considerably the list of Chinese monarchs who were enshrined in the Temple of Ancient Monarchs (Ch., Lidai diwang miao), with the goal of establishing the Qing as the legitimate successor to previous dynasties that had likewise been identified as China.¹¹¹ With Yongzheng’s policy, the yardstick for judging barbarians suddenly snapped, as the ruling dynasty now identified itself both with the ancient rulers and with the
eastern barbarians.
After assuming the throne in 1735, the Qianlong emperor not only quickly revoked his father’s pardon and executed Zeng but also reversed Yongzheng’s approach by clearly differentiating the civilized Qing from the barbarian countries surrounding it. Qianlong thus brought the civilized–barbarian discourse back to its pre-Yongzheng meaning, in which cultural factors played a pivotal role. He exploited his father’s heritage by turning the latter’s policy of permitting the free and public use of all Chinese characters for barbarian into a tool for propagating the opposite message in the context of the civilized– barbarian discourse—namely, one that excluded the Qing from this category. No longer would the Great Qing downgrade itself to the rank of barbarian.¹¹² Consequently, in the Qianlong period the use of the term foreign barbarians in official documents reached its historical zenith.¹¹³ Through this terminology, the Qing combined its civilized centrality with cultural superiority. Qianlong achieved this symbolic goal by formally designating all other countries as barbarians, along with the majority of the ethnic groups under his rule, and one of the most important targets of this barbarianization at the normative level was Chosŏn.
At the time when Yongzheng published his book on the definition of barbarian, some Manchu envoys to Chosŏn had taken to visiting Jizi Shrine in P’yŏngyang on their way back from Hansŏng.¹¹⁴ As mentioned in the introduction, Jizi was said to be the founding father of the ancient Korean regime, invested by the Chinese monarch of the Zhou Dynasty with the lands of Chosŏn, where he maintained a familistic and tributary relationship with the central court of China. Given the intense debate around ethnicity and the civilized–barbarian dichotomy in the late years of Yongzheng’s reign, the Manchu envoys’ visits to Jizi Shrine could help the Manchu regime bolster its Chineseness and its claims to legitimacy beyond its borders. When the Qing overcame the challenge of the civilized–barbarian distinction within China in the first half of the Qianlong period, visits to Jizi Shrine ceased, although Chinese historical records continued to celebrate the familial relationship between the Chinese and the Koreans.
The Qing’s Systematic, Institutional Barbarianization of Chosŏn and Others
In June 1751 the Qianlong emperor instructed the governors-general and governors of border provinces to draw and submit pictures of domestic and foreign barbarians (Ch., neiwai miaoyi, waiyi fanzhong) in order to demonstrate the flourishing of the Qing.¹¹⁵ The emperor was following a precedent set by Emperor Taizong (r. 627–49) of the Tang Dynasty, who was believed to have brought China its most prosperous days in the pre-Qing era. Since Tang Taizong had commissioned paintings of the barbarians to celebrate the great moment in which ten thousand countries came to revere the emperor (Ch., wanguo laichao),¹¹⁶ Qianlong had every reason to commemorate his dynasty’s accomplishments in the same way. Even during the Qing expansion into Central Asia, Qianlong identified the efforts of the Han and Tang dynasties to extend Chinese power into Central Asia as historical milestones by which to measure his own progress.¹¹⁷
Beyond the obvious political factors, contemporary popular culture may also have motivated Qianlong’s desire for an illustrated record of the Qing’s imperial expansion. As a big fan of Chinese opera who contributed to the birth of Peking opera, Qianlong may have been influenced by popular operas that extolled the virtues of the civilized center of the world. These operas can be dated at least to the Yuan, but in the Ming and early Qing they were still being performed in cities such as Beijing. Their scripts described the Ming as the Heavenly Dynasty, the upper country, or the central civilized country, bordered by barbarians in four directions (primarily represented as Chosŏn, Annam, and political units in Inner Asia) who paid tribute and presented palace memorials to the great emperor of China.¹¹⁸
In 1761, ten years after Qianlong ordered the drawings, the first edition of the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Ch., Huang Qing zhigong tu) was published in four volumes, featuring six hundred pictures of people from the Qing’s outer fan and from barbarian places within Qing territory or on its periphery. The first picture in the collection was of a Korean official who wore a Ming-style official robe but was labeled "a barbarian official of the country of
Chosŏn" (Ch., Chaoxian guo yiguan) (see figure 2.3). Once again, Chosŏn served as the model for others in the collection, and its prototypical role was made clear by Qing scholars in the Essentials of Complete Books of the Four Storehouses Catalog (Ch., Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao).¹¹⁹ Chosŏn, Little China, was thus institutionally converted into a country of barbarians by the Qing’s political discourse and imperial documentary mechanism.
Following Chosŏn, other countries, including Ryukyu, Annam, Siam, Sulu, Lanchang, Burma, Britain, France, Japan, the Netherlands, and Russia, likewise became barbarians in the Qing nomenclature, as did many of the diverse peoples within Qing territory. In nearly every case, the Qing narrative constructed an imperial pedigree by reviewing a long history of Zongfan relations with the foreign country (Ch., guo; Ma., gurun) or domestic tribe (Ch., buluo; Ma., aiman) from the Zhou to the Ming Dynasties and emphasized that it was the Qing’s merits that prompted the barbarians to send emissaries to come and pay tribute (Ch., qianshi rugong; Ma., elcin takūrafi albabun jafanjimbi) or come to kowtow with tribute (Ch., chaogong; Ma., albabun jafame hengkilenjimbi).¹²⁰ In this way, the Qing systematically assimilated the historical legacies of previous dynasties into its own Zongfan relations with these countries and tribes and consolidated its legitimacy as the civilized center, or Zhongguo (Ma., Dulimbai gurun).¹²¹ Also in 1761, in order to celebrate the empress dowager’s seventieth birthday, the Qing published another magnificent collection, Illustrations of the Great Celebration (Ch., Luhuan huijing tu). The first illustration carried the title Ten thousand countries came to revere the emperor, the precise phrase the Tang Dynasty had used, and Chosŏn’s emissaries occupied a distinguished position within it.¹²² If there was a documentary institutionalization for the Qing,¹²³ in terms of the Qing’s construction of its civilized identity, this process was substantially accomplished in 1761.
FIGURE 2.3. A Chosŏn official in the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Huang Qing zhigong tu, 33).
Behind the cheerful facade of the great multiethnic empire lay the axiom of the Qing’s centrality in the world. And that world, of course, often found its way to the Qing threshold. Britain, which the Qing knew as the country of Ying ji li (Ying ji li is a transliteration of England; Ch., Yingjili guo; Ma., Ing gi lii gurun), was one of the countries portrayed as barbarian in the collection of 1761. At the end of that year, the Qianlong emperor instructed his representatives in Guangzhou to notify the men from afar and foreign barbarians there—the British merchants—that the Heavenly Dynasty has everything it needs, so it does not need foreign barbarians to bring trivial goods for trade.¹²⁴ The edict was a response to petitions from James Flint in 1759 and Nicholas Skottowe in 1761. The two were representatives of the British merchants who wanted to change the Canton system of trade, which channeled all trade with the West through that southern port. Their efforts not only were futile but in fact led to stricter regulations on Western traders in China.¹²⁵ In this sense, the rebuff that George Macartney’s mission later received from the emperor in 1793 was merely a repetition of the institutionalized rhetoric that had been directed at the British in China more than three decades earlier.
Popularizing Chosŏn’s Status as Foreign Barbarians in Imperial Discourse
The prolonged construction of the Qing’s new identity and the reorientation of its political discourse vis-à-vis other countries was not just the result of the emperor’s personal activities or political motivations, imposed on the administration from the top down. Nor should they be understood purely as the outcome of implementing the political will of the Manchu court. Rather, Qing officials at the local level, from counties to prefectures to provinces, also contributed to this construction from the bottom up. As a result, in the eighteenth century, Chosŏn’s status as foreign barbarians was popularized within the norms of Qing foreign relations.
This point is illustrated by the Qing policy toward shipwrecked fishermen from Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, and other countries who were rescued by local Chinese officials along the coast. At least from the early Qianlong period, Qing officials called these victims barbarians who suffered from storms (Ch., zaofeng nanyi; Ma., edun de lasihibufi jobolon de tušaha i niyalma) and sent them to Beijing or to the nearest provincial capital, from whence they could return home with embassies from their countries. From the 1730s to the 1880s, the Qing archives were full of such reports of local officials looking after shipwrecked fishermen; reports concerning fishermen from Chosŏn were particularly prominent.¹²⁶ By accommodating these victims on humanitarian grounds, the Qing sought to highlight its policy of cherishing men from afar and to display the deep and outstanding merits of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., zhao tianchao rouyuan shenren; Ma., abkai gurun i goroki urse be gosire šumin gosin be iletulembi). This sort of rhetoric, aimed at justifying and consolidating the way of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao tizhi; Ma., abkai gurun i doro yoso), reached its peak in the Qianlong period.¹²⁷
Chosŏn again represented the best example of the way of the Heavenly Dynasty, a fact that permeated many aspects of Qing-Chosŏn contacts. For instance, in 1776, one thousand taels of silver belonging to a Korean mission were stolen by Chinese thieves near Mukden. Emperor Qianlong instructed the Manchu general of Mukden, Hūngšang (1718–81), to compensate the mission for its losses in order to uphold the way of our Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., he wo tianchao tizhi; Ma. musei amba gurun i doro de acanambi). The emperor emphasized in his Chinese edict that the Chosŏn are a people of foreign barbarians (Ch., Chaoxian nai waiyi zhi ren), further elucidating in the Manchu version of the edict that the people of the country of Chosŏn are a people of foreign barbarians (Ma., Coohiyan gurun i niyalma serengge, tulergi aiman i niyalma).¹²⁸ This case was not exceptional, and the wealth of similar cases indicates the maturation of the Qing’s Zongfan discourse.¹²⁹
Despite the harmonious imperial picture the Qing painted, its model fan was simultaneously creating an alternate vision. While Chosŏn continued publicly to display its obedience to the Qing, sending tributary missions to Beijing over and above what imperial edicts demanded, in private the Chosŏn king and his
officials, along with Chosŏn intellectuals, were reluctant to identify the Qing as the supreme representative of Chinese culture. This story is explored in the next chapter.
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2 BARBARIANIZING CHOSŎN The Chosŏn Model and the Chinese Empire, 1644–1761 The year 1644 marked the beginning of a new stage in the Qing’s exploitation of the “Chosŏn model” as an institutionalized policy for constructing a new imperial order within and beyond the Qing’s borders. Informed by Chosŏn’s status as the Qing’s prototypical outer fan, this model manifested itself in well-established and highly programmed formalities in the contacts between the Qing and its outer fan. Through the Chosŏn model, the Qing rulers initiated a twofold transfor- mation by reversing and institutionalizing the discourse of the civilized–barbarian distinction: they enshrined the Qing as the new Heavenly Dynasty at the center of the known universe and converted Chosŏn and other countries into countries of barbarians on its periphery. The Qing accomplished this transformation con- clusively in the middle of the eighteenth century, when the court published the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Ch., Huang Qing zhigong tu). This chapter reveals the prolonged process by which the Qing gradually reconstructed a Chinese empire in the post-Ming world by legitimizing, enhancing, and practicing its new dual identity as China/Zhongguo and the Heavenly Dynasty through the Chosŏn model in its foreign relations from the first half of the seven- teenth century to the second half of the eighteenth century. Over the course of this century and a half, the macrotransformation of the Manchu regime’s identity in the cosmopolitan politico-cultural context was deeply connected with its microtrans-formation in the Manchu-Chosŏn framework. If there was a tendency among China’s neighbors to decenter the Middle Kingdom after the Ming, this chapter brings to light the process of recentering the Middle Kingdom undertaken by the Qing.¹ Establishing a Dual Identity: The Qing as China and the Heavenly Dynasty On October 30, 1644, Emperor Shunzhi offered a grand sacrifice to Heaven and Earth in the Qing’s new capital, Beijing. He asserted that the Qing would “pacify China” (Ch., sui Zhongguo) and “set a good example for ten thousand countries” (Ch., biaozheng wanbang).² For many people, this event marked the rise of the Qing as the equivalent of China/Zhongguo. In 1767, after finding that a magistrate in Yunnan Province had failed to refer to the Qing as the “Heavenly Dynasty” or “China/Zhongguo” in an official note to the “foreign barbarians” of Burma, Emperor Qianlong furiously pointed out that “it is the rule for one to refer to the court as the ‘Heavenly Dynasty’ or ‘China’ when one mentions it to men from afar. Our country has unified the central area and external areas, and even the barbarians know the Great Qing’s virtue and civilization.”³ Emperor Qianlong’s pronouncement indicates that the terms “Heavenly Dynasty” and “Zhongguo” were interchangeable. Historians of the Qing and modern China tend to follow the emperor, or at least the Qing’s political discourse as developed by the emperor, by treating China/Zhongguo and the Heavenly Dynasty as synonymous terms, both referring to the political unit of the Qing. Yet what the emperor did not mention—or was perhaps not able to realize—was that the Qing did not acquire the two titles simultaneously when it replaced the Ming in the early seventeenth century. As the emperor indicated, the two terms were used for the Qing almost exclusively in the context of foreign relations with “men from afar” or “foreign barbarians,” which generally referred to foreigners. In the domestic context, these terms were replaced by others, such as “the Great Qing,” “our dynasty” (Ch., wochao, benchao, or guochao), “our country” (Ch., wo guojia), and “the imperial dynasty” (Ch., huangchao or shengchao). In the first years after 1644, some Qing officials described the new regime as the “Qing Dynasty” (Ch., Qingchao), a successor to the “Ming Dynasty” in the context of foreign communications; this usage is found in correspondence between officials in Guangzhou
(Canton) and Siam in 1653. But Qingchao remains rare in Qing documents.⁴ As the Qing took over Beijing in 1644 and consolidated its rule over inner China afterward, it completed its transformation into Zhongguo, but its refashioning into the Heavenly Dynasty had barely started. In the late 1640s, when the Manchu Eight Banners were marching into South China, Southwest China, and North- west China, the Qing began to use Chosŏn to construct its new image as the Heavenly Dynasty; however, the process turned out to be difficult and even embar- rassing. According to early Qing archives, Qing scholars may have called the Qing the “Heavenly Dynasty” for the first time in a draft imperial edict in 1649 invest- ing Yi Ho (King Hyojong) as the king of Chosŏn. The draft edict was written by Fu Yijian (1609–65), a Han Chinese literatus from Shandong Province who had won first place in the Qing’s first imperial civil-service examination in 1645.⁵ By emphasizing that the king of Chosŏn should be “an important subordinate serving the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., pinghan tianchao) and loyal to the “central civilized country” (Ch., Huaxia), Fu equated the Qing, which had become Zhongguo, with the Heavenly Dynasty and the civilized country. However, the final version of the edict that was sent to Chosŏn omitted the two latter terms and continued to use the term “upper country” to refer to the Qing, suggesting that the Qing was not yet prepared to claim to be the Heavenly Dynasty.⁶ China, or Zhongguo, could be defined in a general geographical sense by the Qing borders, regardless of how the borders were expanded and redrawn, so long as the Qing controlled the Ming’s territory, or at least the central plain (Ch., Zhongyuan).⁷ In fact, after 1644, when the Qing rulers began writing and revising their history, they deliberately deleted some Manchu terms referring to the Ming as Zhongguo. For example, Hongtaiji, in a letter to the Ming on July 29, 1632, had ex- plained that the Jin fought with the Ming because “the Ming officials in Liaodong did not follow the way of China” (Ma., Liyoodung i hafasa Dulimbai gurun i doroi tondoi beiderakū), using the Manchu term Dulimbai gurun in clear reference to China/Zhongguo. Later, the narrative written in Chinese replaced the phrase “the way of China” (Ch., Zhongguo/Zhongyuan zhi dao) with “the way of rightness” (Ch., zhengzhi zhi dao). While Hongtaiji in 1632 had called the Ming “your China” (Ma., suweni Dulimbai gurun), the post-1644 Chinese edition replaced this term with “your country” (Ch., erguo), deleting the word for “China.”⁸ The changing terminology shows that after 1644 the Qing deeply identified itself with China. Given the ethnic background of the ruling house of the Qing, many scholars have been interested in establishing when the Qing court officially used the Manchu term Dulimbai gurun to define itself as China/Zhongguo. Some cite the year 1689 and the Treaty of Nerchinsk that the Qing signed with Russia. In fact, the Qing court had used this Manchu term to represent its identity much earlier in its negotiations with Zheng Jing (1642–81), the eldest son of Zheng Chenggong (1624–62), who occupied Taiwan in 1662. While Zheng Jing never questioned the Qing’s identity as China, he argued that Taiwan was not a part of China in an ef- fort to secure for Taiwan an independent status like that of Chosŏn. Emperor Kangxi, however, reiterated in a decree in 1669 that Zheng belonged to the “people of China” (Ch., Zhongguo zhi ren; Ma., Dulimbai gurun i niyalma).⁹ In the late Kangxi period, the Qing presented itself as China in a favorable and definitive way. For example, in his travelogue, the Manchu official Tulišen, who was dispatched as an envoy to the Turgūt Mongols in Russia in 1712, generally referred to the Qing as Dulimbai gurun (“China”) or meni Dulimbai gurun (“our China”); these terms were rendered into Chinese as Zhongguo or Zhonghua when Tulišen’s jour- nal was published in 1723 in both languages. Tulišen also consistently translated terms such as “our place” (Ma., meni bade) as “our China” (Ch., wo Zhongguo) and referred to all people of the Great Qing, such as the Manchus, Han Chinese, and Mongols, as “people of China.” More importantly, following Emperor Kangx- i’s instructions, Tulišen emphasized China’s Confucian nature to Russia, claiming that “our country takes fidelity, filial piety, benevolence, justice, and sincerity as fundamentals” (Ma., meni gurun i banjire tondo hiyoošun, gosin, jurgan, akdun be fulehe da obumbi; Ch., wo guojia yi zhong xiao ren yi xin wei genben).¹⁰ By contrast, the Heavenly Dynasty, or Tianchao, could not be delineated in the same way, since it was based on the notion of all-under-Heaven—a China- centered politico-cultural term with no connection to borders in the geographical sense. Put another way, the Qing could define itself as China from within, but it
could not identify itself as the Heavenly Dynasty without support from outside the Qing: the new regime would first have to erect a new, Qing-centric, and multi- national Zongfan system. The expectation that the Qing would become a new imperial power required the regime to transform the countries that the Ming had represented as its fan into fan in the Qing’s orbit. The Ming had pursued the same policy when it “became the ruler of China” (Ch., zhu Zhongguo) in 1368, im- mediately sending envoys to the countries that had served as fan of its predecessor, the Yuan Dynasty, with the aim of converting them into fan of the Ming.¹¹ However, unlike the Ming, the Manchu rulers in 1644 faced the tremendous challenge of overcoming their previous status as barbarians, as defined by the civi- lized–bar-bar- distinction. Compared with the mission to identify the Qing as China and as the legitimate successor to the Ming within the Qing’s borders, the quest to construct the Qing as the new Heavenly Dynasty beyond its borders called for extraordinary effort. From the perspective of comparative philology, the Chinese term “Tianchao” was not initially widely adopted in the Manchu language, in which it was literally rendered as abkai gurun (“Heavenly country”).¹² The Manchu rulers had difficulty identifying with this term and the Chinese political concepts behind it. In July 1637, for example, after reviewing the draft edict of investiture to the king of Chosŏn, Hongtaiji commented that he did not like to equate himself with Heaven as the Ming had done, suggesting that his officials must have employed the Chinese word tian (“Heaven”) or the Manchu term abka (“Heaven”) in the draft.¹³ Nevertheless, the task of reconstructing the Qing as the new China in the seventeenth century left the Manchu rulers with no choice but to embrace the term and the rationale behind it. The intellectual transformation of the Qing ruling house is evident in the visit of the fifth Dalai Lama (1617–82) to Beijing in late 1652 and early 1653. The Qing’s Manchu officials supported Emperor Shunzhi’s plan to greet the Dalai Lama in Daiga in Inner Mongolia, arguing that the Ūlet Mongols, who controlled Tibet mili- tarily at the time, would be pacified by the emperor’s gracious behavior. But the Han Chinese officials argued that the emperor was “the ruler of all countries under Heaven” (Ch., tianxia guojia zhi zhu) and should not violate conventions by meeting with a lama, even the Dalai Lama, in person outside the capital. Still hesitant about going to Daiga, the emperor took part in a grand ceremony commemorating Confucius at the Directorate of Education (Ch., Guozi jian) in Beijing, where he knelt down twice, each time making three prostrations. The ceremony, attended by many high-ranking Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese officials and generals, conferred on the emperor the mantle of the supreme agent of Confucianism. Right after the ceremony, two Han Chinese grand secretaries, Hong Cheng- chou (1593–1665) and Chen Zhilin (1605–66), submitted a memorial to the emperor entreating him not to go to Daiga to welcome the Dalai Lama because astro- logical phenomena reported by the Imperial Astronomical Bureau suggested that intruders would threaten the emperorship. The two officials emphasized that “the way of Heaven is infinite” (Ch., tiandao shenyuan) and could not be predicted. After reading the memorial, the emperor immediately abandoned the idea of visiting Daiga. Instead he welcomed the Dalai Lama in the South Garden of Beijing.¹⁴ As this episode suggests, the Manchu emperor had to adjust to his role as the Son of Heaven in the Confucian sense in the post-1644 politico-cultural and ideological contexts, notwithstanding the Qing’s serious religious and military concerns over its western frontier in Inner Asia. Reconstructing the Chinese Empire: The Rise of the Chosŏn Model From East Asia to Southeast and Inner Asia: The Qing’s Presentation of the Chosŏn Model The Qing did not stand alone as it sought to construct its new dual identity. Chosŏn, the first Confucian outer fan of the Qing, played an unparalleled role in pro- viding the Manchu conquerors with resources to form and articulate the Qing’s new identity. As early as 1650, in a palace memorial to Emperor Shunzhi, the king called the Qing the “Heavenly Dynasty,” even though the Qing court itself was still reluctant to use the term.¹⁵ The development of Chosŏn’s essential role in the
Qing-centric Zongfan world can be divided into two historical phases: the seven years from 1637 to 1643 and the 251 years from 1644 to 1894. In the first phase, Chosŏn began serving as the outer fan of the Qing by adhering to the clearly formulated and institutionalized discipline of the Sino-Korean Zongfan system, which had functioned between the Ming and Chosŏn for more than two centuries. As chapter 1 described, the Qing was able to make a significant move toward the transformation of its identity by assuming the place of the Ming in the framework of Sino-Korean relations. The frequent visits of Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries to Mukden provided the Qing with good opportunities to emphasize and practice its centrality in the known world. After 1644, with its dramatic emergence as a Ming-style, nationwide regime and the extensive expansion of its territory, the Qing found itself in the position of having to manage relations with multiple neighboring countries, such as Annam, Ryukyu, Lanchang (Laos), Siam, Sulu (the Philippines), and Burma, that had served as subordinates to the Ming. Having inherited these fan from the Ming, what Qing China now needed to do was to resume and refashion the Zongfan sys- tem according to its own standards. On this front, the Qing had gained valuable experience from its institutionalized communications with Chosŏn since the 1630s and, through these communications, had developed a mature model of a Qing-centric Zongfan arrangement. The Chosŏn model laid out a path whereby a country or a political entity could follow Chosŏn into the Qingcentric system primarily by receiving imperial investitures from the Qing, adopting the regnal titles of the Qing in its calendar, and sending tributary emissaries to the Qing.¹⁶ The Chosŏn model was a pattern centered on rituals.¹⁷ Although the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship had been inaugurated by the Manchu military conquest of 1637, as a result of which the crown prince, another prince, and sons of high- ranking Chosŏn officials were detained in Mukden as hostages, the unpleasant situation began to change when the Qing released the hostages in 1644. The Qing also progressively reduced the tributes required of Chosŏn until, by the late 1730s, they were less than one-tenth of what they had been in the late 1630s and be- came a mere symbol of political subordination.¹⁸ What accompanied the tributes was the performance of a set of highly programmed and increasingly elaborate formalities that demonstrated the hierarchical Zongfan order and the Qing’s new normative identity. In the first years after 1644, the Qing found the Chosŏn model the most powerful and practical way of managing its relations with other countries and of extend- ing its influence and authority. Emperor Shunzhi articulated the importance of Chosŏn’s model role in 1647 after the Qing army conquered Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong Provinces and prepared to establish relations with Ryukyu, Annam, Siam, and Japan. On March 17 and August 25, the emperor announced that the Qing would “give preferential treatment to these countries as to Chosŏn” (Ch., yu Chaoxian yiti youdai) as long as they “subordinated themselves to ‘the civilized’ and paid tribute to the court” (Ch., qingxin xianghua, chengchen rugong).¹⁹ In this way, the Manchu rulers publicized Chosŏn’s prototypical fan status and estab- lished the Qing-Chosŏn relationship as the yardstick for relations between the Qing and other countries or political entities. Rather than adopting the aggressive colonial policy of the Yuan, the Qing learned from the Ming’s Zongfan mechanism, using the sophisticated and markedly Confucian Chosŏn model to maintain stability on its frontiers and to construct a new Chinese empire beyond them.²⁰ As a result of the Qing rulers’ efforts at promoting the Chosŏn model after 1644, political units beyond the Qing’s control also came to regard it as an ideal way of solving conflicts with the Qing while retaining their own privileges. Between 1662 and 1669, for example, when the Qing was trying to persuade Zheng Jing to surrender in Taiwan, Zheng insisted on “following the Chosŏn model” (Ch., zhao Chaoxian shili) into the Qing’s Zongfan system by “proclaiming subordination and paying tribute” (Ch., chengchen nagong) but refraining from cutting his hair in the Qing style.²¹ For Zheng, the Chosŏn model appeared to offer the most favorable and promising way to resolve the standoff with the Qing. Emperor Kangxi refused this proposal on the grounds that Chosŏn had been “always a foreign country” (Ch., conglai suoyou zhi waiguo; Ma., daci bihe encu gurun), whereas Zheng belonged to the “people of China.”²² These negotiations show the perceived broad applicability and coverage of the Chosŏn model in situations in which neither independence nor complete annexation was an immediate and acceptable
solution. The Chosŏn model provided the Manchu ruling house with a general blueprint for dealing with other political entities. Over the Qing period, two parallel central institutions were responsible for the affairs of outer fan : the Mongolian Superintendency mainly managed outer fan located to the north and west of Qing China, while the Ministry of Rites was in charge of fan in the east, the south, and the west. This book focuses on the outer fan under the management of the Ministry of Rites rather than those under the Mongolian Superintendency, although the two types of outer fan may have been associated through the Chosŏn model in the early years of the Qing’s expansion to Inner Asia and the development of its Eurasian empire. This inconspicuous connection between the eastern and western frontiers of the Qing empire had manifested itself at least by 1653, when the Qing invested the fifth Dalai Lama and the Gusi Khan of the Ūlet Mongols by incorporating them into the Qing-dominated extended family and placing them under the Qing’s juris- diction. At the time, the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites were administratively still closely connected with one another: it was a Manchu min- ister (Ch., shangshu; Ma., aliha amban) from the Ministry of Rites, Langkio, and a vice minister (Ch., shilang; Ma., ashan i amban) from the Mongolian Superin- tendency, Sidali, who together gave the Dalai Lama and the Gusi Khan the books of investiture. The imperial statement in the khan’s investiture book bore a re- markable resemblance to that issued to the new king of Chosŏn in 1649. It declared that the recipient must serve as the Qing’s “subordinate” or “fence” (Ch., pingfu) “until the Yellow River becomes as narrow as a belt and Mount Tai becomes as small as a grindstone” (Ch., daili shanhe).²³ In addition, the mechanism governing the “local products” and tributes that the lama and the khan presented to the emperor and the empress dowager in 1654 and the imperial gifts the lama and the khan received in return was much like that used between the Qing and Chosŏn.²⁴ Finally, the imperial mandates of investiture (Ch., gaoming; Ma., g’aoming) that the Qing issued to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni bore the same imperial seal—“Seal of declaring imperial mandate” (Ch., zhigao zhi bao; Ma., hese wasimbure boobai)—as had the mandate investing the new king of Chosŏn.²⁵ If we compare the imperial codes of the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites, it seems that the former borrowed institutional regulations from the latter to formalize the communications between the Manchu rulers and the Mongol fan in Inner Asia. The prototypical role of Chosŏn in the Qingcentric Zong- fan system may have contributed to the Qing’s policy of integrating the Inner Asian political and military entities into the Qing’s extended family.²⁶ On the surface, the geographical responsibilities of the Ministry of Rites did not overlap with those of the Mongolian Superintendency, as Qing officials confirmed in 1743, so Qing-Chosŏn contacts were ostensibly unrelated to Qing– Inner Asian contacts.²⁷ But on the political level, soon after 1644 the Qing rulers began to apply the Zongfan rationale behind the Chosŏn model to Inner Asia, along with the Manchu court’s promulgation of the discourse of “all-under-Heaven” and “people with- out difference between the outside and the inside,” as part of the long process of subordinating the Zunghar Mongols, whom the Qing rulers treated as people “beyond virtue and civilization.”²⁸ Administratively, the Ministry of Rites was also in charge of the affairs of some lamas in Gansu and Shaanxi until the 1740s, when it transferred this jurisdiction to the Mongolian Superintendency.²⁹ The Chosŏn model, in this sense, gradually became a normative, standard, and powerful soft weapon in the repertoire of the Qing. It allowed the Manchu rulers to govern the areas conquered by the formidable Eight Banners in Inner Asia, which ar- guably smoothed the way for the Qing to insert its civil administrative system into these areas during the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods. Who Were the Barbarians? The Imperial Code and the Qing’s Reforms Under the Qing, the Zongfan order was maintained and embodied by the exchange of emissaries between the Qing and its “subordinate countries” (Ch., shuguo; Ma., tulergi gurun or harangga gurun), which were generally described as “subordinate countries of foreign barbarians” (Ch., waiyi shuguo). All exchanges were conducted in accordance with The Universal Tributary Regulations (Ch., Chaogong tongli) codified by the Ministry of Rites, and the performance of the exchanges
was supervised by the Host-Guest Office (Ch., Zhuke qingli si) of the Ministry of Rites. These regulations primarily consisted of the following seven mandates:
1.Investiture (Ch., cefeng): The Qing emperor gave the new king of each fan a patent of appointment through an imperial mandate of investiture along with a decree (Ch., chiyu) and an official seal for use in correspondence.
2.Regnal titles (Ch., nianhao): The fan adopted the Qing’s regnal titles as the way to enumerate years.
3.Calendar (Ch., shuoli): The fan used the Qing’s calendar and celebrated Chinese festivals.
4.The dispatch of emissaries to pay tribute to the Qing (Ch., chaogong), with a frequency individually determined by the Qing.
5.The conferral of noble rank on a deceased king or privileged members of the royal house of the fan (Ch., fengshi).
6.Reporting events to the Qing (Ch., zoushi): Each fan informed the emperor of important domestic events but did not need to ask for instructions and could assume that the Qing would not intervene in its domestic affairs.
7.Trade (Ch., maoyi or hushi), including trade at the frontiers and at the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations (Ch., Huitong siyi guan; Ma., Acan- jime isanjire tulergi gurun i bithe ubaliyambure kuren) in Beijing.³⁰ The Qing made considerable changes to the Zongfan system that it inherited from the Ming. The Ming had also relied on The Universal Tributary Regulations, by which the Ministry of Rites managed routine exchanges between China and the “subordinate barbarian countries in the four quarters” (Ch., fanguo or siyi)—Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, the Jurchens, Mongolia, and other countries and political entities—as well as interactions between the Ming and “indigenous chieftains” (Ch., tuguan or tusi), including local chieftains in Yunnan, Guangxi, Guizhou, Sichuan, Hunan, and Hubei.³¹ But two significant changes distinguished the list of “foreign barbarian countries” in the new Qing regulations from the Ming’s list. First, the Qing excluded “indigenous chieftains” from its list of tribu- taries because of its policy toward “barbarian chieftains” (Ch., yimu) in southwestern China. Known as “replacing the hereditary indigenous chieftains with rotat- ing officials” (Ch., gaitu guiliu), the policy had been inaugurated by the Yuan and the Ming, but only in the Yongzheng period of the Qing was it carried out on a truly large scale.³² The areas and populations under the chieftains’ control were integrated simultaneously into the Qing’s territory and into its household regis- tration system.³³ The indigenous chieftains were thus outside the supervision of the Ministry of Rites. The line between barbarians belonging to these political units and barbarians from other countries was clear in the minds of the Manchu rulers at court and their deputies in the provinces.³⁴ Second, the Western coun- tries gradually disappeared from the list of foreign barbarians in the tributary regulations. By the late fourteenth century, the Ming had fifteen outer fan countries, and the majority of these became the Qing’s outer fan, including Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, Lanchang, Siam, Sulu, and Burma.³⁵ From the 1760s to the 1840s dur- ing the Qing period, the list also included the Netherlands and the countries of the Western Ocean (Ch., Xiyang), but by the 1890s only these seven Asian coun- tries remained on the list.³⁶ Whereas in the Qianlong period the Mongolian, Tibetan, and Muslim areas under the management of the Mongolian Superintendency had “all entered [the Qing’s] map and registers” (Ch., xianru bantu) and were presented “like prefectures and counties” (Ch., youru junxian),³⁷ the “subordinate countries of foreign bar- barians” under the supervision of the Ministry of Rites were not integrated into the Qing’s core territory. Nor would these countries be treated as parts of the Republic or the People’s Republic of China in the twentieth century. By the same token, the dual management system for the outer fan—the Mongolian Superin- tendency and the Ministry of Rites—under the Qing made it difficult for people outside this institutional mechanism to draw a clear line between them. This might explain why, as discussed in chapter 5, some Qing officials in the late nineteenth century responded to complications involving Chosŏn by suggesting that
Beijing apply its policy vis-à-vis Mongolia and Tibet to Chosŏn by converting Chosŏn into prefectures and counties, as they supposed Chosŏn had been in the Qianlong period. The rationale behind this suggestion applied the basic structure of the Qing empire on its western frontier to the management of its eastern one, highlighting Chosŏn’s prominent subordinate position within the empire. The role of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship is thus significant. This relationship should not be treated simply as a specific instance of the Zongfan sys- tem, as scholars have typically done. Rather, it is best understood as a prototype that shaped the formation of the Qing’s Zongfan system and helped the Manchu regime transform its political identity for the purpose of claiming centrality and accessing orthodox legitimacy in the process of reshuffling the Chinese world. In short, the Qing-Chosŏn relationship was the seedbed of the Qing’s entire Zongfan arrangement, from which the political legitimacy of both sides—the Qing and its outer fan—sprang. Civilizing the Center: The Practice of the Chosŏn Model Five aspects of the Qing’s practice of the Chosŏn model, aspects embodied in and undergirded by ritual practices and documentary discourse, showcased the Qing’s identity as the civilized center. These aspects concern the frequency and composition of missions; the overland route and the Sino-Korean geographical boundaries; humble palace memorials, imperial mandates and decrees, and orthodox legitimacy; tributes, gifts, and court-to-court interactions; and receptions and rituals. The Frequency and Composition of Imperial and Tributary Missions The exchange of missions between the Qing and Chosŏn started in 1637 and continued without interruption until the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. The fre- quency of Chosŏn’s missions to the Qing was higher than that of any other country. Whereas other subordinate countries sent tributary missions to Beijing every other year (Ryukyu), every three years (Siam), every four years (Annam), every five years (Sulu), or every ten years (Lanchang and Burma), Chosŏn dispatched sev- eral missions every year.³⁸ Although the imperial code required Chosŏn to send an annual tributary mission at the end of each year that would simultaneously serve as the mission for the winter solstice, the imperial birthday, and the lunar New Year, Chosŏn never hesitated to send more emissaries under different names, dispatching a new mission before the previous one had even returned in order to nourish its relationship with the Qing.³⁹ From 1637 to 1894, Chosŏn sent about 698 official missions to the Qing for twenty-six different purposes, an average of 2.71 missions per year.⁴⁰ In 1784 and 1788, Emperor Qianlong commented jubilantly that in this respect Chosŏn was a peer of the Qing’s inner fan.⁴¹ According to the imperial regulations, a Korean mission was to have thirty members: an envoy, an associate envoy, a secretary, three interpreters, and twenty- four tribute guard officers. The envoy, associate envoy, and secretary were the three key members. As a special privilege to Chosŏn, the number of attendants and servants attached to the mission was not limited. By contrast, the missions from Ryukyu, Lanchang, Burma, and the Netherlands were not to exceed twenty mem- bers; those from other Western countries were limited to twenty-two, those from Siam to twenty-six, and those from Annam to thirty.⁴² Many Korean scholars and businessmen visited Beijing as mission attendants or servants in order to experience Chinese culture or to seek their fortunes, so a Korean mission often num- bered several hundred people. For example, the annual tributary mission of 1653 had a total of 225 members, the gratitude mission of 1777 a total of 310, the grat- itude mission of 1803 a total of 213, and the congratulatory mission of 1889 a total of 311.⁴³ In 1829, two missions with more than six hundred people combined ar- rived in Beijing at the same time, forcing the Ministry of Rites and the Ministry of Works to borrow twenty large tents from the Imperial Household Department (Ch., Neiwu fu) to house the additional visitors. Until the late nineteenth century, the legions of Chosŏn’s missions continued their pilgrimages to Beijing every
year with a large number of tributes and horses.⁴⁴ By contrast, the Qing sent far fewer and smaller imperial missions to Chosŏn. From 1637 to 1894, the Qing undertook 172 missions to Hansŏng, an average of 0.67 missions per year. In the early Qing, the Manchu court frequently dispatched emissaries to investigate cases of homicide and smuggling at the border, to negotiate resolutions to these cases with the king, and sometimes to discuss the punishment of Korean officials who failed to satisfy the Qing. As early as the Shunzhi period, the Manchu court began to reduce the number of its envoys, the rationale behind the change being the Zongfan idea of “cherishing the small.” In May 1653, for example, in the course of investigating a cross-border case of homicide, the Ministry of Rites proposed to ask the Korean emissary in Beijing to carry the imperial documents to the king instead of dispatching an imperial envoy for the purpose, given that “Chosŏn is a country of men from afar” (Ch., Chaoxian guo xi yuanren). Emperor Shunzhi endorsed this proposal, declaring that “hereafter, do not propose to send envoys to disturb the fan [Ch., fanbang] with minor matters.”⁴⁵ By the middle period of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, such envoys to Hansŏng disappeared entirely.⁴⁶ From this point on, imperial missions to Chosŏn were of two primary types: missions for investiture and missions to confer noble rank, both relating to power shifts that required the Chinese emperor’s bestowal of legitimacy. In the early period, an imperial mission contained around a hundred men, many of whom were Manchu bannermen of the Eight Banners who joined the mission for the purpose of trade. In 1658 Emperor Shunzhi significantly trimmed the size of the mis- sions by calling for the end of Manchu trade in Hansŏng. After that, a mission comprised an envoy, an associate envoy, four interpreters, and eighteen attendants.⁴⁷ In 1845 and 1846, Emperor Daoguang further reduced the number of core members to four.⁴⁸ Taking attendants into account, after the early nine- teenth century an imperial mission had fewer than thirty members in total. The mission in 1876 comprised twenty members, and the last mission, in 1890, had twenty-eight.⁴⁹ All imperial envoys to Chosŏn—from the first envoy in 1637, Inggūldai, to the last one in 1890, Xuchang (1838–92)—were Manchu officials. They included some members of the Mongol and Han Chinese Eight Banners but no non-banner Han Chinese, whereas envoys to Annam and Ryukyu were mainly non-banner Han Chinese rather than Manchus. By at least the 1760s, Han Chinese scholars were fully aware of this ethnic discrepancy, though some of their Korean counterparts were not.⁵⁰ The door was never opened for Han Chinese to participate in tributary affairs in Korea. The exclusion was perhaps rooted in the implicit demands of the civilized–barbarian distinction and the Qing’s need to transcend the pre-1644 Manchu-Korean relationship: the Manchu court had to demonstrate, maintain, and consolidate its legitimacy as the human and institutional agent of the Mandate of Heaven and to strengthen its claim to civilized centrality and Chineseness through the hierarchical relationship. Still, some Manchu envoys, such as Akdun (1685–1756) in 1717, broadly identified themselves from a cultural perspective as “Han envoys” (Ch., hanjie) from the “central civilized country” (Ch., Zhonghua, Zhongxia).⁵¹ The Overland Route, the Willow Palisade, and Geographical Boundaries In the post-1644 period, the emissaries of the two countries traveled on an overland route, which was about 950 miles (3,000 Chinese li) long and linked Han- sŏng and Beijing via around eighty-two stations. The route passed through P’yŏngyang, Ŭiju, the Yalu River, Fenghuang City, Mukden, Shanhai Pass, Fengrun, and Tongzhou (see map 2.1). From 1644 to 1894, both Korean and Manchu emissaries were required to follow the overland route, the sole exception being the last imperial mission in 1890, which took a maritime route due to exceptional circumstances. In general, a mission took forty to sixty days to reach Beijing from Hansŏng, and an imperial mission from Beijing faced the same trudge to Hansŏng.⁵² In Manchuria the overland route skirted the long Willow Palisade (Ch., Liutiao bian)—a system of levees and trenches planted with willow trees, their branches tied together—from Fenghuang City to Shanhai Pass, where it almost connected with the Great Wall. The Manchu rulers built the palisade from the late 1630s to
the 1680s in order to preserve their economic privileges by demarcating domestic boundaries between Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese regions. In the early period of Kangxi’s reign, the palisade connecting Shanhai Pass in the west and Fenghuang City in the east, known as the Old Fence, was around 590 miles (1,900 li) long and had sixteen fence gates, while in the north the New Fence between Weiyuan Village and Fateha Mountain was 215 miles (690 li) with four gates.⁵³ Fenghuang City, located at the southeastern corner of the east wing of the Old Fence, was under the supervision of the Manchu General of Mukden (Ch., Shengjing jiangjun) and had a gate (K., ch’akmun; Ch., zhamen), known as Feng huang Gate, about three miles (eight li) to the southeast of the city.⁵⁴ The Qing built Fenghuang Gate between 1638 and 1639 and extended it southeast toward the Yalu River between 1685 and 1690 up to a location about nine miles (thirty li) from the city.⁵⁵ The gate was the only pass through which Korean emissaries could enter the Qing’s “ancestral territory” (Ch., genben zhongdi) in Manchuria.
Map 2.1 The overland route between Beijing and Ŭiju in the late eighteenth century. The line connecting points A, B, C, and D on the map marks the Willow Pal- isade, which started at Fenghuang City (A) and ended near the Great Wall (the line connecting points D, E, and F). The line connecting points A, G (Mukden), H (Shanhai Pass), I (Fengrun), and J (Tongzhou) forms the overland route that Chosŏn’s emissaries took to Beijing after crossing the Yalu River. Yŏji to, hand- written map, preserved at the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University. Copyright Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies. Between the gate and the boundary river lay a Qing-controlled area in which no one was allowed to live. In the late seventeenth century, this area spanned about thirty-four miles.⁵⁶ The Korean emissaries could pass through this area freely and were not subjected to security checks until they reached Fenghuang Gate. The garrison major of the Manchu bannermen at Fenghuang City did not welcome, check, or send off the missions beyond the gate, which may help explain why Ko- rean emissaries were occasionally robbed by Chinese bandits outside the gate.⁵⁷ For the Korean visitors, Fenghuang Gate was thus more like a borderline than the Yalu River was, although the geographical borderline ran along the middle course of the river. After entering Fenghuang Gate, the Koreans were to proceed to Beijing within twenty-eight days under the escort of Qing soldiers, passing through thirty-nine transfer stations (Ch., gongshi guanshe; Ma., alban jafara elcin i tatara guwan i boo). In fact, however, the visitors were so familiar with the route that generally no Chinese soldiers accompanied them to Beijing. The absence of Chinese monitors endowed the Koreans with fair freedom to visit places along their route and interview local people, enriching their travel journals, which eventually constituted a voluminous collection known as Yŏnhaengnok (The records of the journey to Beijing). All emissaries of the Qing’s fan were required to follow specific tributary routes and dared not deviate from them. For example, Ryukyu’s emissaries were instructed to arrive at Min’an in Fujian, Sulu’s at Xiamen in Fujian, those of Western countries at Macau in Guangdong, Siam’s at Humen in Guangdong, An- nam’s at Taiping in Guangxi, and Burma’s at Yongchang in Yunnan. After the emissaries reached the designated places, the governor-general and the governor of the province would report their arrival to the Ministry of Rites and instruct subordinate officials to send them on to Beijing. Chosŏn’s emissaries had no such rela- tions with officials in the provinces through which they passed, and they communicated directly with the Ministry of Rites. In other words, Chosŏn’s contacts with the Qing were under Beijing’s direct control, which enabled Beijing to use Chosŏn to portray the harmony of its Zongfan system whenever necessary. Along the overland route, the high frequency and large size of Chosŏn’s missions produced considerable and lucrative commercial opportunities for merchants from both countries. What flowed into the Qing realm in massive quantities, in addition to Korean and Japanese goods, was silver. The mission of 1712, for in- stance, carried more than two hundred thousand taels of silver to Beijing, while the one in 1777 brought more than ninety-three thousand taels. The bulk of the sil- ver was originally from Japan, acquired through trade between Tsushima and Chosŏn. The Hansŏng–Fenghuang City–Mukden–Beijing overland trade route was an extension of the Kyoto–Osaka–Tsushima–Pusan–Hansŏng overland and maritime trade route, with Hansŏng and Beijing the two major entrepôts on the com- bined route. Financially, the three nations made up an integrated international silver network, and in the eighteenth century the amount of silver that poured into the Qing from Chosŏn annually could reach five hundred thousand to six hundred thousand taels, which contributed to the Qing’s prosperity but aroused serious concerns among Korean officials.⁵⁸ In this sense, it is not an exaggeration to say that the Beijing–Hansŏng overland route was the most prosperous and most lucrative long-distance and international trade route in East Asia before Chosŏn opened treaty ports in the 1870s and 1880s. Humble Palace Memorials, Imperial Mandates and Decrees, and Orthodox Legitimacy The imperial court in Beijing and the royal court in Hansŏng interacted through meticulously formatted court documents written in accordance with highly institu- tionalized hierarchical norms. From 1637 on, the most important category among the documents that Chosŏn submitted to the Qing was the king’s humble
palace memorials (K., p’yo; Ch., biao). In 1705 the Ministry of Rites in Beijing laid down a set of new criteria for the syntax of these memorials that Chosŏn adhered to for the next 190 years, but the king was still free to use his own terms in composing other kinds of palace memorials.⁵⁹ The humble memorials were aimed at strengthening the Qing’s authority by reiterating and affirming the reciprocal and hierarchical relationship between the emperor and the king. The memorial sub- mitted by the crown prince and deputy king of Chosŏn, Yi Yun (King Gyŏngjong), on April 14, 1721, in the sixtieth year of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, to congratulate the emperor on his birthday, is a typical example. The memorial was written on a sheet of well-made Korean paper in tiny, narrow Chinese characters evenly ar- ranged in twenty-three vertical lines from right to left—although a memorial could, on occasion, exceed fifty lines—and it carefully followed the rules of honorific elevation, exactly as the Qing had mandated in 1705.⁶⁰ Refer ring to himself as “your minister” (K., sin; Ch., chen) of a vassal (Ch., fanfu), who could hardly bear his separation from the court (Ch., queting), Yi proclaimed that “Your Majesty raises all people of the world by assuming the Mandate of Heaven. The world is peaceful and imperial civilization extends to all places. Your Majesty has pacified the four seas, and ten thousand countries have come to revere Your Majesty [Ch., sihai yi er wanguo laiwang].”⁶¹ In such highly formalized memorials, the king frequently called himself “subordinate” or “minister,” Chosŏn the “small country,” and the Qing the “big coun- try,” the “upper country,” the “big dynasty,” the “central dynasty,” or the “Heavenly Dynasty.”⁶² These Qing-mandated terms exploited Chosŏn’s subordinate sta- tus to highlight the Qing’s centrality in the early eighteenth century. Year after year, Chosŏn, as the representative of the others, helped consolidate the Qing’s supreme cultural identity as well as Qing hegemony through its performance of such written subservience. Upon receipt of the king’s humble memorials, the em- peror generally wrote on the cover in red ink, “I have learned of the appreciative memorial that you, the king, respectfully presented. Let the relevant ministry [the Ministry of Rites] know.” The comments were made either in Manchu (“Wang sini kesi de hengkileme wesimbuhe be saha, harangga jurgan sa.”) or Chinese (“Lanwang zouxie. Zhidao liao. Gaibu zhidao.”). On the Qing side, the imperial decrees granting a deceased king noble rank or investing a new king with a patent of appointment also served to consolidate the hierarchy. The special terms used in these edicts had their own rules, which underwent a process of institutionalization after 1644. When the Qing invested Yi Chong as king in January 1638 (the first investiture that the Qing performed), the decree stated only that Chosŏn would be recognized as fan to the Qing forever.⁶³ But after 1644 the Manchu court began to include additional terms with strong political meanings in the Zongfan context. For example, the decree of investiture in 1649 clearly defined Chosŏn as an outer fan in a “remote area” (Ch., xiahuang) that submitted itself to the Qing’s virtues and civilization. In 1675 the phrase “cher- ishing the eastern country” (Ch., huairou dongtu) appeared in the decrees.⁶⁴ These terms substantially broadened the scope of the Qing’s political and cultural ide- ology and transformed its identity in the context of the civilized–barbarian dichotomy. On March 6, 1725, Emperor Yongzheng issued a mandate and a decree to Yi Gŭm to invest him as the king and his wife as the queen. The mandate of investi- ture (Ch., fengtian gaoming; Ma., abkai hesei g’aoming) consisted of five connected pieces of dyed ramie cloth in red, blue, black, white, and yellow from right to left. Each of the five sections was surrounded by a pattern of flying dragons (see figures 2.1 and 2.2). In the mandate Emperor Yongzheng stated, “The great strat- egy is simply to extend civilization [Ch., jiaohua; Ma., tacihiyan wen] to the countries from afar [Ch., haibang; Ma., goroki gurun]…. Generations of your court have been sincerely loyal and trustworthy and have been paying tribute diligently [Ch., zhigong qinxiu; Ma., tušan alban be kiceme faššambi].” In investing Yi Gŭm the “king of Chosŏn” (Ch., Chaoxian guowang; Ma., Coohiyan gurun i wang), the emperor emphasized that the king “shall serve as the fence on the eastern land [Ch., pinghan dongfan; Ma., dergi bade fiyanji dalikū], devoutly use the imperial calendar [Ch., qiangong zhengshuo; Ma., forgon ton be olhošome ginggulembi], pacify the land, and assist the imperial house forever [Ch., jiafu yu huangjia; Ma., ejen i boode aisilame wehiyembi].” The emperor advised the king to “use a pure and genuine
mind to serve the Heavenly court [Ch., tianshi; Ma., abkai gurun].”⁶⁵ A decree to the king articulated this point again by stating, “You should be loyal forever and efficiently govern the land as a minister from afar [Ch., houfu; Ma., jecen i golo], while you should be loyal and obedient and serve as a fence [Ch., pinghan; Ma., fiyanji dalikū] for the Heavenly house [Ch., tianjia; Ma., gurun boo].”⁶⁶ The Chinese and Manchu terms of the imperial edicts portrayed the king as a family member of the Qing court, and they became more sophisticated in the Qianlong period. The imperial edicts to the king in 1757, for instance, referred to Chosŏn as a “fence,” a “subordinate country” (Ch., shuguo; Ma., harangga gurun), a “remote submission” (Ch., yuanfu; Ma., goroki i jecen), and a “lower country” (Ch., xiaguo; Ma., fejergi gurun) of the “Middle Kingdom” (Ch., Zhongchao, Z hongbang; M., Dulimbai gurun). The edicts also emphasized that the king’s court (M., wang ni boo) had been loyal to and received special rewards from the “Heav- enly court” (Ch., tianshi; Ma., han i hargašan).⁶⁷ By invoking these norms, the Qing explicitly presented itself as the civilized center—China and the Heavenly Dy- nasty—in both Chinese and Manchu terms. In his memorials to the emperor, the king used a gold seal received from the Qing. From early 1637 to early 1653, the seal had only Manchu characters, which read Coohiyan gurun i wang ni doron (seal of the king of the country of Chosŏn). On April 22, 1653, Emperor Shunzhi, evidently displeased by the absence of Chi- nese script from the seal, instructed the Ministry of Rites to make a new seal that included “Chinese characters” (Ch., hanzi). As a result, the words Chaoxian guowang zhi yin (seal of the king of the country of Chosŏn) were added to the seal.⁶⁸ The emperor did not explain his rationale for the change, but his decision underscored the new dynasty’s Chineseness. On the Qing side, the emperors, in their mandates to Chosŏn, always used the “seal of declaring imperial mandate,” which carried both a Chinese text, Zhigao zhi bao, and a Manchu one, Hese wasimbure boobai, exactly the same text that appeared on the imperial mandates issued to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni in Tibet. The combination of languages reflected the polyglot politics of a multiethnic empire.⁶⁹
FIGURE 2.1. The Manchu section of the imperial mandate to invest the king of Chosŏn in 1725. Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, preserved at Jangseogak, the Academy of Korean Studies, Korea. Copyright Academy of Korean Studies.
FIGURE 2.2. The Chinese section of the imperial mandate to invest the king of Chosŏn in 1725. Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, preserved at Jangseogak, the Academy of Korean Studies, Korea. Copyright Academy of Korean Studies. The imperial investiture of the king helps explain a paradox in the Qing period: certain Confucian countries, in particular Chosŏn and Annam, were privately reluctant to identify the Qing as the supreme representative of Chinese culture, but in practice they never challenged its status as the superior country and fre- quently sent tributary missions to Beijing to display their deference. The explanation for the apparent paradox lies in the fact that the missions fulfilled a dual pur- pose in establishing not only the legitimacy of the Qing but also that of the monarchs of the fan. The Zongfan relationship between the Qing and its fan was an incarnation of this symbiotic and synergistic legitimacy, namely, the orthodox legitimacy embodied in the highly programmed rituals involved in the exchange of emissaries. This orthodox legitimacy was the goal for which King Taksin (r. 1767–82) of the Thonburi regime of Siam sent tributary missions to Beijing to pursue investiture after the fall of the Ayutthaya regime (1350–1767), even though King Taksin’s understanding of “paying tribute” (Ch., jingong) was very different from that of the Qing.⁷⁰ The need for legitimacy could also explain why Nguyễn Huệ, the leader of the peasant rebellion against the Lê Dynasty (1428–1788) of Annam, defeated the Qing army in 1789 but nonetheless accepted the Qing’s investiture in 1790. It was also in 1790 that Burma accepted the Qing investiture after winning the Burmese-Qing War in the early 1770s.⁷¹ In addition to pragmatic concerns reflecting geopolitics and China’s military might, securing political legit- imacy from China proved crucial for these regimes’ own rule. Tributes, Gifts, and Court-to-Court Interactions The Qing ritual code clearly listed the types and quantities of tribute that Chosŏn had to present for different purposes. After 1644, these fell into eight major cate- gories. Beyond the most official category of annual tribute, designated as “standard tribute” (Ch., zhenggong), the king generally referred to the items in the other seven categories, such as those marking the imperial birthday, the lunar New Year, and the winter solstice, as “gifts” or “local products.” The Qing accepted all of the submitted items and did not challenge the king’s choice of terms, although it preferred to refer to the items as “tribute.”⁷² While the annual tribute marked a country-to-country relationship, all other categories of tribute, which were presented specifically to the emperor, the empress, and the dowager empress, suggested a strong court-to-court connection. The Ministry of Rites accepted the annual tribute as a routine matter, but it had to sub- mit memorials to the emperor for instructions on how to handle tribute in other categories. In the early Qing, the Ministry of Rites forwarded all tribute items to the Ministry of Revenue and later to the Imperial Household Department, which was in charge of the affairs of the Manchu royal house and had its own financial system independent of the one managed by the Ministry of Revenue.⁷³ Therefore, although the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship seemed to manifest itself main- ly in hierarchical country-to-country interactions, in reality it was a dual system involving the two countries and the two courts. The gifts that the imperial envoys carried to Chosŏn were directed at specific members of the royal family, including the king, the queen, the crown prince, and the dowager queen. Usually the envoys brought first-rate silk for official robes. When imperial missions were dispatched to extend the emperor’s condolences on the deaths of core royalty, some gifts were consumed at the funeral ceremonies, while others were converted into 150 to 300 taels of silver by the Ministry of Rev- enue and delivered to the Korean royal house. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, imperial envoys followed a precise routine to deliver their condolences and gifts. The last such mission occurred in 1890, and it is explored in detail in chapter 5. Receptions, Ritual Performances, and the Civilized Qing Chosŏn’s emissaries were well accommodated at each transfer station after they entered China, but they had to prepare food for themselves until they arrived in
Beijing. Upon reaching their residence in Beijing, the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations, the emissaries first visited the Ministry of Rites to present the king’s memorials and the list of tribute items. All emissaries from Chosŏn and from other countries, as well as the kings they represented, had to submit their documents to the emperor through the ministry, with which they could communicate via official notes (Ch., ziwen). In the main hall of the ministry, the emis- saries would pass the memorials to the head officials, who would place the memorials in front of the imperial tablet on a table in the middle of the hall. The emis- saries would then kneel down once to make three prostrations toward the head officials, who would in turn bow three times to the emissaries with their hands folded in front (Ch., zuoyi, a ritual practiced between officials of equal ranks). Once they had finished, the emissaries would kneel down three times, each time making three prostrations toward the tablet.⁷⁴ The ministry would submit the documents to the emperor the next day, while the emissaries returned to their resi- dence to wait for the imperial audience. The Qing’s commander general of the Metropolitan Infantry Brigade Yamen (Ch., Bujun tongling yamen) sent soldiers to guard the emissaries’ residence.⁷⁵ Three additional institutions were involved in hosting the guests: the Court of Imperial Entertainments (Ch., Guanglu si) delivered daily food and drink, distrib- uted to each member of the mission according to rank; the Ministry of Revenue brought fodder for the Koreans’ horses; and the Ministry of Works provided char- coal. These meticulous regulations embodied the Qing’s policy of “cherishing men from afar.” During their stay in Beijing, the emissaries had various responsibilities to fulfill. If there was a grand court assembly of officials in the Forbidden City, the emis- saries had to attend and pay homage at the end of the wing of the Qing civil officials. A major task was to pay a formal visit to the emperor at either the Summer Palace in Beijing or the Summer Palace in Rehe (Chengde). After the audience, the emissaries would be invited to attend certain events, such as banquets in the Forbidden City, performances of Chinese operas, or fireworks shows at the Summer Palace.⁷⁶ All ritual procedures, in particular the highest level of kowtow, were minutely regulated and fastidiously practiced. Such rituals between the Chinese emperor and foreign emissaries had been defined and institutionalized at least since the “great rituals” laid out in The Rituals of the Great Tang (Ch., Da Tang Kaiyuan li), compiled in the eighth century.⁷⁷ In the Ming and the Qing, the rituals became extremely elaborate, and the Korean emissaries were required to rehearse the complicated ceremonies in advance as a sign of their loyalty and as part of the process that would “civilize the barbarians in the four quarters” (Ch., feng siyi).⁷⁸ Rituals helped maintain the political arrangement and strengthen the iden- tities of all participants.⁷⁹ In grand court gatherings, emissaries from Chosŏn were usually the first representatives of the outer fan to perform the rituals for the emperor, as on February 9, 1675, at the Lantern Festival, where the Chosŏn emissaries congratulated Kangxi ahead of their Russian, Kalka Mongol, and Ūlet Mon- gol counterparts.⁸⁰ Chosŏn’s role as an exemplar was particularly prominent in the late eighteenth century during the Qianlong period, when the Qing in many cases “followed the model for Chosŏn” (Ch., zhao Chaoxian zhi li) in managing its bilateral exchanges with Annam, Ryukyu, and Siam.⁸¹ Chinese scholars at the time also widely regarded Chosŏn as the “model for other countries” (Ch., zhuguo zhi zhang).⁸² The emissaries also attended two major official banquets, one held at the Ministry of Rites and the other at the emissaries’ residence. An astonishing number of institutions were involved in their organization: the Court of Imperial Entertainments; the Food Supply Office (Ch., Jingshan qingli si) of the Ministry of Rites; the Ministries of Revenue, Works, and War; Shuntian Prefecture; and the Revenue Superintendent of Chongwen Gate (Ch., Liangyi shuiwu jiandu). Royal contractors (Ch., hanghu) were also assigned specific tasks. Each of the three key members of the mission was treated to what was known as a fifth-level Manchu banquet and the other members to a sixth-level one, preferential treatment not afforded to emissaries from any other country. The high cost of the banquets was fully covered by the Qing and, not surprisingly, the banquets were replete with ritual performances reinforcing the bilateral hierarchical order.⁸³ The imperial code included an “illustration of the banquets for Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries” (Ch., Chaoxian gongshi yantu) and specified that the seating arrangements for banquets held for
emissaries from other countries should follow the Chosŏn pattern (Ch., geguo gongshi fangci).⁸⁴ During their sojourn in Beijing, the emissaries, particularly scholars without official status or responsibilities, were enthusiastic about socializing with Qing literati. The tradition of such interactions had started in Ming times but had been suspended in the Ming-Qing transition period because of the anti-Manchu atti- tudes that were prevalent in Chosŏn. Indeed, before the eighteenth century, the three key members of the tributary mission barely left their residence to meet with Chinese officials or scholars because many Korean scholars embracing Neo-Confucianism saw the Qing as a barbarous country and regarded the tributary mis- sion as a humiliation.⁸⁵ In the 1760s, however, literary social gatherings involving Korean emissaries again became frequent and continued until the 1890s. In the 1860s, many Chinese officials, such as Dong Wenhuan (1833–77) of the Imperial Academy (Ch., Hanlin yuan), who was known for calligraphy and epigraphy, ac- tively socialized with Koreans.⁸⁶ On the Korean side, Pak Kyusu (1807–76), an emissary who visited Beijing in 1872, befriended more than a hundred famous Chi- nese scholars through social gatherings.⁸⁷ Versed in the same Confucian classics, adhering to the same Neo-Confucianism, and using the same Chinese characters, the Qing and Chosŏn scholars could easily identify one another as men of the same caliber. They met for drinks, composed poems, and exchanged their own compositions and calligraphy. That Chosŏn was known as “Little China” might also have lent these transnational literary social gatherings a homogenous cultural identity. These savants formed an informal perennial club in which they exchanged ideas about history and literature and improved their perceptions of each other’s countries. According to Key- hiuk Kim, their communications also “assured Korea of a constant stream of information and knowledge concerning the latest intellectual trends in China.”⁸⁸ When they gathered with their Han Chinese friends, the Korean guests usually showed an aversion to Manchu customs, such as the Manchu-style official robe and hairstyle, and were very proud of their Ming-style robes and hats, in keeping with the civilized–barbarian dichotomy. But in 1766, when Hong Tae-yong (1731– 83) expressed contempt for the Manchus’ control of China, he found to his surprise that his Han Chinese counterparts, such as Yan Cheng (1733–67), did not appreciate his anti-Manchu sentiments; instead, Yan and his colleagues applauded the Qing’s support for civilization. After intensive conversation with his Chi- nese friends, Hong conceded that Koreans on a fundamental level still belonged to the “barbarians by the sea” (K., haesang chi iin). By concluding that “the civi- lized and the barbarians are the same” (K., Hwa–I il ya), he acknowledged the Qing’s civilized status.⁸⁹ Through such interactions, many Korean and Chinese scholars became close friends and continued to correspond even after the emissaries returned to Chosŏn. When Yan Cheng was on the brink of death, he laid a letter from Hong on his abdomen to indicate how deeply he treasured their friendship. When news of Yan’s death reached Hansŏng, Hong burst into tears and commented that he had lost a brother to whom he was as attached as he was to his right arm.⁹⁰ Like the emissaries from Hansŏng who experienced a combination of hardship and comfort as they made their way to Beijing, Qing imperial envoys also had to endure discomfort until they passed through Fenghuang Gate on their journey toward Ŭiju. There they were welcomed and treated well by the Korean side. Al- though the land between the gate and the Yalu River was Qing territory, the Korean prefect of Ŭiju was able to dispatch Korean officers, Manchu interpreters, and servants to welcome the envoys at the three stations in this area: Congxiu, Mazhuan, and Sanjiang. At each station the Koreans would set up temporary houses for the envoys and provide hearty meals that could feature more than thirty different dishes. In Ŭiju the prefect treated each envoy to a banquet with more than 130 kinds of food.⁹¹ Receptions along the way from Ŭiju to P’yŏngyang and then to Hansŏng were even more luxurious, and the cost was significant.⁹² In contrast to their Korean counterparts in Beijing, the Manchu envoys in Hansŏng confined themselves to ritual exchanges. Beijing-style literary social gath- erings did take place in Shuri, the capital of Ryukyu, but not in Hansŏng, where the envoys, along with their assistants, never left their lodgings to converse with local officials or scholars.⁹³ No transnational literati club like the one in Beijing ever formed in Hansŏng. After 1658, when Emperor Shunzhi put an end to
Manchu trade in Hansŏng, the imperial envoys were always temporary visitors who returned home as soon as their mission was accomplished. In addition, al- most all imperial envoys before the early eighteenth century made a point of visiting the Samjŏndo stele in a southern suburb of Hansŏng. The Koreans regarded the stele, with its inscriptions celebrating the Manchu conquest of Chosŏn, as a humiliation, and some Confucian scholars and students argued that it should be destroyed, so the envoys’ visits were sensitive and made the stele a barometer of the two countries’ relationship. In 1723 the Qing’s two envoys made a formal visit to the stele with a number of Korean officials. At the site, the vice envoy knelt down three times, each time bowing his head three times. In 1724 and 1729, the imperial envoys also paid formal visits to the stele, again accompanied by a group of Koreans. On these occasions both the Manchu envoys and their Korean interpreters kowtowed to the stele. In 1731, however, instead of visiting Samjŏndo, the envoys simply asked for copies of the inscriptions on the stele, and after 1762, they no longer even requested transcripts. By the late nineteenth century, Qing officials had only a vague understanding of the stele and were uncertain whether it featured a Manchu inscription.⁹⁴ During their sojourn in Hansŏng, the Qing envoys performed four major ceremonies in which the king participated. The first was the welcome at the Gate of Receiving Imperial Favors (K., Yŏngŭn mun) outside the West Gate of the city. The king bowed once to the imperial documents, then returned to his palace in the city. The second, conducted inside the king’s palace, was the transfer of the imperial documents and other items to the king. The king kowtowed four times to the imperial edicts. In addition, the king and the envoys bowed once or twice to each other with their hands folded in front. The king, on his own territory, did not need to perform the highest level of kowtow toward the imperial decrees or other documents and gifts, as his ministers would do in Beijing. The third ceremony was the king’s visit to the envoys at their residence, the South Palace Annex, where the Koreans honored the envoys with several tea banquets. Finally, there was the send-off at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country on the city’s outskirts, where the king provided a tea ceremony for the departing envoys. Contact between the two sides was always conducted through the Korean Ministry of Rites. All of the procedures in these ceremonies were regulated by ritual codes and were executed until the early 1890s. The Korean side had no obligation to report any domestic affairs to the envoys, nor would the envoys intervene in such affairs. Rather, this stylized interaction in Hansŏng endowed the monarch of Chosŏn with political legitimacy, continuously consolidating the reciprocal and hierarchical Zongfan relations between the two countries. Celebrating the Relationship: The Qing Emperor’s Roles in the Zongfan System As the institutional agent at the highest level of the Zongfan hierarchy, the emperor could exploit the occasions of imperial audiences and his patriarchal authority to modify and lubricate the mechanism from the top down. As the following sections show, he could freely endow tributary emissaries with various extra gifts, supervise and admonish the Manchu envoys to Chosŏn and the Manchus along the border in Manchuria, and make final decisions about border conflicts. Consolidating the System through Imperial Gifts and Extra Gifts After Chosŏn’s emissaries presented their tribute gifts to the emperor, the sovereign would bestow “routine gifts” (Ch., lishang) on them and the king. At least since the Shunzhi period, the Qing presented the tribute missions with gifts whose value exceeded that of the tribute, based on detailed calculations.⁹⁵ The gifts and their quantities varied according to the category of the mission, and when the Korean envoy was a member of the royal house, the amount and quality of the gifts would increase. The silk and satin among the gifts were taken from the Imperial Household Department, rather than the Ministry of Revenue, in order to show the emperor’s personal favor toward the “king of the fan ” (Ch., fanwang). To mark the imperial birthday and the lunar New Year, the Qing would give the king a second-class horse with bridle and each of the two envoys a third-class horse with bridle, highlighting the Manchu character of the Qing regime. The Qing
would also give the envoys silver in the average amount of at least 680 taels (for annual tributary missions and winter solstice missions) or 850 taels (for imperial birthday missions and lunar New Year missions), along with other gifts.⁹⁶ Some scholars have argued that the routine gifts were an institutionalized part of the overall Zongfan mechanism and hence afforded little flexibility.⁹⁷ Yet the emperor could break this routine at his discretion by awarding the emissaries extra gifts during audiences. For instance, in early 1795 Emperor Qianlong awarded the king a hundred copies of the Chinese character for “happiness” (Ch., fu) that he had written on small squares of red paper.⁹⁸ This sort of largesse was seem- ingly random,⁹⁹ but it did not simply represent imperial prerogative or a deviation from the flowcharts of ritual codes. Rather, the practice of giving supererogatory gifts highlighted the Qing policy of “giving more to the visitors and benefiting less from them” (Ch., houwang bolai), as Emperor Qian-long explained it to Chosŏn in 1736.¹⁰⁰ The emperor thus moderated the system by lending it flexibility and novelty. In the late eighteenth century, Emperor Qianlong disbursed an increasing quantity of extra gifts, while the amount of the tribute sent by Chosŏn remained remarkably stable. The extra imperial gifts reached their peak in the 1790s, a time when Emperor Qianlong was particularly keen to enhance the image of his dynasty as the Heavenly Dynasty. Given these priorities, the Qing court was not con- cerned about maintaining a balance between the value of the tributes and that of the imperial gifts. In 1793 a Korean emissary acknowledged that the Qing treated Chosŏn in such a favorable way that the Qing’s spending on accommodations for the tributary emissaries and the value of the various imperial gifts far exceeded the value of the Korean “local products.”¹⁰¹ Constructing a Positive Image of the Qing and Highlighting the Envoys’ Manchu Identity The Qing emperor sought to further burnish his dynasty’s image in his contacts with Chosŏn by taking steps to prevent the Manchu envoys to Chosŏn and the bannermen who resided along the border in Manchuria from compromising the dignity of the Heavenly Dynasty through open degeneracy. Emperor Qianlong, for example, felt it necessary to extend the Qing’s prolonged campaign to maintain Manchu traditions and identity to the field of the Sino-Korean communications by closely monitoring his envoys’ behavior. His first reform aimed to bolster the Manchu envoys’ integrity by discouraging corruption during their trip to Chosŏn. In 1736, after reducing by half the amount of the gifts the Koreans were expected to provide to the imperial envoys, the emperor punished two envoys who violated the new rules. He decreed that in the fu- ture the garrison generals at Mukden and Shanhai Pass should check the envoys’ luggage when they returned from Hansŏng to make sure they had not received unauthorized gifts.¹⁰² Until the last imperial mission in 1890, subsequent emperors continued to admonish their envoys to Chosŏn to remain upright and honest. Compared with their pre-1637 Ming counterparts, who had exploited Chosŏn for maximum profit, the Manchu envoys, in particular after the Kangxi period, be- haved well on their visits to Chosŏn, which helped reduce the tension between the two countries caused by the Qing invasions in the 1630s. The Korean scholar Hong Tae-yong acknowledged in 1766 that the Qing was much more generous and kind to Chosŏn than the Ming had been.¹⁰³ The Qianlong emperor also believed that the Manchu officers and soldiers in Manchuria should focus on border security. In 1737, under the claim of “giving kindness to the people from afar,” he decided to prohibit the Manchus from trading with Koreans in the Middle River area of the Yalu River and to ask “merchants and commoners of inner China” (Ch., neidi shangmin) to undertake this trade instead. The Middle River market had been established in 1592 between Chosŏn and the Ming; it had barely opened during the Ming-Qing war but was restored as a major trading center between the Qing and Chosŏn after 1646. Manchu ban- nermen and merchants near Fenghuang City had thereafter constituted the Qing’s traders in the market. Now the Qianlong emperor abruptly concluded that the bannermen were “not good at doing business” and sought to direct his Manchu warriors back to the military realm. The king, however, was deeply concerned about the potential arrival of the people of “inner China,” so he petitioned the emperor to maintain the trade with the bannermen. The emperor granted the
petition but explained that by people of “inner China” he meant only those living near the banner garrisons in Manchuria, not those south of the Great Wall or in Beijing.¹⁰⁴ This episode shows that in the border area the Manchu court was concerned more about political consequences and border security than about the economic interests of the local bannermen. It also suggests that at least by the 1730s the Qing had come to integrate Manchuria into its concept of “inner China” (Ch., neidi), further nullifying the border function of the Great Wall within the multiethnic empire. Emperor Qianlong’s more dramatic reform took place in 1763, when he dictated that all Manchu envoys to Chosŏn from that moment onward should ride hors- es instead of taking sedan chairs in Chosŏn. The emperor explained that although Chosŏn had provided sedan chairs for the missions to show its obedience to and respect for the “imperial envoys of the Heavenly Dynasty,” the Manchu officials were expert horsemen and should not ride in sedan chairs. The emperor in- structed the king to end permanently the convention of welcoming the imperial envoys with sedan chairs and to provide only horses instead. The Qing docu- ments do not explain why the emperor suddenly changed this longstanding convention. But according to the first-rank translator of the mission led by Hongying (1707–71), Xu Zongmen, who was a Beijing resident of Korean background, the emperor had originally picked another Manchu official as the envoy but, realizing how obese the chosen official was, asked him how he would make the long trip to Chosŏn. The envoy replied that since he would ride in a sedan chair, his weight would not be a problem. The emperor became angry, and to underline the Manchu martial spirit, he immediately replaced the envoy with Hongying, who was an excellent horseman. The emperor admonished Hongying to display “righteousness” (Ch., zhengda) in the outer fan and to avoid any “wretchedness” (Ch., weisuo). Meanwhile, the Korean emissaries, the emperor said, were exempt from the new rules and could maintain their custom of taking carriages to Beijing.¹⁰⁵ The Qianlong emperor’s quest to maintain and strengthen the Manchuness of the Manchus under his supervision thus helped the Qing improve its image in the eyes of its subordinate and to showcase its virtues in practice. Arbitrating Border Disputes The Qing emperor also served as the highest arbitrator in border conflicts and border-crossing disputes. In each case of border conflict with Chosŏn, it was the emperor—rather than the king, a historical precedent, or a border rule—who made the final decision. The geographical connection between the two countries occasioned a considerable number of illegal border crossings from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. These thorny cases posed a challenge to the Qing, in particular to the emperors, in terms of balancing the Qing’s lofty Zongfan discourse and its practical concerns. This aspect of the Qing’s policy underwent a major change from the Kangxi to the Qianlong period. In the Shunzhi and early Kangxi periods, the Manchu monarchs often doled out severe pun- ishments to the king or his officials over border disputes and often sent special envoys to Chosŏn for in-person investigation. The emperors embraced this ap- proach primarily because the Qing had not yet consolidated its rule in the wake of the Southern Ming (1644–62) and its influences and was worried about the possibility of a Chosŏn rebellion against the Qing. But after the Kangxi emperor suppressed the revolt of the Three Feudatories in the 1680s, the Qing praised Chosŏn for its loyalty and adopted a more relaxed policy on border conflicts with the country, eventually ceasing to send special investigative envoys. The Qing court in the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods following Kangxi governed a country that had been unified to an unprecedented degree since 1644. The court consequently focused on reinforcing the cosmopolitan ideology of all-under-Heaven in the Qing’s foreign relations. Although the emperors had clear views on the Qing’s geographical borders, they preferred to rely on traditional Zongfan norms in settling border disputes with Chosŏn. The Qing’s border policy toward Chosŏn thus became more conservative than aggressive, forming a sharp contrast with the Qing’s contemporary policy in the southwest and northwest, where the new empire continued to expand its territory. On the Chosŏn side, the savvy king and local officials applied the same Zongfan norms in their sophisticated ne- gotiations with their Qing counterparts, leaving the emperor in Beijing with no option but to endorse one Korean proposal after another.
The Mangniushao case provides a good example. In 1745 the Manchu general of Mukden, Daldangga (?–1760), suggested to Emperor Qianlong that the Qing set up a border outpost at Mangniushao near the Yalu River in order to prevent Koreans from illegally crossing the border river to sell or buy grains or to search for ginseng in Manchuria. Although in 1731 Daldangga’s predecessor, Nasutu (?–1749), had likewise proposed an outpost at Mangniushao, Emperor Yongzheng had rejected the proposal because of the king’s opposition and upheld his father’s policy, in place since 1715, of prohibiting all construction in this area.¹⁰⁶ Prompted by an increase in illegal border crossings, Daldangga resurrected Nasutu’s plan and proposed to repair the broken parts of the Willow Palisade and to open lands outside the palisade for cultivation. Emperor Qianlong initially supported Daldangga’s plan and sent a Mongol minister, Bandi (?–1755), to visit the area to confirm that Mangniushao was indeed inside China’s borders and that it would be appropriate for China to establish an outpost there. At the last moment, however, the emperor reversed his stance, invoking the precedents set by the decisions of his grandfather in 1715 and his father in 1731, as well as a decision he himself had made in another case in 1737. To justify his rejection of the proposal, he cited the imperative of “cherishing the small.” Furthermore, the emperor told Daldangga that no further such proposals should be made to the court and that Daldangga and his successors in Mukden should follow established rules in managing border affairs with Chosŏn.¹⁰⁷ In this way, the emperor reduced the possibility of further conflicts in this border area and helped stabilize the two coun- tries’ relationship from the top down. Barbarianizing the Periphery: The Qing’s Institutional Zongfan Discourse The Changing Meaning of Barbarians from Yongzheng to Qianlong The Qing interpretation of the civilized–barbarian distinction underwent a sharp change in the transitional days between the reigns of Yongzheng and Qianlong. In the late 1720s, Emperor Yongzheng had made the putative barbarity of the Qing a public issue among Qing scholars because of his response to the case of Zeng Jing (1679–1735). Encouraged by the civilized–barbarian discourse, Zeng had plotted to rebel against the Manchu “barbarians,” but after he was prosecuted, he re- versed his stance and endorsed the Qing, whereupon the emperor released him from prison. In June 1733, while Zeng was in the provinces giving lectures on the dynasty’s virtues, the emperor issued an edict to prohibit the practice of changing Chinese characters with the meaning of “barbarian” (Ch., hu, lu, yi, di) in books. The Manchu monarch defined the term “barbarian” geographically and confessed that the ancestors of the current dynasty could be called “eastern barbarians,” like ancient Chinese saints. This tone had been set by his great-grandfather Hongtaiji in 1636 in his letter to the king of Chosŏn, and Yongzheng himself had re- peated the same points in his book responding to Zeng, Great Righteousness Resolving Confusion (Ch., Dayi juemi lu) in 1729.¹⁰⁸ By proclaiming that “people living both within and outside China belong to the same family” (Ch., Zhong Wai yijia), Yongzheng insisted that the civilized–barbarian distinction should not be under- stood in a cultural sense, and even if it were, only those who were “beyond civilization” (Ch., wanghua zhi wai), like the Zunghar, might truly be called “barbarians.”¹⁰⁹ Under this definition, the outer fan of the Qing also seemed to be excluded from the category of barbarians. Yongzheng’s statements suggest that the Manchu rulers embraced cultural egalitarianism in order to redistribute cultural resources within the multiethnic empire.¹¹⁰ It is safe to say that the Manchu emperor was trying to overcome the prejudice inherent in the stereotypical civilized–barbarian distinction among Han Chinese intellectuals in the process of consolidating the Manchu regime’s orthodox legitimacy. This sustained effort can also be seen in the move by Yongzheng’s father and grandfather to expand considerably the list of Chinese monarchs who were enshrined in the Temple of Ancient Monarchs (Ch., Lidai di- wang miao), with the goal of establishing the Qing as the legitimate successor to previous dynasties that had likewise been identified as “China.”¹¹¹ With Yongzheng’s policy, the yardstick for judging “barbarians” suddenly snapped, as the ruling dynasty now identified itself both with the ancient rulers and with the
eastern barbarians. After assuming the throne in 1735, the Qianlong emperor not only quickly revoked his father’s pardon and executed Zeng but also reversed Yongzheng’s ap- proach by clearly differentiating the “civilized” Qing from the “barbarian” countries surrounding it. Qianlong thus brought the civilized–barbarian discourse back to its pre-Yongzheng meaning, in which cultural factors played a pivotal role. He exploited his father’s heritage by turning the latter’s policy of permitting the free and public use of all Chinese characters for “barbarian” into a tool for propagating the opposite message in the context of the civilized– barbarian discourse— namely, one that excluded the Qing from this category. No longer would the Great Qing downgrade itself to the rank of barbarian.¹¹² Consequently, in the Qian- long period the use of the term “foreign barbarians” in official documents reached its historical zenith.¹¹³ Through this terminology, the Qing combined its civi- lized centrality with cultural superiority. Qianlong achieved this symbolic goal by formally designating all other countries as barbarians, along with the majority of the ethnic groups under his rule, and one of the most important targets of this barbarianization at the normative level was Chosŏn. At the time when Yongzheng published his book on the definition of “barbarian,” some Manchu envoys to Chosŏn had taken to visiting Jizi Shrine in P’yŏngyang on their way back from Hansŏng.¹¹⁴ As mentioned in the introduction, Jizi was said to be the founding father of the ancient Korean regime, invested by the Chinese monarch of the Zhou Dynasty with the lands of Chosŏn, where he maintained a familistic and tributary relationship with the central court of China. Given the intense debate around ethnicity and the civilized–barbarian dichotomy in the late years of Yongzheng’s reign, the Manchu envoys’ visits to Jizi Shrine could help the Manchu regime bolster its Chineseness and its claims to legitimacy beyond its borders. When the Qing overcame the challenge of the civilized– barbarian distinction within China in the first half of the Qianlong period, visits to Jizi Shrine ceased, although Chinese historical records continued to celebrate the familial relationship between the Chinese and the Koreans. The Qing’s Systematic, Institutional Barbarianization of Chosŏn and Others In June 1751 the Qianlong emperor instructed the governors-general and governors of border provinces to draw and submit pictures of “domestic and foreign bar- barians” (Ch., neiwai miaoyi, waiyi fanzhong) in order to demonstrate the flourishing of the Qing.¹¹⁵ The emperor was following a precedent set by Emperor Taizong (r. 627–49) of the Tang Dynasty, who was believed to have brought China its most prosperous days in the pre-Qing era. Since Tang Taizong had commis- sioned paintings of the barbarians to celebrate the great moment in which “ten thousand countries came to revere the emperor” (Ch., wanguo laichao),¹¹⁶ Qian- long had every reason to commemorate his dynasty’s accomplishments in the same way. Even during the Qing expansion into Central Asia, Qianlong identified “the efforts of the Han and Tang dynasties to extend Chinese power into Central Asia” as “historical milestones” by which to measure his own progress.¹¹⁷ Beyond the obvious political factors, contemporary popular culture may also have motivated Qianlong’s desire for an illustrated record of the Qing’s imperial expansion. As a big fan of Chinese opera who contributed to the birth of Peking opera, Qianlong may have been influenced by popular operas that extolled the virtues of the civilized center of the world. These operas can be dated at least to the Yuan, but in the Ming and early Qing they were still being performed in cities such as Beijing. Their scripts described the Ming as the “Heavenly Dynasty,” the “upper country,” or the “central civilized country,” bordered by “barbarians in four directions” (primarily represented as Chosŏn, Annam, and political units in Inner Asia) who paid tribute and presented palace memorials to the great em- peror of China.¹¹⁸ In 1761, ten years after Qianlong ordered the drawings, the first edition of the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Ch., Huang Qing zhigong tu) was published in four volumes, featuring six hundred pictures of people from the Qing’s outer fan and from “barbarian places” within Qing territory or on its periphery. The first picture in the collection was of a Korean official who wore a Ming-style official robe but was labeled “a barbarian official of the country of
Chosŏn” (Ch., Chaoxian guo yiguan) (see figure 2.3). Once again, Chosŏn served as the model for others in the collection, and its prototypical role was made clear by Qing scholars in the Essentials of Complete Books of the Four Storehouses Catalog (Ch., Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao).¹¹⁹ Chosŏn, “Little China,” was thus institu- tionally converted into a country of barbarians by the Qing’s political discourse and imperial documentary mechanism. Following Chosŏn, other countries, including Ryukyu, Annam, Siam, Sulu, Lanchang, Burma, Britain, France, Japan, the Netherlands, and Russia, likewise be- came barbarians in the Qing nomenclature, as did many of the diverse peoples within Qing territory. In nearly every case, the Qing narrative constructed an impe- rial pedigree by reviewing a long history of Zongfan relations with the foreign “country” (Ch., guo; Ma., gurun) or domestic “tribe” (Ch., buluo; Ma., aiman) from the Zhou to the Ming Dynasties and emphasized that it was the Qing’s merits that prompted the “barbarians” to “send emissaries to come and pay tribute” (Ch., qianshi rugong; Ma., elcin takūrafi albabun jafanjimbi) or “come to kowtow with tribute” (Ch., chaogong; Ma., albabun jafame hengkilenjimbi).¹²⁰ In this way, the Qing systematically assimilated the historical legacies of previous dynasties into its own Zongfan relations with these countries and tribes and consolidated its legitimacy as the civilized center, or Zhongguo (Ma., Dulimbai gurun).¹²¹ Also in 1761, in order to celebrate the empress dowager’s seventieth birthday, the Qing published another magnificent collection, Illustrations of the Great Celebration (Ch., Luhuan huijing tu). The first illustration carried the title “Ten thousand coun- tries came to revere the emperor,” the precise phrase the Tang Dynasty had used, and Chosŏn’s emissaries occupied a distinguished position within it.¹²² If there was a “documentary institutionalization” for the Qing,¹²³ in terms of the Qing’s construction of its civilized identity, this process was substantially accomplished in 1761.
FIGURE 2.3. A Chosŏn official in the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Huang Qing zhigong tu, 33).
Behind the cheerful facade of the great multiethnic empire lay the axiom of the Qing’s centrality in the world. And that world, of course, often found its way to the Qing threshold. Britain, which the Qing knew as “the country of Ying ji li” (“Ying ji li” is a transliteration of “England”; Ch., Yingjili guo; Ma., Ing gi lii gurun), was one of the countries portrayed as barbarian in the collection of 1761. At the end of that year, the Qianlong emperor instructed his representatives in Guangzhou to notify the “men from afar” and “foreign barbarians” there—the British merchants—that “the Heavenly Dynasty has everything it needs, so it does not need foreign barbarians to bring trivial goods for trade.”¹²⁴ The edict was a response to petitions from James Flint in 1759 and Nicholas Skottowe in 1761. The two were representatives of the British merchants who wanted to change the Canton system of trade, which channeled all trade with the West through that south- ern port. Their efforts not only were futile but in fact led to stricter regulations on Western traders in China.¹²⁵ In this sense, the rebuff that George Macartney’s mission later received from the emperor in 1793 was merely a repetition of the institutionalized rhetoric that had been directed at the British in China more than three decades earlier. Popularizing Chosŏn’s Status as Foreign Barbarians in Imperial Discourse The prolonged construction of the Qing’s new identity and the reorientation of its political discourse vis-à-vis other countries was not just the result of the emper- or’s personal activities or political motivations, imposed on the administration from the top down. Nor should they be understood purely as the outcome of implementing the political will of the Manchu court. Rather, Qing officials at the local level, from counties to prefectures to provinces, also contributed to this construction from the bottom up. As a result, in the eighteenth century, Chosŏn’s status as foreign barbarians was popularized within the norms of Qing foreign relations. This point is illustrated by the Qing policy toward shipwrecked fishermen from Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, and other countries who were rescued by local Chi- nese officials along the coast. At least from the early Qianlong period, Qing officials called these victims “barbarians who suffered from storms” (Ch., zaofeng nanyi; Ma., edun de lasihibufi jobolon de tušaha i niyalma) and sent them to Beijing or to the nearest provincial capital, from whence they could return home with embassies from their countries. From the 1730s to the 1880s, the Qing archives were full of such reports of local officials looking after shipwrecked fishermen; re- ports concerning fishermen from Chosŏn were particularly prominent.¹²⁶ By accommodating these victims on humanitarian grounds, the Qing sought to high- light its policy of “cherishing men from afar” and to “display the deep and outstanding merits of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., zhao tianchao rouyuan shenren; Ma., abkai gurun i goroki urse be gosire šumin gosin be iletulembi). This sort of rhetoric, aimed at justifying and consolidating the “way of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao tizhi; Ma., abkai gurun i doro yoso), reached its peak in the Qianlong period.¹²⁷ Chosŏn again represented the best example of the “way of the Heavenly Dynasty,” a fact that permeated many aspects of Qing-Chosŏn contacts. For instance, in 1776, one thousand taels of silver belonging to a Korean mission were stolen by Chinese thieves near Mukden. Emperor Qianlong instructed the Manchu gen- eral of Mukden, Hūngšang (1718–81), to compensate the mission for its losses in order to “uphold the way of our Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., he wo tianchao tizhi; Ma. musei amba gurun i doro de acanambi). The emperor emphasized in his Chinese edict that “the Chosŏn are a people of foreign barbarians” (Ch., Chaoxian nai waiyi zhi ren), further elucidating in the Manchu version of the edict that “the people of the country of Chosŏn are a people of foreign barbarians” (Ma., Coohiyan gurun i niyalma serengge, tulergi aiman i niyalma).¹²⁸ This case was not exceptional, and the wealth of similar cases indicates the maturation of the Qing’s Zongfan discourse.¹²⁹ Despite the harmonious imperial picture the Qing painted, its model fan was simultaneously creating an alternate vision. While Chosŏn continued publicly to display its obedience to the Qing, sending tributary missions to Beijing over and above what imperial edicts demanded, in private the Chosŏn king and his
officials, along with Chosŏn intellectuals, were reluctant to identify the Qing as the supreme representative of Chinese culture. This story is explored in the next chapter.
2
BARBARIANIZING CHOSŎN
The Chosŏn Model and the Chinese Empire, 1644–1761
The year 1644 marked the beginning of a new stage in the Qing’s exploitation of the Chosŏn model as an institutionalized policy for constructing a new imperial order within and beyond the Qing’s borders. Informed by Chosŏn’s status as the Qing’s prototypical outer fan, this model manifested itself in well-established and highly programmed formalities in the contacts between the Qing and its outer fan. Through the Chosŏn model, the Qing rulers initiated a twofold transformation by reversing and institutionalizing the discourse of the civilized–barbarian distinction: they enshrined the Qing as the new Heavenly Dynasty at the center of the known universe and converted Chosŏn and other countries into countries of barbarians on its periphery. The Qing accomplished this transformation conclusively in the middle of the eighteenth century, when the court published the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Ch., Huang Qing zhigong tu).
This chapter reveals the prolonged process by which the Qing gradually reconstructed a Chinese empire in the post-Ming world by legitimizing, enhancing, and practicing its new dual identity as China/Zhongguo and the Heavenly Dynasty through the Chosŏn model in its foreign relations from the first half of the seventeenth century to the second half of the eighteenth century. Over the course of this century and a half, the macrotransformation of the Manchu regime’s identity in the cosmopolitan politico-cultural context was deeply connected with its microtrans-formation in the Manchu-Chosŏn framework. If there was a tendency among China’s neighbors to decenter the Middle Kingdom after the Ming, this chapter brings to light the process of recentering the Middle Kingdom undertaken by the Qing.¹
Establishing a Dual Identity: The Qing as China and the Heavenly Dynasty
On October 30, 1644, Emperor Shunzhi offered a grand sacrifice to Heaven and Earth in the Qing’s new capital, Beijing. He asserted that the Qing would pacify China (Ch., sui Zhongguo) and set a good example for ten thousand countries (Ch., biaozheng wanbang).² For many people, this event marked the rise of the Qing as the equivalent of China/Zhongguo. In 1767, after finding that a magistrate in Yunnan Province had failed to refer to the Qing as the Heavenly Dynasty or China/Zhongguo in an official note to the foreign barbarians of Burma, Emperor Qianlong furiously pointed out that it is the rule for one to refer to the court as the ‘Heavenly Dynasty’ or ‘China’ when one mentions it to men from afar. Our country has unified the central area and external areas, and even the barbarians know the Great Qing’s virtue and civilization.³
Emperor Qianlong’s pronouncement indicates that the terms Heavenly Dynasty and Zhongguo were interchangeable. Historians of the Qing and modern China tend to follow the emperor, or at least the Qing’s political discourse as developed by the emperor, by treating China/Zhongguo and the Heavenly Dynasty as synonymous terms, both referring to the political unit of the Qing. Yet what the emperor did not mention—or was perhaps not able to realize—was that the Qing did not acquire the two titles simultaneously when it replaced the Ming in the early seventeenth century. As the emperor indicated, the two terms were used for the Qing almost exclusively in the context of foreign relations with men from afar or foreign barbarians, which generally referred to foreigners. In the domestic context, these terms were replaced by others, such as the Great Qing, our dynasty (Ch., wochao, benchao, or guochao), our country (Ch., wo guojia), and the imperial dynasty (Ch., huangchao or shengchao). In the first years after 1644, some Qing officials described the new regime as the Qing Dynasty (Ch., Qingchao), a successor to the Ming Dynasty in the context of foreign communications; this usage is found in correspondence between officials in Guangzhou
(Canton) and Siam in 1653. But Qingchao remains rare in Qing documents.⁴
As the Qing took over Beijing in 1644 and consolidated its rule over inner China afterward, it completed its transformation into Zhongguo, but its refashioning into the Heavenly Dynasty had barely started. In the late 1640s, when the Manchu Eight Banners were marching into South China, Southwest China, and Northwest China, the Qing began to use Chosŏn to construct its new image as the Heavenly Dynasty; however, the process turned out to be difficult and even embarrassing. According to early Qing archives, Qing scholars may have called the Qing the Heavenly Dynasty for the first time in a draft imperial edict in 1649 investing Yi Ho (King Hyojong) as the king of Chosŏn. The draft edict was written by Fu Yijian (1609–65), a Han Chinese literatus from Shandong Province who had won first place in the Qing’s first imperial civil-service examination in 1645.⁵ By emphasizing that the king of Chosŏn should be an important subordinate serving the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., pinghan tianchao) and loyal to the central civilized country (Ch., Huaxia), Fu equated the Qing, which had become Zhongguo, with the Heavenly Dynasty and the civilized country. However, the final version of the edict that was sent to Chosŏn omitted the two latter terms and continued to use the term upper country to refer to the Qing, suggesting that the Qing was not yet prepared to claim to be the Heavenly Dynasty.⁶
China, or Zhongguo, could be defined in a general geographical sense by the Qing borders, regardless of how the borders were expanded and redrawn, so long as the Qing controlled the Ming’s territory, or at least the central plain (Ch., Zhongyuan).⁷ In fact, after 1644, when the Qing rulers began writing and revising their history, they deliberately deleted some Manchu terms referring to the Ming as Zhongguo. For example, Hongtaiji, in a letter to the Ming on July 29, 1632, had explained that the Jin fought with the Ming because the Ming officials in Liaodong did not follow the way of China (Ma., Liyoodung i hafasa Dulimbai gurun i doroi tondoi beiderakū), using the Manchu term Dulimbai gurun in clear reference to China/Zhongguo. Later, the narrative written in Chinese replaced the phrase the way of China (Ch., Zhongguo/Zhongyuan zhi dao) with the way of rightness (Ch., zhengzhi zhi dao). While Hongtaiji in 1632 had called the Ming your China (Ma., suweni Dulimbai gurun), the post-1644 Chinese edition replaced this term with your country (Ch., erguo), deleting the word for China.⁸ The changing terminology shows that after 1644 the Qing deeply identified itself with China.
Given the ethnic background of the ruling house of the Qing, many scholars have been interested in establishing when the Qing court officially used the Manchu term Dulimbai gurun to define itself as China/Zhongguo. Some cite the year 1689 and the Treaty of Nerchinsk that the Qing signed with Russia. In fact, the Qing court had used this Manchu term to represent its identity much earlier in its negotiations with Zheng Jing (1642–81), the eldest son of Zheng Chenggong (1624–62), who occupied Taiwan in 1662. While Zheng Jing never questioned the Qing’s identity as China, he argued that Taiwan was not a part of China in an effort to secure for Taiwan an independent status like that of Chosŏn. Emperor Kangxi, however, reiterated in a decree in 1669 that Zheng belonged to the people of China (Ch., Zhongguo zhi ren; Ma., Dulimbai gurun i niyalma).⁹ In the late Kangxi period, the Qing presented itself as China in a favorable and definitive way. For example, in his travelogue, the Manchu official Tulišen, who was dispatched as an envoy to the Turgūt Mongols in Russia in 1712, generally referred to the Qing as Dulimbai gurun (China) or meni Dulimbai gurun (our China); these terms were rendered into Chinese as Zhongguo or Zhonghua when Tulišen’s journal was published in 1723 in both languages. Tulišen also consistently translated terms such as our place (Ma., meni bade) as our China (Ch., wo Zhongguo) and referred to all people of the Great Qing, such as the Manchus, Han Chinese, and Mongols, as people of China. More importantly, following Emperor Kangxi’s instructions, Tulišen emphasized China’s Confucian nature to Russia, claiming that our country takes fidelity, filial piety, benevolence, justice, and sincerity as fundamentals (Ma., meni gurun i banjire tondo hiyoošun, gosin, jurgan, akdun be fulehe da obumbi; Ch., wo guojia yi zhong xiao ren yi xin wei genben).¹⁰
By contrast, the Heavenly Dynasty, or Tianchao, could not be delineated in the same way, since it was based on the notion of all-under-Heaven—a China-centered politico-cultural term with no connection to borders in the geographical sense. Put another way, the Qing could define itself as China from within, but it
could not identify itself as the Heavenly Dynasty without support from outside the Qing: the new regime would first have to erect a new, Qing-centric, and multinational Zongfan system. The expectation that the Qing would become a new imperial power required the regime to transform the countries that the Ming had represented as its fan into fan in the Qing’s orbit. The Ming had pursued the same policy when it became the ruler of China (Ch., zhu Zhongguo) in 1368, immediately sending envoys to the countries that had served as fan of its predecessor, the Yuan Dynasty, with the aim of converting them into fan of the Ming.¹¹ However, unlike the Ming, the Manchu rulers in 1644 faced the tremendous challenge of overcoming their previous status as barbarians, as defined by the civilized–barbarian distinction. Compared with the mission to identify the Qing as China and as the legitimate successor to the Ming within the Qing’s borders, the quest to construct the Qing as the new Heavenly Dynasty beyond its borders called for extraordinary effort.
From the perspective of comparative philology, the Chinese term Tianchao was not initially widely adopted in the Manchu language, in which it was literally rendered as abkai gurun (Heavenly country).¹² The Manchu rulers had difficulty identifying with this term and the Chinese political concepts behind it. In July 1637, for example, after reviewing the draft edict of investiture to the king of Chosŏn, Hongtaiji commented that he did not like to equate himself with Heaven as the Ming had done, suggesting that his officials must have employed the Chinese word tian (Heaven) or the Manchu term abka (Heaven) in the draft.¹³ Nevertheless, the task of reconstructing the Qing as the new China in the seventeenth century left the Manchu rulers with no choice but to embrace the term and the rationale behind it.
The intellectual transformation of the Qing ruling house is evident in the visit of the fifth Dalai Lama (1617–82) to Beijing in late 1652 and early 1653. The Qing’s Manchu officials supported Emperor Shunzhi’s plan to greet the Dalai Lama in Daiga in Inner Mongolia, arguing that the Ūlet Mongols, who controlled Tibet militarily at the time, would be pacified by the emperor’s gracious behavior. But the Han Chinese officials argued that the emperor was the ruler of all countries under Heaven (Ch., tianxia guojia zhi zhu) and should not violate conventions by meeting with a lama, even the Dalai Lama, in person outside the capital. Still hesitant about going to Daiga, the emperor took part in a grand ceremony commemorating Confucius at the Directorate of Education (Ch., Guozi jian) in Beijing, where he knelt down twice, each time making three prostrations. The ceremony, attended by many high-ranking Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese officials and generals, conferred on the emperor the mantle of the supreme agent of Confucianism. Right after the ceremony, two Han Chinese grand secretaries, Hong Chengchou (1593–1665) and Chen Zhilin (1605–66), submitted a memorial to the emperor entreating him not to go to Daiga to welcome the Dalai Lama because astrological phenomena reported by the Imperial Astronomical Bureau suggested that intruders would threaten the emperorship. The two officials emphasized that the way of Heaven is infinite (Ch., tiandao shenyuan) and could not be predicted. After reading the memorial, the emperor immediately abandoned the idea of visiting Daiga. Instead he welcomed the Dalai Lama in the South Garden of Beijing.¹⁴ As this episode suggests, the Manchu emperor had to adjust to his role as the Son of Heaven in the Confucian sense in the post-1644 politico-cultural and ideological contexts, notwithstanding the Qing’s serious religious and military concerns over its western frontier in Inner Asia.
Reconstructing the Chinese Empire: The Rise of the Chosŏn Model
From East Asia to Southeast and Inner Asia: The Qing’s Presentation of the Chosŏn Model
The Qing did not stand alone as it sought to construct its new dual identity. Chosŏn, the first Confucian outer fan of the Qing, played an unparalleled role in providing the Manchu conquerors with resources to form and articulate the Qing’s new identity. As early as 1650, in a palace memorial to Emperor Shunzhi, the king called the Qing the Heavenly Dynasty, even though the Qing court itself was still reluctant to use the term.¹⁵ The development of Chosŏn’s essential role in the
Qing-centric Zongfan world can be divided into two historical phases: the seven years from 1637 to 1643 and the 251 years from 1644 to 1894. In the first phase, Chosŏn began serving as the outer fan of the Qing by adhering to the clearly formulated and institutionalized discipline of the Sino-Korean Zongfan system, which had functioned between the Ming and Chosŏn for more than two centuries. As chapter 1 described, the Qing was able to make a significant move toward the transformation of its identity by assuming the place of the Ming in the framework of Sino-Korean relations. The frequent visits of Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries to Mukden provided the Qing with good opportunities to emphasize and practice its centrality in the known world.
After 1644, with its dramatic emergence as a Ming-style, nationwide regime and the extensive expansion of its territory, the Qing found itself in the position of having to manage relations with multiple neighboring countries, such as Annam, Ryukyu, Lanchang (Laos), Siam, Sulu (the Philippines), and Burma, that had served as subordinates to the Ming. Having inherited these fan from the Ming, what Qing China now needed to do was to resume and refashion the Zongfan system according to its own standards. On this front, the Qing had gained valuable experience from its institutionalized communications with Chosŏn since the 1630s and, through these communications, had developed a mature model of a Qing-centric Zongfan arrangement. The Chosŏn model laid out a path whereby a country or a political entity could follow Chosŏn into the Qingcentric system primarily by receiving imperial investitures from the Qing, adopting the regnal titles of the Qing in its calendar, and sending tributary emissaries to the Qing.¹⁶ The Chosŏn model was a pattern centered on rituals.¹⁷ Although the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship had been inaugurated by the Manchu military conquest of 1637, as a result of which the crown prince, another prince, and sons of high-ranking Chosŏn officials were detained in Mukden as hostages, the unpleasant situation began to change when the Qing released the hostages in 1644. The Qing also progressively reduced the tributes required of Chosŏn until, by the late 1730s, they were less than one-tenth of what they had been in the late 1630s and became a mere symbol of political subordination.¹⁸ What accompanied the tributes was the performance of a set of highly programmed and increasingly elaborate formalities that demonstrated the hierarchical Zongfan order and the Qing’s new normative identity.
In the first years after 1644, the Qing found the Chosŏn model the most powerful and practical way of managing its relations with other countries and of extending its influence and authority. Emperor Shunzhi articulated the importance of Chosŏn’s model role in 1647 after the Qing army conquered Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong Provinces and prepared to establish relations with Ryukyu, Annam, Siam, and Japan. On March 17 and August 25, the emperor announced that the Qing would give preferential treatment to these countries as to Chosŏn (Ch., yu Chaoxian yiti youdai) as long as they subordinated themselves to ‘the civilized’ and paid tribute to the court (Ch., qingxin xianghua, chengchen rugong).¹⁹ In this way, the Manchu rulers publicized Chosŏn’s prototypical fan status and established the Qing-Chosŏn relationship as the yardstick for relations between the Qing and other countries or political entities. Rather than adopting the aggressive colonial policy of the Yuan, the Qing learned from the Ming’s Zongfan mechanism, using the sophisticated and markedly Confucian Chosŏn model to maintain stability on its frontiers and to construct a new Chinese empire beyond them.²⁰
As a result of the Qing rulers’ efforts at promoting the Chosŏn model after 1644, political units beyond the Qing’s control also came to regard it as an ideal way of solving conflicts with the Qing while retaining their own privileges. Between 1662 and 1669, for example, when the Qing was trying to persuade Zheng Jing to surrender in Taiwan, Zheng insisted on following the Chosŏn model (Ch., zhao Chaoxian shili) into the Qing’s Zongfan system by proclaiming subordination and paying tribute (Ch., chengchen nagong) but refraining from cutting his hair in the Qing style.²¹ For Zheng, the Chosŏn model appeared to offer the most favorable and promising way to resolve the standoff with the Qing. Emperor Kangxi refused this proposal on the grounds that Chosŏn had been always a foreign country (Ch., conglai suoyou zhi waiguo; Ma., daci bihe encu gurun), whereas Zheng belonged to the people of China.²² These negotiations show the perceived broad applicability and coverage of the Chosŏn model in situations in which neither independence nor complete annexation was an immediate and acceptable
solution.
The Chosŏn model provided the Manchu ruling house with a general blueprint for dealing with other political entities. Over the Qing period, two parallel central institutions were responsible for the affairs of outer fan : the Mongolian Superintendency mainly managed outer fan located to the north and west of Qing China, while the Ministry of Rites was in charge of fan in the east, the south, and the west. This book focuses on the outer fan under the management of the Ministry of Rites rather than those under the Mongolian Superintendency, although the two types of outer fan may have been associated through the Chosŏn model in the early years of the Qing’s expansion to Inner Asia and the development of its Eurasian empire.
This inconspicuous connection between the eastern and western frontiers of the Qing empire had manifested itself at least by 1653, when the Qing invested the fifth Dalai Lama and the Gusi Khan of the Ūlet Mongols by incorporating them into the Qing-dominated extended family and placing them under the Qing’s jurisdiction. At the time, the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites were administratively still closely connected with one another: it was a Manchu minister (Ch., shangshu; Ma., aliha amban) from the Ministry of Rites, Langkio, and a vice minister (Ch., shilang; Ma., ashan i amban) from the Mongolian Superintendency, Sidali, who together gave the Dalai Lama and the Gusi Khan the books of investiture. The imperial statement in the khan’s investiture book bore a remarkable resemblance to that issued to the new king of Chosŏn in 1649. It declared that the recipient must serve as the Qing’s subordinate or fence (Ch., pingfu) until the Yellow River becomes as narrow as a belt and Mount Tai becomes as small as a grindstone (Ch., daili shanhe).²³ In addition, the mechanism governing the local products and tributes that the lama and the khan presented to the emperor and the empress dowager in 1654 and the imperial gifts the lama and the khan received in return was much like that used between the Qing and Chosŏn.²⁴ Finally, the imperial mandates of investiture (Ch., gaoming; Ma., g’aoming) that the Qing issued to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni bore the same imperial seal—Seal of declaring imperial mandate (Ch., zhigao zhi bao; Ma., hese wasimbure boobai)—as had the mandate investing the new king of Chosŏn.²⁵
If we compare the imperial codes of the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites, it seems that the former borrowed institutional regulations from the latter to formalize the communications between the Manchu rulers and the Mongol fan in Inner Asia. The prototypical role of Chosŏn in the Qingcentric Zongfan system may have contributed to the Qing’s policy of integrating the Inner Asian political and military entities into the Qing’s extended family.²⁶ On the surface, the geographical responsibilities of the Ministry of Rites did not overlap with those of the Mongolian Superintendency, as Qing officials confirmed in 1743, so Qing-Chosŏn contacts were ostensibly unrelated to Qing– Inner Asian contacts.²⁷ But on the political level, soon after 1644 the Qing rulers began to apply the Zongfan rationale behind the Chosŏn model to Inner Asia, along with the Manchu court’s promulgation of the discourse of all-under-Heaven and people without difference between the outside and the inside, as part of the long process of subordinating the Zunghar Mongols, whom the Qing rulers treated as people beyond virtue and civilization.²⁸ Administratively, the Ministry of Rites was also in charge of the affairs of some lamas in Gansu and Shaanxi until the 1740s, when it transferred this jurisdiction to the Mongolian Superintendency.²⁹ The Chosŏn model, in this sense, gradually became a normative, standard, and powerful soft weapon in the repertoire of the Qing. It allowed the Manchu rulers to govern the areas conquered by the formidable Eight Banners in Inner Asia, which arguably smoothed the way for the Qing to insert its civil administrative system into these areas during the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods.
Who Were the Barbarians? The Imperial Code and the Qing’s Reforms
Under the Qing, the Zongfan order was maintained and embodied by the exchange of emissaries between the Qing and its subordinate countries (Ch., shuguo; Ma., tulergi gurun or harangga gurun), which were generally described as subordinate countries of foreign barbarians (Ch., waiyi shuguo). All exchanges were conducted in accordance with The Universal Tributary Regulations (Ch., Chaogong tongli) codified by the Ministry of Rites, and the performance of the exchanges
was supervised by the Host-Guest Office (Ch., Zhuke qingli si) of the Ministry of Rites. These regulations primarily consisted of the following seven mandates:
Investiture (Ch., cefeng): The Qing emperor gave the new king of each fan a patent of appointment through an imperial mandate of investiture along with a decree (Ch., chiyu) and an official seal for use in correspondence.
Regnal titles (Ch., nianhao): The fan adopted the Qing’s regnal titles as the way to enumerate years.
Calendar (Ch., shuoli): The fan used the Qing’s calendar and celebrated Chinese festivals.
The dispatch of emissaries to pay tribute to the Qing (Ch., chaogong), with a frequency individually determined by the Qing.
The conferral of noble rank on a deceased king or privileged members of the royal house of the fan (Ch., fengshi).
Reporting events to the Qing (Ch., zoushi): Each fan informed the emperor of important domestic events but did not need to ask for instructions and could assume that the Qing would not intervene in its domestic affairs.
Trade (Ch., maoyi or hushi), including trade at the frontiers and at the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations (Ch., Huitong siyi guan; Ma., Acanjime isanjire tulergi gurun i bithe ubaliyambure kuren) in Beijing.³⁰
The Qing made considerable changes to the Zongfan system that it inherited from the Ming. The Ming had also relied on The Universal Tributary Regulations, by which the Ministry of Rites managed routine exchanges between China and the subordinate barbarian countries in the four quarters (Ch., fanguo or siyi)—Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, the Jurchens, Mongolia, and other countries and political entities—as well as interactions between the Ming and indigenous chieftains (Ch., tuguan or tusi), including local chieftains in Yunnan, Guangxi, Guizhou, Sichuan, Hunan, and Hubei.³¹ But two significant changes distinguished the list of foreign barbarian countries in the new Qing regulations from the Ming’s list. First, the Qing excluded indigenous chieftains from its list of tributaries because of its policy toward barbarian chieftains (Ch., yimu) in southwestern China. Known as replacing the hereditary indigenous chieftains with rotating officials (Ch., gaitu guiliu), the policy had been inaugurated by the Yuan and the Ming, but only in the Yongzheng period of the Qing was it carried out on a truly large scale.³² The areas and populations under the chieftains’ control were integrated simultaneously into the Qing’s territory and into its household registration system.³³ The indigenous chieftains were thus outside the supervision of the Ministry of Rites. The line between barbarians belonging to these political units and barbarians from other countries was clear in the minds of the Manchu rulers at court and their deputies in the provinces.³⁴ Second, the Western countries gradually disappeared from the list of foreign barbarians in the tributary regulations. By the late fourteenth century, the Ming had fifteen outer fan countries, and the majority of these became the Qing’s outer fan, including Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, Lanchang, Siam, Sulu, and Burma.³⁵ From the 1760s to the 1840s during the Qing period, the list also included the Netherlands and the countries of the Western Ocean (Ch., Xiyang), but by the 1890s only these seven Asian countries remained on the list.³⁶
Whereas in the Qianlong period the Mongolian, Tibetan, and Muslim areas under the management of the Mongolian Superintendency had all entered [the Qing’s] map and registers (Ch., xianru bantu) and were presented like prefectures and counties (Ch., youru junxian),³⁷ the subordinate countries of foreign barbarians under the supervision of the Ministry of Rites were not integrated into the Qing’s core territory. Nor would these countries be treated as parts of the Republic or the People’s Republic of China in the twentieth century. By the same token, the dual management system for the outer fan—the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites—under the Qing made it difficult for people outside this institutional mechanism to draw a clear line between them. This might explain why, as discussed in chapter 5, some Qing officials in the late nineteenth century responded to complications involving Chosŏn by suggesting that
Beijing apply its policy vis-à-vis Mongolia and Tibet to Chosŏn by converting Chosŏn into prefectures and counties, as they supposed Chosŏn had been in the Qianlong period. The rationale behind this suggestion applied the basic structure of the Qing empire on its western frontier to the management of its eastern one, highlighting Chosŏn’s prominent subordinate position within the empire.
The role of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship is thus significant. This relationship should not be treated simply as a specific instance of the Zongfan system, as scholars have typically done. Rather, it is best understood as a prototype that shaped the formation of the Qing’s Zongfan system and helped the Manchu regime transform its political identity for the purpose of claiming centrality and accessing orthodox legitimacy in the process of reshuffling the Chinese world. In short, the Qing-Chosŏn relationship was the seedbed of the Qing’s entire Zongfan arrangement, from which the political legitimacy of both sides—the Qing and its outer fan—sprang.
Civilizing the Center: The Practice of the Chosŏn Model
Five aspects of the Qing’s practice of the Chosŏn model, aspects embodied in and undergirded by ritual practices and documentary discourse, showcased the Qing’s identity as the civilized center. These aspects concern the frequency and composition of missions; the overland route and the Sino-Korean geographical boundaries; humble palace memorials, imperial mandates and decrees, and orthodox legitimacy; tributes, gifts, and court-to-court interactions; and receptions and rituals.
The Frequency and Composition of Imperial and Tributary Missions
The exchange of missions between the Qing and Chosŏn started in 1637 and continued without interruption until the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. The frequency of Chosŏn’s missions to the Qing was higher than that of any other country. Whereas other subordinate countries sent tributary missions to Beijing every other year (Ryukyu), every three years (Siam), every four years (Annam), every five years (Sulu), or every ten years (Lanchang and Burma), Chosŏn dispatched several missions every year.³⁸ Although the imperial code required Chosŏn to send an annual tributary mission at the end of each year that would simultaneously serve as the mission for the winter solstice, the imperial birthday, and the lunar New Year, Chosŏn never hesitated to send more emissaries under different names, dispatching a new mission before the previous one had even returned in order to nourish its relationship with the Qing.³⁹ From 1637 to 1894, Chosŏn sent about 698 official missions to the Qing for twenty-six different purposes, an average of 2.71 missions per year.⁴⁰ In 1784 and 1788, Emperor Qianlong commented jubilantly that in this respect Chosŏn was a peer of the Qing’s inner fan.⁴¹
According to the imperial regulations, a Korean mission was to have thirty members: an envoy, an associate envoy, a secretary, three interpreters, and twenty-four tribute guard officers. The envoy, associate envoy, and secretary were the three key members. As a special privilege to Chosŏn, the number of attendants and servants attached to the mission was not limited. By contrast, the missions from Ryukyu, Lanchang, Burma, and the Netherlands were not to exceed twenty members; those from other Western countries were limited to twenty-two, those from Siam to twenty-six, and those from Annam to thirty.⁴² Many Korean scholars and businessmen visited Beijing as mission attendants or servants in order to experience Chinese culture or to seek their fortunes, so a Korean mission often numbered several hundred people. For example, the annual tributary mission of 1653 had a total of 225 members, the gratitude mission of 1777 a total of 310, the gratitude mission of 1803 a total of 213, and the congratulatory mission of 1889 a total of 311.⁴³ In 1829, two missions with more than six hundred people combined arrived in Beijing at the same time, forcing the Ministry of Rites and the Ministry of Works to borrow twenty large tents from the Imperial Household Department (Ch., Neiwu fu) to house the additional visitors. Until the late nineteenth century, the legions of Chosŏn’s missions continued their pilgrimages to Beijing every
year with a large number of tributes and horses.⁴⁴
By contrast, the Qing sent far fewer and smaller imperial missions to Chosŏn. From 1637 to 1894, the Qing undertook 172 missions to Hansŏng, an average of 0.67 missions per year. In the early Qing, the Manchu court frequently dispatched emissaries to investigate cases of homicide and smuggling at the border, to negotiate resolutions to these cases with the king, and sometimes to discuss the punishment of Korean officials who failed to satisfy the Qing. As early as the Shunzhi period, the Manchu court began to reduce the number of its envoys, the rationale behind the change being the Zongfan idea of cherishing the small. In May 1653, for example, in the course of investigating a cross-border case of homicide, the Ministry of Rites proposed to ask the Korean emissary in Beijing to carry the imperial documents to the king instead of dispatching an imperial envoy for the purpose, given that Chosŏn is a country of men from afar (Ch., Chaoxian guo xi yuanren). Emperor Shunzhi endorsed this proposal, declaring that "hereafter, do not propose to send envoys to disturb the fan [Ch., fanbang] with minor matters."⁴⁵ By the middle period of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, such envoys to Hansŏng disappeared entirely.⁴⁶
From this point on, imperial missions to Chosŏn were of two primary types: missions for investiture and missions to confer noble rank, both relating to power shifts that required the Chinese emperor’s bestowal of legitimacy. In the early period, an imperial mission contained around a hundred men, many of whom were Manchu bannermen of the Eight Banners who joined the mission for the purpose of trade. In 1658 Emperor Shunzhi significantly trimmed the size of the missions by calling for the end of Manchu trade in Hansŏng. After that, a mission comprised an envoy, an associate envoy, four interpreters, and eighteen attendants.⁴⁷ In 1845 and 1846, Emperor Daoguang further reduced the number of core members to four.⁴⁸ Taking attendants into account, after the early nineteenth century an imperial mission had fewer than thirty members in total. The mission in 1876 comprised twenty members, and the last mission, in 1890, had twenty-eight.⁴⁹
All imperial envoys to Chosŏn—from the first envoy in 1637, Inggūldai, to the last one in 1890, Xuchang (1838–92)—were Manchu officials. They included some members of the Mongol and Han Chinese Eight Banners but no non-banner Han Chinese, whereas envoys to Annam and Ryukyu were mainly non-banner Han Chinese rather than Manchus. By at least the 1760s, Han Chinese scholars were fully aware of this ethnic discrepancy, though some of their Korean counterparts were not.⁵⁰ The door was never opened for Han Chinese to participate in tributary affairs in Korea. The exclusion was perhaps rooted in the implicit demands of the civilized–barbarian distinction and the Qing’s need to transcend the pre-1644 Manchu-Korean relationship: the Manchu court had to demonstrate, maintain, and consolidate its legitimacy as the human and institutional agent of the Mandate of Heaven and to strengthen its claim to civilized centrality and Chineseness through the hierarchical relationship. Still, some Manchu envoys, such as Akdun (1685–1756) in 1717, broadly identified themselves from a cultural perspective as Han envoys (Ch., hanjie) from the central civilized country (Ch., Zhonghua, Zhongxia).⁵¹
The Overland Route, the Willow Palisade, and Geographical Boundaries
In the post-1644 period, the emissaries of the two countries traveled on an overland route, which was about 950 miles (3,000 Chinese li) long and linked Hansŏng and Beijing via around eighty-two stations. The route passed through P’yŏngyang, Ŭiju, the Yalu River, Fenghuang City, Mukden, Shanhai Pass, Fengrun, and Tongzhou (see map 2.1). From 1644 to 1894, both Korean and Manchu emissaries were required to follow the overland route, the sole exception being the last imperial mission in 1890, which took a maritime route due to exceptional circumstances. In general, a mission took forty to sixty days to reach Beijing from Hansŏng, and an imperial mission from Beijing faced the same trudge to Hansŏng.⁵²
In Manchuria the overland route skirted the long Willow Palisade (Ch., Liutiao bian)—a system of levees and trenches planted with willow trees, their branches tied together—from Fenghuang City to Shanhai Pass, where it almost connected with the Great Wall. The Manchu rulers built the palisade from the late 1630s to
the 1680s in order to preserve their economic privileges by demarcating domestic boundaries between Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese regions. In the early period of Kangxi’s reign, the palisade connecting Shanhai Pass in the west and Fenghuang City in the east, known as the Old Fence, was around 590 miles (1,900 li) long and had sixteen fence gates, while in the north the New Fence between Weiyuan Village and Fateha Mountain was 215 miles (690 li) with four gates.⁵³ Fenghuang City, located at the southeastern corner of the east wing of the Old Fence, was under the supervision of the Manchu General of Mukden (Ch., Shengjing jiangjun) and had a gate (K., ch’akmun; Ch., zhamen), known as Feng huang Gate, about three miles (eight li) to the southeast of the city.⁵⁴ The Qing built Fenghuang Gate between 1638 and 1639 and extended it southeast toward the Yalu River between 1685 and 1690 up to a location about nine miles (thirty li) from the city.⁵⁵ The gate was the only pass through which Korean emissaries could enter the Qing’s ancestral territory (Ch., genben zhongdi) in Manchuria.
Map 2.1 The overland route between Beijing and Ŭiju in the late eighteenth century. The line connecting points A, B, C, and D on the map marks the Willow Palisade, which started at Fenghuang City (A) and ended near the Great Wall (the line connecting points D, E, and F). The line connecting points A, G (Mukden), H (Shanhai Pass), I (Fengrun), and J (Tongzhou) forms the overland route that Chosŏn’s emissaries took to Beijing after crossing the Yalu River. Yŏji to, handwritten map, preserved at the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University. Copyright Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies.
Between the gate and the boundary river lay a Qing-controlled area in which no one was allowed to live. In the late seventeenth century, this area spanned about thirty-four miles.⁵⁶ The Korean emissaries could pass through this area freely and were not subjected to security checks until they reached Fenghuang Gate. The garrison major of the Manchu bannermen at Fenghuang City did not welcome, check, or send off the missions beyond the gate, which may help explain why Korean emissaries were occasionally robbed by Chinese bandits outside the gate.⁵⁷ For the Korean visitors, Fenghuang Gate was thus more like a borderline than the Yalu River was, although the geographical borderline ran along the middle course of the river.
After entering Fenghuang Gate, the Koreans were to proceed to Beijing within twenty-eight days under the escort of Qing soldiers, passing through thirty-nine transfer stations (Ch., gongshi guanshe; Ma., alban jafara elcin i tatara guwan i boo). In fact, however, the visitors were so familiar with the route that generally no Chinese soldiers accompanied them to Beijing. The absence of Chinese monitors endowed the Koreans with fair freedom to visit places along their route and interview local people, enriching their travel journals, which eventually constituted a voluminous collection known as Yŏnhaengnok (The records of the journey to Beijing). All emissaries of the Qing’s fan were required to follow specific tributary routes and dared not deviate from them. For example, Ryukyu’s emissaries were instructed to arrive at Min’an in Fujian, Sulu’s at Xiamen in Fujian, those of Western countries at Macau in Guangdong, Siam’s at Humen in Guangdong, Annam’s at Taiping in Guangxi, and Burma’s at Yongchang in Yunnan. After the emissaries reached the designated places, the governor-general and the governor of the province would report their arrival to the Ministry of Rites and instruct subordinate officials to send them on to Beijing. Chosŏn’s emissaries had no such relations with officials in the provinces through which they passed, and they communicated directly with the Ministry of Rites. In other words, Chosŏn’s contacts with the Qing were under Beijing’s direct control, which enabled Beijing to use Chosŏn to portray the harmony of its Zongfan system whenever necessary.
Along the overland route, the high frequency and large size of Chosŏn’s missions produced considerable and lucrative commercial opportunities for merchants from both countries. What flowed into the Qing realm in massive quantities, in addition to Korean and Japanese goods, was silver. The mission of 1712, for instance, carried more than two hundred thousand taels of silver to Beijing, while the one in 1777 brought more than ninety-three thousand taels. The bulk of the silver was originally from Japan, acquired through trade between Tsushima and Chosŏn. The Hansŏng–Fenghuang City–Mukden–Beijing overland trade route was an extension of the Kyoto–Osaka–Tsushima–Pusan–Hansŏng overland and maritime trade route, with Hansŏng and Beijing the two major entrepôts on the combined route. Financially, the three nations made up an integrated international silver network, and in the eighteenth century the amount of silver that poured into the Qing from Chosŏn annually could reach five hundred thousand to six hundred thousand taels, which contributed to the Qing’s prosperity but aroused serious concerns among Korean officials.⁵⁸ In this sense, it is not an exaggeration to say that the Beijing–Hansŏng overland route was the most prosperous and most lucrative long-distance and international trade route in East Asia before Chosŏn opened treaty ports in the 1870s and 1880s.
Humble Palace Memorials, Imperial Mandates and Decrees, and Orthodox Legitimacy
The imperial court in Beijing and the royal court in Hansŏng interacted through meticulously formatted court documents written in accordance with highly institutionalized hierarchical norms. From 1637 on, the most important category among the documents that Chosŏn submitted to the Qing was the king’s humble
palace memorials (K., p’yo; Ch., biao). In 1705 the Ministry of Rites in Beijing laid down a set of new criteria for the syntax of these memorials that Chosŏn adhered to for the next 190 years, but the king was still free to use his own terms in composing other kinds of palace memorials.⁵⁹ The humble memorials were aimed at strengthening the Qing’s authority by reiterating and affirming the reciprocal and hierarchical relationship between the emperor and the king. The memorial submitted by the crown prince and deputy king of Chosŏn, Yi Yun (King Gyŏngjong), on April 14, 1721, in the sixtieth year of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, to congratulate the emperor on his birthday, is a typical example. The memorial was written on a sheet of well-made Korean paper in tiny, narrow Chinese characters evenly arranged in twenty-three vertical lines from right to left—although a memorial could, on occasion, exceed fifty lines—and it carefully followed the rules of honorific elevation, exactly as the Qing had mandated in 1705.⁶⁰ Refer ring to himself as your minister (K., sin; Ch., chen) of a vassal (Ch., fanfu), who could hardly bear his separation from the court (Ch., queting), Yi proclaimed that "Your Majesty raises all people of the world by assuming the Mandate of Heaven. The world is peaceful and imperial civilization extends to all places. Your Majesty has pacified the four seas, and ten thousand countries have come to revere Your Majesty [Ch., sihai yi er wanguo laiwang]."⁶¹
In such highly formalized memorials, the king frequently called himself subordinate or minister, Chosŏn the small country, and the Qing the big country, the upper country, the big dynasty, the central dynasty, or the Heavenly Dynasty.⁶² These Qing-mandated terms exploited Chosŏn’s subordinate status to highlight the Qing’s centrality in the early eighteenth century. Year after year, Chosŏn, as the representative of the others, helped consolidate the Qing’s supreme cultural identity as well as Qing hegemony through its performance of such written subservience. Upon receipt of the king’s humble memorials, the emperor generally wrote on the cover in red ink, I have learned of the appreciative memorial that you, the king, respectfully presented. Let the relevant ministry [the Ministry of Rites] know. The comments were made either in Manchu (Wang sini kesi de hengkileme wesimbuhe be saha, harangga jurgan sa.) or Chinese (Lanwang zouxie. Zhidao liao. Gaibu zhidao.).
On the Qing side, the imperial decrees granting a deceased king noble rank or investing a new king with a patent of appointment also served to consolidate the hierarchy. The special terms used in these edicts had their own rules, which underwent a process of institutionalization after 1644. When the Qing invested Yi Chong as king in January 1638 (the first investiture that the Qing performed), the decree stated only that Chosŏn would be recognized as fan to the Qing forever.⁶³ But after 1644 the Manchu court began to include additional terms with strong political meanings in the Zongfan context. For example, the decree of investiture in 1649 clearly defined Chosŏn as an outer fan in a remote area (Ch., xiahuang) that submitted itself to the Qing’s virtues and civilization. In 1675 the phrase cherishing the eastern country (Ch., huairou dongtu) appeared in the decrees.⁶⁴ These terms substantially broadened the scope of the Qing’s political and cultural ideology and transformed its identity in the context of the civilized–barbarian dichotomy.
On March 6, 1725, Emperor Yongzheng issued a mandate and a decree to Yi Gŭm to invest him as the king and his wife as the queen. The mandate of investiture (Ch., fengtian gaoming; Ma., abkai hesei g’aoming) consisted of five connected pieces of dyed ramie cloth in red, blue, black, white, and yellow from right to left. Each of the five sections was surrounded by a pattern of flying dragons (see figures 2.1 and 2.2). In the mandate Emperor Yongzheng stated, "The great strategy is simply to extend civilization [Ch., jiaohua; Ma., tacihiyan wen] to the countries from afar [Ch., haibang; Ma., goroki gurun]…. Generations of your court have been sincerely loyal and trustworthy and have been paying tribute diligently [Ch., zhigong qinxiu; Ma., tušan alban be kiceme faššambi]. In investing Yi Gŭm the king of Chosŏn" (Ch., Chaoxian guowang; Ma., Coohiyan gurun i wang), the emperor emphasized that the king "shall serve as the fence on the eastern land [Ch., pinghan dongfan; Ma., dergi bade fiyanji dalikū], devoutly use the imperial calendar [Ch., qiangong zhengshuo; Ma., forgon ton be olhošome ginggulembi], pacify the land, and assist the imperial house forever [Ch., jiafu yu huangjia; Ma., ejen i boode aisilame wehiyembi]. The emperor advised the king to use a pure and genuine
mind to serve the Heavenly court [Ch., tianshi; Ma., abkai gurun]."⁶⁵ A decree to the king articulated this point again by stating, "You should be loyal forever and efficiently govern the land as a minister from afar [Ch., houfu; Ma., jecen i golo], while you should be loyal and obedient and serve as a fence [Ch., pinghan; Ma., fiyanji dalikū] for the Heavenly house [Ch., tianjia; Ma., gurun boo]."⁶⁶
The Chinese and Manchu terms of the imperial edicts portrayed the king as a family member of the Qing court, and they became more sophisticated in the Qianlong period. The imperial edicts to the king in 1757, for instance, referred to Chosŏn as a fence, a subordinate country (Ch., shuguo; Ma., harangga gurun), a remote submission (Ch., yuanfu; Ma., goroki i jecen), and a lower country (Ch., xiaguo; Ma., fejergi gurun) of the Middle Kingdom (Ch., Zhongchao, Z hongbang; M., Dulimbai gurun). The edicts also emphasized that the king’s court (M., wang ni boo) had been loyal to and received special rewards from the Heavenly court (Ch., tianshi; Ma., han i hargašan).⁶⁷ By invoking these norms, the Qing explicitly presented itself as the civilized center—China and the Heavenly Dynasty—in both Chinese and Manchu terms.
In his memorials to the emperor, the king used a gold seal received from the Qing. From early 1637 to early 1653, the seal had only Manchu characters, which read Coohiyan gurun i wang ni doron (seal of the king of the country of Chosŏn). On April 22, 1653, Emperor Shunzhi, evidently displeased by the absence of Chinese script from the seal, instructed the Ministry of Rites to make a new seal that included Chinese characters (Ch., hanzi). As a result, the words Chaoxian guowang zhi yin (seal of the king of the country of Chosŏn) were added to the seal.⁶⁸ The emperor did not explain his rationale for the change, but his decision underscored the new dynasty’s Chineseness. On the Qing side, the emperors, in their mandates to Chosŏn, always used the seal of declaring imperial mandate, which carried both a Chinese text, Zhigao zhi bao, and a Manchu one, Hese wasimbure boobai, exactly the same text that appeared on the imperial mandates issued to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni in Tibet. The combination of languages reflected the polyglot politics of a multiethnic empire.⁶⁹
FIGURE 2.1. The Manchu section of the imperial mandate to invest the king of Chosŏn in 1725. Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, preserved at Jangseogak, the Academy of Korean Studies, Korea. Copyright Academy of Korean Studies.
FIGURE 2.2. The Chinese section of the imperial mandate to invest the king of Chosŏn in 1725. Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, preserved at Jangseogak, the Academy of Korean Studies, Korea. Copyright Academy of Korean Studies.
The imperial investiture of the king helps explain a paradox in the Qing period: certain Confucian countries, in particular Chosŏn and Annam, were privately reluctant to identify the Qing as the supreme representative of Chinese culture, but in practice they never challenged its status as the superior country and frequently sent tributary missions to Beijing to display their deference. The explanation for the apparent paradox lies in the fact that the missions fulfilled a dual purpose in establishing not only the legitimacy of the Qing but also that of the monarchs of the fan. The Zongfan relationship between the Qing and its fan was an incarnation of this symbiotic and synergistic legitimacy, namely, the orthodox legitimacy embodied in the highly programmed rituals involved in the exchange of emissaries. This orthodox legitimacy was the goal for which King Taksin (r. 1767–82) of the Thonburi regime of Siam sent tributary missions to Beijing to pursue investiture after the fall of the Ayutthaya regime (1350–1767), even though King Taksin’s understanding of paying tribute (Ch., jingong) was very different from that of the Qing.⁷⁰ The need for legitimacy could also explain why Nguyễn Huệ, the leader of the peasant rebellion against the Lê Dynasty (1428–1788) of Annam, defeated the Qing army in 1789 but nonetheless accepted the Qing’s investiture in 1790. It was also in 1790 that Burma accepted the Qing investiture after winning the Burmese-Qing War in the early 1770s.⁷¹ In addition to pragmatic concerns reflecting geopolitics and China’s military might, securing political legitimacy from China proved crucial for these regimes’ own rule.
Tributes, Gifts, and Court-to-Court Interactions
The Qing ritual code clearly listed the types and quantities of tribute that Chosŏn had to present for different purposes. After 1644, these fell into eight major categories. Beyond the most official category of annual tribute, designated as standard tribute (Ch., zhenggong), the king generally referred to the items in the other seven categories, such as those marking the imperial birthday, the lunar New Year, and the winter solstice, as gifts or local products. The Qing accepted all of the submitted items and did not challenge the king’s choice of terms, although it preferred to refer to the items as tribute.⁷²
While the annual tribute marked a country-to-country relationship, all other categories of tribute, which were presented specifically to the emperor, the empress, and the dowager empress, suggested a strong court-to-court connection. The Ministry of Rites accepted the annual tribute as a routine matter, but it had to submit memorials to the emperor for instructions on how to handle tribute in other categories. In the early Qing, the Ministry of Rites forwarded all tribute items to the Ministry of Revenue and later to the Imperial Household Department, which was in charge of the affairs of the Manchu royal house and had its own financial system independent of the one managed by the Ministry of Revenue.⁷³ Therefore, although the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship seemed to manifest itself mainly in hierarchical country-to-country interactions, in reality it was a dual system involving the two countries and the two courts.
The gifts that the imperial envoys carried to Chosŏn were directed at specific members of the royal family, including the king, the queen, the crown prince, and the dowager queen. Usually the envoys brought first-rate silk for official robes. When imperial missions were dispatched to extend the emperor’s condolences on the deaths of core royalty, some gifts were consumed at the funeral ceremonies, while others were converted into 150 to 300 taels of silver by the Ministry of Revenue and delivered to the Korean royal house. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, imperial envoys followed a precise routine to deliver their condolences and gifts. The last such mission occurred in 1890, and it is explored in detail in chapter 5.
Receptions, Ritual Performances, and the Civilized Qing
Chosŏn’s emissaries were well accommodated at each transfer station after they entered China, but they had to prepare food for themselves until they arrived in
Beijing. Upon reaching their residence in Beijing, the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations, the emissaries first visited the Ministry of Rites to present the king’s memorials and the list of tribute items. All emissaries from Chosŏn and from other countries, as well as the kings they represented, had to submit their documents to the emperor through the ministry, with which they could communicate via official notes (Ch., ziwen). In the main hall of the ministry, the emissaries would pass the memorials to the head officials, who would place the memorials in front of the imperial tablet on a table in the middle of the hall. The emissaries would then kneel down once to make three prostrations toward the head officials, who would in turn bow three times to the emissaries with their hands folded in front (Ch., zuoyi, a ritual practiced between officials of equal ranks). Once they had finished, the emissaries would kneel down three times, each time making three prostrations toward the tablet.⁷⁴ The ministry would submit the documents to the emperor the next day, while the emissaries returned to their residence to wait for the imperial audience.
The Qing’s commander general of the Metropolitan Infantry Brigade Yamen (Ch., Bujun tongling yamen) sent soldiers to guard the emissaries’ residence.⁷⁵ Three additional institutions were involved in hosting the guests: the Court of Imperial Entertainments (Ch., Guanglu si) delivered daily food and drink, distributed to each member of the mission according to rank; the Ministry of Revenue brought fodder for the Koreans’ horses; and the Ministry of Works provided charcoal. These meticulous regulations embodied the Qing’s policy of cherishing men from afar.
During their stay in Beijing, the emissaries had various responsibilities to fulfill. If there was a grand court assembly of officials in the Forbidden City, the emissaries had to attend and pay homage at the end of the wing of the Qing civil officials. A major task was to pay a formal visit to the emperor at either the Summer Palace in Beijing or the Summer Palace in Rehe (Chengde). After the audience, the emissaries would be invited to attend certain events, such as banquets in the Forbidden City, performances of Chinese operas, or fireworks shows at the Summer Palace.⁷⁶ All ritual procedures, in particular the highest level of kowtow, were minutely regulated and fastidiously practiced. Such rituals between the Chinese emperor and foreign emissaries had been defined and institutionalized at least since the great rituals laid out in The Rituals of the Great Tang (Ch., Da Tang Kaiyuan li), compiled in the eighth century.⁷⁷ In the Ming and the Qing, the rituals became extremely elaborate, and the Korean emissaries were required to rehearse the complicated ceremonies in advance as a sign of their loyalty and as part of the process that would civilize the barbarians in the four quarters (Ch., feng siyi).⁷⁸ Rituals helped maintain the political arrangement and strengthen the identities of all participants.⁷⁹ In grand court gatherings, emissaries from Chosŏn were usually the first representatives of the outer fan to perform the rituals for the emperor, as on February 9, 1675, at the Lantern Festival, where the Chosŏn emissaries congratulated Kangxi ahead of their Russian, Kalka Mongol, and Ūlet Mongol counterparts.⁸⁰ Chosŏn’s role as an exemplar was particularly prominent in the late eighteenth century during the Qianlong period, when the Qing in many cases followed the model for Chosŏn (Ch., zhao Chaoxian zhi li) in managing its bilateral exchanges with Annam, Ryukyu, and Siam.⁸¹ Chinese scholars at the time also widely regarded Chosŏn as the model for other countries (Ch., zhuguo zhi zhang).⁸²
The emissaries also attended two major official banquets, one held at the Ministry of Rites and the other at the emissaries’ residence. An astonishing number of institutions were involved in their organization: the Court of Imperial Entertainments; the Food Supply Office (Ch., Jingshan qingli si) of the Ministry of Rites; the Ministries of Revenue, Works, and War; Shuntian Prefecture; and the Revenue Superintendent of Chongwen Gate (Ch., Liangyi shuiwu jiandu). Royal contractors (Ch., hanghu) were also assigned specific tasks. Each of the three key members of the mission was treated to what was known as a fifth-level Manchu banquet and the other members to a sixth-level one, preferential treatment not afforded to emissaries from any other country. The high cost of the banquets was fully covered by the Qing and, not surprisingly, the banquets were replete with ritual performances reinforcing the bilateral hierarchical order.⁸³ The imperial code included an illustration of the banquets for Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries (Ch., Chaoxian gongshi yantu) and specified that the seating arrangements for banquets held for
emissaries from other countries should follow the Chosŏn pattern (Ch., geguo gongshi fangci).⁸⁴
During their sojourn in Beijing, the emissaries, particularly scholars without official status or responsibilities, were enthusiastic about socializing with Qing literati. The tradition of such interactions had started in Ming times but had been suspended in the Ming-Qing transition period because of the anti-Manchu attitudes that were prevalent in Chosŏn. Indeed, before the eighteenth century, the three key members of the tributary mission barely left their residence to meet with Chinese officials or scholars because many Korean scholars embracing Neo-Confucianism saw the Qing as a barbarous country and regarded the tributary mission as a humiliation.⁸⁵ In the 1760s, however, literary social gatherings involving Korean emissaries again became frequent and continued until the 1890s. In the 1860s, many Chinese officials, such as Dong Wenhuan (1833–77) of the Imperial Academy (Ch., Hanlin yuan), who was known for calligraphy and epigraphy, actively socialized with Koreans.⁸⁶ On the Korean side, Pak Kyusu (1807–76), an emissary who visited Beijing in 1872, befriended more than a hundred famous Chinese scholars through social gatherings.⁸⁷
Versed in the same Confucian classics, adhering to the same Neo-Confucianism, and using the same Chinese characters, the Qing and Chosŏn scholars could easily identify one another as men of the same caliber. They met for drinks, composed poems, and exchanged their own compositions and calligraphy. That Chosŏn was known as Little China might also have lent these transnational literary social gatherings a homogenous cultural identity. These savants formed an informal perennial club in which they exchanged ideas about history and literature and improved their perceptions of each other’s countries. According to Key-hiuk Kim, their communications also assured Korea of a constant stream of information and knowledge concerning the latest intellectual trends in China.⁸⁸
When they gathered with their Han Chinese friends, the Korean guests usually showed an aversion to Manchu customs, such as the Manchu-style official robe and hairstyle, and were very proud of their Ming-style robes and hats, in keeping with the civilized–barbarian dichotomy. But in 1766, when Hong Tae-yong (1731–83) expressed contempt for the Manchus’ control of China, he found to his surprise that his Han Chinese counterparts, such as Yan Cheng (1733–67), did not appreciate his anti-Manchu sentiments; instead, Yan and his colleagues applauded the Qing’s support for civilization. After intensive conversation with his Chinese friends, Hong conceded that Koreans on a fundamental level still belonged to the barbarians by the sea (K., haesang chi iin). By concluding that the civilized and the barbarians are the same (K., Hwa–I il ya), he acknowledged the Qing’s civilized status.⁸⁹ Through such interactions, many Korean and Chinese scholars became close friends and continued to correspond even after the emissaries returned to Chosŏn. When Yan Cheng was on the brink of death, he laid a letter from Hong on his abdomen to indicate how deeply he treasured their friendship. When news of Yan’s death reached Hansŏng, Hong burst into tears and commented that he had lost a brother to whom he was as attached as he was to his right arm.⁹⁰
Like the emissaries from Hansŏng who experienced a combination of hardship and comfort as they made their way to Beijing, Qing imperial envoys also had to endure discomfort until they passed through Fenghuang Gate on their journey toward Ŭiju. There they were welcomed and treated well by the Korean side. Although the land between the gate and the Yalu River was Qing territory, the Korean prefect of Ŭiju was able to dispatch Korean officers, Manchu interpreters, and servants to welcome the envoys at the three stations in this area: Congxiu, Mazhuan, and Sanjiang. At each station the Koreans would set up temporary houses for the envoys and provide hearty meals that could feature more than thirty different dishes. In Ŭiju the prefect treated each envoy to a banquet with more than 130 kinds of food.⁹¹ Receptions along the way from Ŭiju to P’yŏngyang and then to Hansŏng were even more luxurious, and the cost was significant.⁹²
In contrast to their Korean counterparts in Beijing, the Manchu envoys in Hansŏng confined themselves to ritual exchanges. Beijing-style literary social gatherings did take place in Shuri, the capital of Ryukyu, but not in Hansŏng, where the envoys, along with their assistants, never left their lodgings to converse with local officials or scholars.⁹³ No transnational literati club like the one in Beijing ever formed in Hansŏng. After 1658, when Emperor Shunzhi put an end to
Manchu trade in Hansŏng, the imperial envoys were always temporary visitors who returned home as soon as their mission was accomplished. In addition, almost all imperial envoys before the early eighteenth century made a point of visiting the Samjŏndo stele in a southern suburb of Hansŏng. The Koreans regarded the stele, with its inscriptions celebrating the Manchu conquest of Chosŏn, as a humiliation, and some Confucian scholars and students argued that it should be destroyed, so the envoys’ visits were sensitive and made the stele a barometer of the two countries’ relationship. In 1723 the Qing’s two envoys made a formal visit to the stele with a number of Korean officials. At the site, the vice envoy knelt down three times, each time bowing his head three times. In 1724 and 1729, the imperial envoys also paid formal visits to the stele, again accompanied by a group of Koreans. On these occasions both the Manchu envoys and their Korean interpreters kowtowed to the stele. In 1731, however, instead of visiting Samjŏndo, the envoys simply asked for copies of the inscriptions on the stele, and after 1762, they no longer even requested transcripts. By the late nineteenth century, Qing officials had only a vague understanding of the stele and were uncertain whether it featured a Manchu inscription.⁹⁴
During their sojourn in Hansŏng, the Qing envoys performed four major ceremonies in which the king participated. The first was the welcome at the Gate of Receiving Imperial Favors (K., Yŏngŭn mun) outside the West Gate of the city. The king bowed once to the imperial documents, then returned to his palace in the city. The second, conducted inside the king’s palace, was the transfer of the imperial documents and other items to the king. The king kowtowed four times to the imperial edicts. In addition, the king and the envoys bowed once or twice to each other with their hands folded in front. The king, on his own territory, did not need to perform the highest level of kowtow toward the imperial decrees or other documents and gifts, as his ministers would do in Beijing. The third ceremony was the king’s visit to the envoys at their residence, the South Palace Annex, where the Koreans honored the envoys with several tea banquets. Finally, there was the send-off at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country on the city’s outskirts, where the king provided a tea ceremony for the departing envoys. Contact between the two sides was always conducted through the Korean Ministry of Rites. All of the procedures in these ceremonies were regulated by ritual codes and were executed until the early 1890s. The Korean side had no obligation to report any domestic affairs to the envoys, nor would the envoys intervene in such affairs. Rather, this stylized interaction in Hansŏng endowed the monarch of Chosŏn with political legitimacy, continuously consolidating the reciprocal and hierarchical Zongfan relations between the two countries.
Celebrating the Relationship: The Qing Emperor’s Roles in the Zongfan System
As the institutional agent at the highest level of the Zongfan hierarchy, the emperor could exploit the occasions of imperial audiences and his patriarchal authority to modify and lubricate the mechanism from the top down. As the following sections show, he could freely endow tributary emissaries with various extra gifts, supervise and admonish the Manchu envoys to Chosŏn and the Manchus along the border in Manchuria, and make final decisions about border conflicts.
Consolidating the System through Imperial Gifts and Extra Gifts
After Chosŏn’s emissaries presented their tribute gifts to the emperor, the sovereign would bestow routine gifts (Ch., lishang) on them and the king. At least since the Shunzhi period, the Qing presented the tribute missions with gifts whose value exceeded that of the tribute, based on detailed calculations.⁹⁵ The gifts and their quantities varied according to the category of the mission, and when the Korean envoy was a member of the royal house, the amount and quality of the gifts would increase. The silk and satin among the gifts were taken from the Imperial Household Department, rather than the Ministry of Revenue, in order to show the emperor’s personal favor toward the "king of the fan " (Ch., fanwang). To mark the imperial birthday and the lunar New Year, the Qing would give the king a second-class horse with bridle and each of the two envoys a third-class horse with bridle, highlighting the Manchu character of the Qing regime. The Qing
would also give the envoys silver in the average amount of at least 680 taels (for annual tributary missions and winter solstice missions) or 850 taels (for imperial birthday missions and lunar New Year missions), along with other gifts.⁹⁶
Some scholars have argued that the routine gifts were an institutionalized part of the overall Zongfan mechanism and hence afforded little flexibility.⁹⁷ Yet the emperor could break this routine at his discretion by awarding the emissaries extra gifts during audiences. For instance, in early 1795 Emperor Qianlong awarded the king a hundred copies of the Chinese character for happiness (Ch., fu) that he had written on small squares of red paper.⁹⁸ This sort of largesse was seemingly random,⁹⁹ but it did not simply represent imperial prerogative or a deviation from the flowcharts of ritual codes. Rather, the practice of giving supererogatory gifts highlighted the Qing policy of giving more to the visitors and benefiting less from them (Ch., houwang bolai), as Emperor Qian-long explained it to Chosŏn in 1736.¹⁰⁰ The emperor thus moderated the system by lending it flexibility and novelty. In the late eighteenth century, Emperor Qianlong disbursed an increasing quantity of extra gifts, while the amount of the tribute sent by Chosŏn remained remarkably stable. The extra imperial gifts reached their peak in the 1790s, a time when Emperor Qianlong was particularly keen to enhance the image of his dynasty as the Heavenly Dynasty. Given these priorities, the Qing court was not concerned about maintaining a balance between the value of the tributes and that of the imperial gifts. In 1793 a Korean emissary acknowledged that the Qing treated Chosŏn in such a favorable way that the Qing’s spending on accommodations for the tributary emissaries and the value of the various imperial gifts far exceeded the value of the Korean local products.¹⁰¹
Constructing a Positive Image of the Qing and Highlighting the Envoys’ Manchu Identity
The Qing emperor sought to further burnish his dynasty’s image in his contacts with Chosŏn by taking steps to prevent the Manchu envoys to Chosŏn and the bannermen who resided along the border in Manchuria from compromising the dignity of the Heavenly Dynasty through open degeneracy. Emperor Qianlong, for example, felt it necessary to extend the Qing’s prolonged campaign to maintain Manchu traditions and identity to the field of the Sino-Korean communications by closely monitoring his envoys’ behavior.
His first reform aimed to bolster the Manchu envoys’ integrity by discouraging corruption during their trip to Chosŏn. In 1736, after reducing by half the amount of the gifts the Koreans were expected to provide to the imperial envoys, the emperor punished two envoys who violated the new rules. He decreed that in the future the garrison generals at Mukden and Shanhai Pass should check the envoys’ luggage when they returned from Hansŏng to make sure they had not received unauthorized gifts.¹⁰² Until the last imperial mission in 1890, subsequent emperors continued to admonish their envoys to Chosŏn to remain upright and honest. Compared with their pre-1637 Ming counterparts, who had exploited Chosŏn for maximum profit, the Manchu envoys, in particular after the Kangxi period, behaved well on their visits to Chosŏn, which helped reduce the tension between the two countries caused by the Qing invasions in the 1630s. The Korean scholar Hong Tae-yong acknowledged in 1766 that the Qing was much more generous and kind to Chosŏn than the Ming had been.¹⁰³
The Qianlong emperor also believed that the Manchu officers and soldiers in Manchuria should focus on border security. In 1737, under the claim of giving kindness to the people from afar, he decided to prohibit the Manchus from trading with Koreans in the Middle River area of the Yalu River and to ask merchants and commoners of inner China (Ch., neidi shangmin) to undertake this trade instead. The Middle River market had been established in 1592 between Chosŏn and the Ming; it had barely opened during the Ming-Qing war but was restored as a major trading center between the Qing and Chosŏn after 1646. Manchu bannermen and merchants near Fenghuang City had thereafter constituted the Qing’s traders in the market. Now the Qianlong emperor abruptly concluded that the bannermen were not good at doing business and sought to direct his Manchu warriors back to the military realm. The king, however, was deeply concerned about the potential arrival of the people of inner China, so he petitioned the emperor to maintain the trade with the bannermen. The emperor granted the
petition but explained that by people of inner China he meant only those living near the banner garrisons in Manchuria, not those south of the Great Wall or in Beijing.¹⁰⁴ This episode shows that in the border area the Manchu court was concerned more about political consequences and border security than about the economic interests of the local bannermen. It also suggests that at least by the 1730s the Qing had come to integrate Manchuria into its concept of inner China (Ch., neidi), further nullifying the border function of the Great Wall within the multiethnic empire.
Emperor Qianlong’s more dramatic reform took place in 1763, when he dictated that all Manchu envoys to Chosŏn from that moment onward should ride horses instead of taking sedan chairs in Chosŏn. The emperor explained that although Chosŏn had provided sedan chairs for the missions to show its obedience to and respect for the imperial envoys of the Heavenly Dynasty, the Manchu officials were expert horsemen and should not ride in sedan chairs. The emperor instructed the king to end permanently the convention of welcoming the imperial envoys with sedan chairs and to provide only horses instead. The Qing documents do not explain why the emperor suddenly changed this longstanding convention. But according to the first-rank translator of the mission led by Hongying (1707–71), Xu Zongmen, who was a Beijing resident of Korean background, the emperor had originally picked another Manchu official as the envoy but, realizing how obese the chosen official was, asked him how he would make the long trip to Chosŏn. The envoy replied that since he would ride in a sedan chair, his weight would not be a problem. The emperor became angry, and to underline the Manchu martial spirit, he immediately replaced the envoy with Hongying, who was an excellent horseman. The emperor admonished Hongying to display righteousness (Ch., zhengda) in the outer fan and to avoid any wretchedness (Ch., weisuo). Meanwhile, the Korean emissaries, the emperor said, were exempt from the new rules and could maintain their custom of taking carriages to Beijing.¹⁰⁵ The Qianlong emperor’s quest to maintain and strengthen the Manchuness of the Manchus under his supervision thus helped the Qing improve its image in the eyes of its subordinate and to showcase its virtues in practice.
Arbitrating Border Disputes
The Qing emperor also served as the highest arbitrator in border conflicts and border-crossing disputes. In each case of border conflict with Chosŏn, it was the emperor—rather than the king, a historical precedent, or a border rule—who made the final decision. The geographical connection between the two countries occasioned a considerable number of illegal border crossings from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. These thorny cases posed a challenge to the Qing, in particular to the emperors, in terms of balancing the Qing’s lofty Zongfan discourse and its practical concerns. This aspect of the Qing’s policy underwent a major change from the Kangxi to the Qianlong period. In the Shunzhi and early Kangxi periods, the Manchu monarchs often doled out severe punishments to the king or his officials over border disputes and often sent special envoys to Chosŏn for in-person investigation. The emperors embraced this approach primarily because the Qing had not yet consolidated its rule in the wake of the Southern Ming (1644–62) and its influences and was worried about the possibility of a Chosŏn rebellion against the Qing. But after the Kangxi emperor suppressed the revolt of the Three Feudatories in the 1680s, the Qing praised Chosŏn for its loyalty and adopted a more relaxed policy on border conflicts with the country, eventually ceasing to send special investigative envoys.
The Qing court in the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods following Kangxi governed a country that had been unified to an unprecedented degree since 1644. The court consequently focused on reinforcing the cosmopolitan ideology of all-under-Heaven in the Qing’s foreign relations. Although the emperors had clear views on the Qing’s geographical borders, they preferred to rely on traditional Zongfan norms in settling border disputes with Chosŏn. The Qing’s border policy toward Chosŏn thus became more conservative than aggressive, forming a sharp contrast with the Qing’s contemporary policy in the southwest and northwest, where the new empire continued to expand its territory. On the Chosŏn side, the savvy king and local officials applied the same Zongfan norms in their sophisticated negotiations with their Qing counterparts, leaving the emperor in Beijing with no option but to endorse one Korean proposal after another.
The Mangniushao case provides a good example. In 1745 the Manchu general of Mukden, Daldangga (?–1760), suggested to Emperor Qianlong that the Qing set up a border outpost at Mangniushao near the Yalu River in order to prevent Koreans from illegally crossing the border river to sell or buy grains or to search for ginseng in Manchuria. Although in 1731 Daldangga’s predecessor, Nasutu (?–1749), had likewise proposed an outpost at Mangniushao, Emperor Yongzheng had rejected the proposal because of the king’s opposition and upheld his father’s policy, in place since 1715, of prohibiting all construction in this area.¹⁰⁶ Prompted by an increase in illegal border crossings, Daldangga resurrected Nasutu’s plan and proposed to repair the broken parts of the Willow Palisade and to open lands outside the palisade for cultivation. Emperor Qianlong initially supported Daldangga’s plan and sent a Mongol minister, Bandi (?–1755), to visit the area to confirm that Mangniushao was indeed inside China’s borders and that it would be appropriate for China to establish an outpost there. At the last moment, however, the emperor reversed his stance, invoking the precedents set by the decisions of his grandfather in 1715 and his father in 1731, as well as a decision he himself had made in another case in 1737. To justify his rejection of the proposal, he cited the imperative of cherishing the small. Furthermore, the emperor told Daldangga that no further such proposals should be made to the court and that Daldangga and his successors in Mukden should follow established rules in managing border affairs with Chosŏn.¹⁰⁷ In this way, the emperor reduced the possibility of further conflicts in this border area and helped stabilize the two countries’ relationship from the top down.
Barbarianizing the Periphery: The Qing’s Institutional Zongfan Discourse
The Changing Meaning of Barbarians from Yongzheng to Qianlong
The Qing interpretation of the civilized–barbarian distinction underwent a sharp change in the transitional days between the reigns of Yongzheng and Qianlong. In the late 1720s, Emperor Yongzheng had made the putative barbarity of the Qing a public issue among Qing scholars because of his response to the case of Zeng Jing (1679–1735). Encouraged by the civilized–barbarian discourse, Zeng had plotted to rebel against the Manchu barbarians, but after he was prosecuted, he reversed his stance and endorsed the Qing, whereupon the emperor released him from prison. In June 1733, while Zeng was in the provinces giving lectures on the dynasty’s virtues, the emperor issued an edict to prohibit the practice of changing Chinese characters with the meaning of barbarian (Ch., hu, lu, yi, di) in books. The Manchu monarch defined the term barbarian geographically and confessed that the ancestors of the current dynasty could be called eastern barbarians, like ancient Chinese saints. This tone had been set by his great-grandfather Hongtaiji in 1636 in his letter to the king of Chosŏn, and Yongzheng himself had repeated the same points in his book responding to Zeng, Great Righteousness Resolving Confusion (Ch., Dayi juemi lu) in 1729.¹⁰⁸ By proclaiming that people living both within and outside China belong to the same family (Ch., Zhong Wai yijia), Yongzheng insisted that the civilized–barbarian distinction should not be understood in a cultural sense, and even if it were, only those who were beyond civilization (Ch., wanghua zhi wai), like the Zunghar, might truly be called barbarians.¹⁰⁹ Under this definition, the outer fan of the Qing also seemed to be excluded from the category of barbarians.
Yongzheng’s statements suggest that the Manchu rulers embraced cultural egalitarianism in order to redistribute cultural resources within the multiethnic empire.¹¹⁰ It is safe to say that the Manchu emperor was trying to overcome the prejudice inherent in the stereotypical civilized–barbarian distinction among Han Chinese intellectuals in the process of consolidating the Manchu regime’s orthodox legitimacy. This sustained effort can also be seen in the move by Yongzheng’s father and grandfather to expand considerably the list of Chinese monarchs who were enshrined in the Temple of Ancient Monarchs (Ch., Lidai diwang miao), with the goal of establishing the Qing as the legitimate successor to previous dynasties that had likewise been identified as China.¹¹¹ With Yongzheng’s policy, the yardstick for judging barbarians suddenly snapped, as the ruling dynasty now identified itself both with the ancient rulers and with the
eastern barbarians.
After assuming the throne in 1735, the Qianlong emperor not only quickly revoked his father’s pardon and executed Zeng but also reversed Yongzheng’s approach by clearly differentiating the civilized Qing from the barbarian countries surrounding it. Qianlong thus brought the civilized–barbarian discourse back to its pre-Yongzheng meaning, in which cultural factors played a pivotal role. He exploited his father’s heritage by turning the latter’s policy of permitting the free and public use of all Chinese characters for barbarian into a tool for propagating the opposite message in the context of the civilized– barbarian discourse—namely, one that excluded the Qing from this category. No longer would the Great Qing downgrade itself to the rank of barbarian.¹¹² Consequently, in the Qianlong period the use of the term foreign barbarians in official documents reached its historical zenith.¹¹³ Through this terminology, the Qing combined its civilized centrality with cultural superiority. Qianlong achieved this symbolic goal by formally designating all other countries as barbarians, along with the majority of the ethnic groups under his rule, and one of the most important targets of this barbarianization at the normative level was Chosŏn.
At the time when Yongzheng published his book on the definition of barbarian, some Manchu envoys to Chosŏn had taken to visiting Jizi Shrine in P’yŏngyang on their way back from Hansŏng.¹¹⁴ As mentioned in the introduction, Jizi was said to be the founding father of the ancient Korean regime, invested by the Chinese monarch of the Zhou Dynasty with the lands of Chosŏn, where he maintained a familistic and tributary relationship with the central court of China. Given the intense debate around ethnicity and the civilized–barbarian dichotomy in the late years of Yongzheng’s reign, the Manchu envoys’ visits to Jizi Shrine could help the Manchu regime bolster its Chineseness and its claims to legitimacy beyond its borders. When the Qing overcame the challenge of the civilized–barbarian distinction within China in the first half of the Qianlong period, visits to Jizi Shrine ceased, although Chinese historical records continued to celebrate the familial relationship between the Chinese and the Koreans.
The Qing’s Systematic, Institutional Barbarianization of Chosŏn and Others
In June 1751 the Qianlong emperor instructed the governors-general and governors of border provinces to draw and submit pictures of domestic and foreign barbarians (Ch., neiwai miaoyi, waiyi fanzhong) in order to demonstrate the flourishing of the Qing.¹¹⁵ The emperor was following a precedent set by Emperor Taizong (r. 627–49) of the Tang Dynasty, who was believed to have brought China its most prosperous days in the pre-Qing era. Since Tang Taizong had commissioned paintings of the barbarians to celebrate the great moment in which ten thousand countries came to revere the emperor (Ch., wanguo laichao),¹¹⁶ Qianlong had every reason to commemorate his dynasty’s accomplishments in the same way. Even during the Qing expansion into Central Asia, Qianlong identified the efforts of the Han and Tang dynasties to extend Chinese power into Central Asia as historical milestones by which to measure his own progress.¹¹⁷
Beyond the obvious political factors, contemporary popular culture may also have motivated Qianlong’s desire for an illustrated record of the Qing’s imperial expansion. As a big fan of Chinese opera who contributed to the birth of Peking opera, Qianlong may have been influenced by popular operas that extolled the virtues of the civilized center of the world. These operas can be dated at least to the Yuan, but in the Ming and early Qing they were still being performed in cities such as Beijing. Their scripts described the Ming as the Heavenly Dynasty, the upper country, or the central civilized country, bordered by barbarians in four directions (primarily represented as Chosŏn, Annam, and political units in Inner Asia) who paid tribute and presented palace memorials to the great emperor of China.¹¹⁸
In 1761, ten years after Qianlong ordered the drawings, the first edition of the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Ch., Huang Qing zhigong tu) was published in four volumes, featuring six hundred pictures of people from the Qing’s outer fan and from barbarian places within Qing territory or on its periphery. The first picture in the collection was of a Korean official who wore a Ming-style official robe but was labeled "a barbarian official of the country of
Chosŏn" (Ch., Chaoxian guo yiguan) (see figure 2.3). Once again, Chosŏn served as the model for others in the collection, and its prototypical role was made clear by Qing scholars in the Essentials of Complete Books of the Four Storehouses Catalog (Ch., Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao).¹¹⁹ Chosŏn, Little China, was thus institutionally converted into a country of barbarians by the Qing’s political discourse and imperial documentary mechanism.
Following Chosŏn, other countries, including Ryukyu, Annam, Siam, Sulu, Lanchang, Burma, Britain, France, Japan, the Netherlands, and Russia, likewise became barbarians in the Qing nomenclature, as did many of the diverse peoples within Qing territory. In nearly every case, the Qing narrative constructed an imperial pedigree by reviewing a long history of Zongfan relations with the foreign country (Ch., guo; Ma., gurun) or domestic tribe (Ch., buluo; Ma., aiman) from the Zhou to the Ming Dynasties and emphasized that it was the Qing’s merits that prompted the barbarians to send emissaries to come and pay tribute (Ch., qianshi rugong; Ma., elcin takūrafi albabun jafanjimbi) or come to kowtow with tribute (Ch., chaogong; Ma., albabun jafame hengkilenjimbi).¹²⁰ In this way, the Qing systematically assimilated the historical legacies of previous dynasties into its own Zongfan relations with these countries and tribes and consolidated its legitimacy as the civilized center, or Zhongguo (Ma., Dulimbai gurun).¹²¹ Also in 1761, in order to celebrate the empress dowager’s seventieth birthday, the Qing published another magnificent collection, Illustrations of the Great Celebration (Ch., Luhuan huijing tu). The first illustration carried the title Ten thousand countries came to revere the emperor, the precise phrase the Tang Dynasty had used, and Chosŏn’s emissaries occupied a distinguished position within it.¹²² If there was a documentary institutionalization for the Qing,¹²³ in terms of the Qing’s construction of its civilized identity, this process was substantially accomplished in 1761.
FIGURE 2.3. A Chosŏn official in the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Huang Qing zhigong tu, 33).
Behind the cheerful facade of the great multiethnic empire lay the axiom of the Qing’s centrality in the world. And that world, of course, often found its way to the Qing threshold. Britain, which the Qing knew as the country of Ying ji li (Ying ji li is a transliteration of England; Ch., Yingjili guo; Ma., Ing gi lii gurun), was one of the countries portrayed as barbarian in the collection of 1761. At the end of that year, the Qianlong emperor instructed his representatives in Guangzhou to notify the men from afar and foreign barbarians there—the British merchants—that the Heavenly Dynasty has everything it needs, so it does not need foreign barbarians to bring trivial goods for trade.¹²⁴ The edict was a response to petitions from James Flint in 1759 and Nicholas Skottowe in 1761. The two were representatives of the British merchants who wanted to change the Canton system of trade, which channeled all trade with the West through that southern port. Their efforts not only were futile but in fact led to stricter regulations on Western traders in China.¹²⁵ In this sense, the rebuff that George Macartney’s mission later received from the emperor in 1793 was merely a repetition of the institutionalized rhetoric that had been directed at the British in China more than three decades earlier.
Popularizing Chosŏn’s Status as Foreign Barbarians in Imperial Discourse
The prolonged construction of the Qing’s new identity and the reorientation of its political discourse vis-à-vis other countries was not just the result of the emperor’s personal activities or political motivations, imposed on the administration from the top down. Nor should they be understood purely as the outcome of implementing the political will of the Manchu court. Rather, Qing officials at the local level, from counties to prefectures to provinces, also contributed to this construction from the bottom up. As a result, in the eighteenth century, Chosŏn’s status as foreign barbarians was popularized within the norms of Qing foreign relations.
This point is illustrated by the Qing policy toward shipwrecked fishermen from Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, and other countries who were rescued by local Chinese officials along the coast. At least from the early Qianlong period, Qing officials called these victims barbarians who suffered from storms (Ch., zaofeng nanyi; Ma., edun de lasihibufi jobolon de tušaha i niyalma) and sent them to Beijing or to the nearest provincial capital, from whence they could return home with embassies from their countries. From the 1730s to the 1880s, the Qing archives were full of such reports of local officials looking after shipwrecked fishermen; reports concerning fishermen from Chosŏn were particularly prominent.¹²⁶ By accommodating these victims on humanitarian grounds, the Qing sought to highlight its policy of cherishing men from afar and to display the deep and outstanding merits of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., zhao tianchao rouyuan shenren; Ma., abkai gurun i goroki urse be gosire šumin gosin be iletulembi). This sort of rhetoric, aimed at justifying and consolidating the way of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao tizhi; Ma., abkai gurun i doro yoso), reached its peak in the Qianlong period.¹²⁷
Chosŏn again represented the best example of the way of the Heavenly Dynasty, a fact that permeated many aspects of Qing-Chosŏn contacts. For instance, in 1776, one thousand taels of silver belonging to a Korean mission were stolen by Chinese thieves near Mukden. Emperor Qianlong instructed the Manchu general of Mukden, Hūngšang (1718–81), to compensate the mission for its losses in order to uphold the way of our Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., he wo tianchao tizhi; Ma. musei amba gurun i doro de acanambi). The emperor emphasized in his Chinese edict that the Chosŏn are a people of foreign barbarians (Ch., Chaoxian nai waiyi zhi ren), further elucidating in the Manchu version of the edict that the people of the country of Chosŏn are a people of foreign barbarians (Ma., Coohiyan gurun i niyalma serengge, tulergi aiman i niyalma).¹²⁸ This case was not exceptional, and the wealth of similar cases indicates the maturation of the Qing’s Zongfan discourse.¹²⁹
Despite the harmonious imperial picture the Qing painted, its model fan was simultaneously creating an alternate vision. While Chosŏn continued publicly to display its obedience to the Qing, sending tributary missions to Beijing over and above what imperial edicts demanded, in private the Chosŏn king and his
officials, along with Chosŏn intellectuals, were reluctant to identify the Qing as the supreme representative of Chinese culture. This story is explored in the next chapter.
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3 JUSTIFYING THE CIVILIZED The Qing’s Contacts with Chosŏn, Annam, and Britain, 1762–1861 As Chosŏn carefully maintained its political subordination to the Qing on the surface, and the Manchu ruling house used this submission to reinforce the Qing’s centrality and Chineseness, Chosŏn simultaneously constructed its own Chineseness within its borders by depicting the Qing as barbarians in particular mo- ments. The civilized–barbarian discourse pervaded Chosŏn, nourishing a strong pro-Ming and anti-Qing attitude among the educated in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century. Chosŏn entered the contest for civilized status in a cultural sense, and its perennial missions to the Qing served this domestic construc- tion of identity. As the Qing was proclaiming Chineseness in the post-Ming era, Chosŏn, too, sought to establish itself as the exclusive legitimate successor to the Ming. In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, a group of Korean scholars who observed the Qing’s prosperity and the economic gap between the Qing and Chosŏn dared to voice their support for the Qing’s claim to civilized status. Their arguments counterbalanced the prevalent anti-Qing attitude among Korean scholars and helped Chosŏn cope with the paradox of the civilized–barbarian discourse in a practical sense. This chapter examines the interior aspects and function of the Zongfan order by showing how the Qing’s rule of “cherishing the men from afar” operated in the ritual protocol and presentations of diplomatic missions between the Qing, Chosŏn, and other countries from 1762 to 1861. The chapter discusses several cases of emissary exchanges between the Qing and Chosŏn against the background of the sharp reversal of the civilized–barbarian discourse that both sides exploited intensively for their own domestic politico-cultural legitimacy. It suggests that the Qing eventually prevailed over Chosŏn. By introducing Annam’s and Britain’s missions to China as a point of comparison for those from Chosŏn, the chapter further explores how the Manchu ruling house navigated the balance between the Chinese rhetoric commensurate with China’s claimed preeminence in the cosmopolitan world and the practical consequences of this superiority in bilateral com- munications. This balance illustrates the Qing state-craft and helps explain why, in the second half of the nineteenth century, both the Qing and Chosŏn, along with Vietnam and Ryukyu, encountered such tremendous difficulty in defining the nature of their relationship in accordance with the newly imported international law, a topic examined in part 2 of this book. Historical Memory of the Civilized: Chosŏn’s Anti-Manchu Mentality The Perception of a Barbarous Qing within Little China after 1644 With the irreversible downfall of the Ming in 1644, Chosŏn intensified its efforts to identify itself as the exclusive and genuine heir to Chinese civilization. In their daily training and practices, Korean intellectuals who were followers of Neo-Confucianism shared a consensus that the Manchu conquest of China proper in 1644 marked the “fall of the central civilized country” (K., Chunghwa hamnak).¹ In Chosŏn, numerous scholars used the regnal title of the last emperor of the Ming, Chongzhen, to date their personal letters and domestic documents. Their attitude was consolidated in the “Little China” discourse that emphasized the succes- sion of Confucian orthodox legitimacy (K., tot’ong) instead of denying explicitly that the Qing possessed political orthodox legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom. Thus, within its borders Chosŏn presented itself as the successor to Confucius, Mencius, and Zhu Xi after the demise of the Ming. On the Qing side, Chosŏn’s status as Little China was widely accepted by both ethnic Han and Manchu scholars. The Chinese officials and intelligentsia did not treat their Korean counterparts as barbarians, as they did many Europeans. On occasion, the Qing court explicitly appraised Chosŏn as “a country of rituals
and literature” (Ch., wenwu zhi bang; Ma., doro yoso i gurun), a statement also endorsed by many Chinese scholars of the Qing.² Yet when it came to locating Chosŏn within the multilevel structure of all-under-Heaven in the Qing’s political and cultural discourse, Chosŏn was inevitably designated a country of barbar- ians on China’s periphery. As this chapter shows, Korean scholars who visited Beijing had to face the challenge of reconciling their country’s putative barbarity with their conviction in its superior cultural pedigree. In late seventeenth-century Chosŏn, in particular during the reigns of King Hyojong and King Hyŏngjong, anti-Qing sentiment was widespread among intel- lectuals. Song Si-yŏl (1607–89), a leading scholar and King Hyojong’s mentor, zealously proposed a northern expedition (K., bukpŏl) against the Manchus in order to “recover the central plain” on behalf of the Ming.³ Song’s plan was never put into practice, but it won strong moral support from the court and from Confucian scholars and contributed to the rise of a Korean national identity in the post-Ming period when the country was struggling for a new episteme.⁴ Another scholar, Sin Yu-han (1681–1752), in a letter to a friend who was about to visit Beijing as a member of a tributary mission, claimed that “we are also Chinese” (K., uri yŏk Chunggukin) and that Chosŏn was “China”—a “China with Classic of Poetry and Book of Documents ” (K., sisŏ Chungguk) and a “China with [Chinese-style] clothes and belts” (K., ŭidae Chungguk). Sin went on to claim that since the fall of the Ming in 1644 China had not had a Son of Heaven, implying that political orthodox legitimacy also lay in Chosŏn, the successor to Kija (Jizi).⁵ The cases of Song and Sin reveal a pronounced victim mentality within the Korean ruling house and intellectual stratum after the humiliating Manchu invasions and the fall of the Ming. Highlighting Korea’s filial duty to the deposed Ming became an ideological tool to maintain Chosŏn’s domestic order and raise the morale of the learned class. On the one hand, the king presented himself as a loyal subordinate of the Qing for the sake of the political orthodox legitimacy grant- ed by the Qing; but on the other hand, he was the moral sponsor of the anti-Qing movement inside Chosŏn, seeking to capture the political orthodox legitimacy embedded in the connection between his rulership and his subjects. Like the Qing emperors, the Korean kings had to deal with grave challenges arising from the framework of the civilized–barbarian discourse. Against the background of this volatile balance, Chosŏn entered a more radical period of actively commemorating the “imperial Ming” during the reign of King Sukchong, when the Qing’s control over Chosŏn was loosened as the Kangxi emperor was preoccupied with suppressing the revolt of the Three Feudatories in the 1680s. In April 1704, on the sixtieth anniversary of Emperor Chongzhen’s suicide, the king established an altar near the palace in Hansŏng and performed a new ceremony to commemorate Chongzhen. Although it was the forty-third year of Kangxi, the king called the moment the “seventy-seventh year of Chongzhen,” setting the starting year to 1628, when Chongzhen ascended the throne. The king declared that the “imperial Ming” was the “owner of the civilized and the barbar- ians” (K., Hwa–I ju) but that the “northern barbarians”—that is, the Manchus—had taken the opportunity to “occupy our central plain” (K., kŏ a chungwŏn), with the result that the “rituals and clothes” (K., yeak ŭigwan)—the traditional metaphor for civilization—had become barbarous. Chosŏn, the king claimed, was the only place that still loyally worshipped the “old motherland” (K., koguk). Reciting these words at the ceremony, the king burst into tears. All of the officials around him wept too. Soon thereafter, in October of the same year, the king had a long discussion with several ministers about building a temple to Wanli, the Ming emperor who saved Chosŏn from the Japanese invasion in the 1590s. The ministers endorsed the king’s pro-Ming attitude but pointed out that it was inappropriate for a “vas- sal” to offer sacrifices to the “Son of Heaven,” so the king instead constructed a nine-floor altar and named it the Great Altar for Gratitude (K., Taebodan), where a state ceremony would be performed twice a year, in spring and autumn. The altar was completed in January 1705.⁶ Thereafter, Chosŏn continued to commemorate the Ming for another 190 years until 1895, when it declared independence from the Qing. The altar was permanently closed in 1908, three years after Chosŏn
became a protectorate of Japan and two years before it was annexed by Japan. Korean emissaries to Beijing continuously fed the popular antipathy toward the Qing in Chosŏn by providing firsthand accounts of their dealings with the bar- barous usurpers of the Ming. For these emissaries, the trip to Beijing was a journey for mourning the Ming, deprecating the Qing, and strengthening Chosŏn’s identity as Little China. As they reached various landmarks—the Yalu River, Fenghuang Gate, Liaoyang, the Korean compound in Mukden where Crown Prince So- hyŏn had been detained between 1637 and 1644, Shanhai Pass, and the Forbidden City in Beijing, where the Ming emperors had resided for centuries—the emis- saries often wrote poems lamenting the fall of the Ming. These poems became part of their journals, which were widely circulated in Chosŏn and were generically known as Yŏnhaengnok (The records of the journey to Beijing).⁷ From the second half of the eighteenth century, however, some Korean intellectuals, having witnessed the Qing’s prosperity on their journeys to Beijing and having engaged in extensive conversations with Han Chinese and Manchu scholars in Beijing, started to reconsider their entrenched view of the barbarous Qing. Disillusioned with Chosŏn’s self-proclaimed cultural superiority, these pundits recognized the Qing as a civilized country and called for Chosŏn to learn from Qing China for its own good, beyond the popular doctrine of “revering China and expelling the barbarians.” These scholars constituted the School of Northern Learning (K., Pukhak p’ae), focusing on “practical knowledge” (K., Sirhak). They successfully resumed contacts between the literati of Korea and those of China that had been suspended for more than 120 years since 1644. Among these scholars, three in particular stood out: Hong Tae-yong, Pak Che-ka (1750–1805), and Pak Chi-wŏn (1737–1805). Honoring the Great Ming: Hong Tae-yong’s Perception of the Qing Hong Tae-yong was born in Hansŏng in 1731 into Chosŏn’s ruling gentry and the hereditary class of yangban (lit. “two branches [of the ruling class]”), and he studied with Kim Wŏn-haeng (1702–72), a leading scholar of the time. In late 1765, when his uncle was appointed the secretary of the annual tributary mission to Beijing, Hong became affiliated with the mission as an officer of the emissaries’ junior relatives (K., chaje gungwan).⁸ Although Hong regarded the Qing as a bar- barous country, he was excited about the trip and was eager to exchange ideas with his Chinese counterparts. After arriving in Beijing in early 1766, Hong put al- most all his time and energy into getting to know Chinese scholars, mainly through written conversations (K., p’iltam, “conversing by writing Chinese char- acters”). These dialogues led him to conclude that the Qing, no matter how barbarous in Chosŏn’s eyes, was indeed the civilized Middle Kingdom, whereas Chosŏn, no matter how superior in its own mind, nonetheless fell into the category of barbarians. Hong, like other Koreans, was extremely proud of Chosŏn’s fashion of Ming-style clothes and hats and disparaged the Manchu hairstyle and robes. His choice of dress signaled that he maintained the true way of Chinese culture. In his conversations with Chinese intellectuals in the first weeks of his stay in Beijing, Hong frequently used his clothing to highlight Chosŏn’s cultural superiority over the Qing.⁹ Shortly thereafter, however, Hong entered into dialogue with other Chinese intellectuals, in particular Yan Cheng and Pan Tingyun (1743–?), and these highly trained scholars dramatically changed his view of the Qing. Yan and Pan, both Han Chinese, were from Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province, where they had successfully passed the imperial civil-service examinations and won the title of Juren (a qualified graduate at the provincial level). They were determined to pass the last round of imperial exams in Beijing to realize their dream of serving their country as officials. To enhance their communications with Hong, they shared with him their provincial exam essays. In the first conversation among Hong, Yan, Pan, and their Korean and Chinese peers, another Korean, Kim P’yŏng-jung, asked Pan why he had said in his exam essay that people should worship only the Zhou Dynasty—a statement that, Kim felt, could be seen as an expression of nostalgia for the deposed Ming and as an act of defiance against the Manchus. Pan explained that his words referred to the “central civilized country,” which was the “patriarch for myriad countries” (Ch., wanguo suozong), and
he emphasized that the current Son of Heaven, the Qianlong emperor, was so great that all subjects should show him obedience and respect. Worshipping the Zhou, Pan concluded, was akin to worshipping the current dynasty. Hong, for the first time in his life, heard the Qing called the central civilized country. Seeing Pan’s response as a consequence of the sensitive Manchu–Han Chinese ethnic relationship, Hong disregarded his claim and instead responded by highlighting Chosŏn’s identity as Little China. But by the end of the conversation, the two sides had found common ground in celebrating the Qing conceit that “all-under- Heav- is one unified family” (Ch., tianxia yijia).¹⁰ Hong did not reveal his sense of cultural superiority until his second conversation with Yan and Pan at the Korean residence. The conversation included a long discussion about clothes and hats, in which the Korean hosts and the Chinese guests articulated their respective understandings of the Ming-Qing transition and the Qing’s position in Chinese history. Hong emphasized several times that Koreans wore Ming-style garments, which in China by this time were worn only on the opera stage. Hong indicated that the garments served as a visible reminder of the “dignified manner of Han Chinese officials” (Ch., hanguan weiyi). The Ko- rean hosts asked Pan and Yan critical questions regarding the Manchu hair-style, clothes, and hats, and about the Ming’s stories. Pan, who was in charge of recording the conversation, answered their questions carefully and praised the Qing volubly.¹¹ Pan later became an official in Beijing and never gave Hong the copies of their correspondence that Hong had requested after returning to Hansŏng, although the two maintained a good relationship.¹² In another long conversation with Yan, Hong again used Chosŏn’s style of dress to criticize the Qing and mourn the Ming. Hong told Yan he felt extremely sad that China had lost itself with its adoption of Manchu fashions in hair and clothes and that China’s situation was in his view even worse than it had been under the Jin and Yuan Dynasties. In comparison, Hong proudly noted Chosŏn’s loyalty to the Ming, which he called the “parent nation.” Yan, however, argued that in 1644 the Qing had legitimately become the ruler of the country by defeating the rebels and defending and enacting justice. At the end of the conversation, Hong acknowledged that whereas the Ming had exploited his country, the Qing was much more generous toward Chosŏn.¹³ Hong realized that Han Chinese scholars identified the Qing both as a legitimate successor to the Ming in the political sense and as a legitimate heir to Confucianism in the cultural sense. Although the Han Chinese had adopted the Manchu queue and clothes, Hong concluded, they were still the “offspring of the old home of the central civilized country” (K., Chunghwa koga chi ye). By contrast, Hong conceded that although Koreans took pride in their Ming-style dress, on a fundamental level they still belonged to the “barbarians by the sea.” By arguing that “the civilized and the barbarians are the same,” he acknowledged the Qing’s civilized status.¹⁴ Hong returned to Chosŏn with a new perception of Qing China, and he made an immense contribution to the School of Northern Learning. Learning from the North: The Korean Visitors’ New Tone toward the Qing Revisiting the Civilized–Barbarian Discourse: Pak Che-ka’s Visit to Beijing After Hong returned to Hansŏng in 1766, his strong relationships with Pan, Yan, and other Chinese friends, and his continuous correspondence with them, swiftly became legend among his fellow scholars in Chosŏn. One of them was Pak Che-ka, born in 1750 in Hansŏng, where his father served as a minister at the court. Because his mother was a concubine, Pak was not allowed to take the civil-service examinations, but he won fame as a poet when he was young and joined a wide aristocratic and intellectual social network, through which he became acquainted with Hong. Pak was fascinated by the contacts between Hong and Chinese scholars and hoped to visit Beijing himself. His opportunity came in the spring of 1778, when the emissary Ch’ae Che-gong (1720–99) invited Pak and another fa- mous young scholar, Yi Tŏng-mu (1741–93), to join him on a tributary mission to Beijing. This trip helped transform Pak into a leading proponent of Sirhak—“practical knowledge.”
In Beijing Pak exchanged poems or conducted written conversations with more than fifty famous Han Chinese and Manchu scholars, almost all of them high- ranking officials at court, including Ji Yun (1724–1805), Pan Tingyun, Tiyeboo (1752–1824), and Fengšen Yendehe (1775–1810). He also conversed with a Muslim prince from Central Asia. After returning to Chosŏn, he spent three months composing a treatise entitled “Discussions on Northern Learning” (K., Pukhak ŭi), in which he discussed what Chosŏn could learn from the Qing in matters ranging from the construction of bridges, roads, ships, and cities to the production of porcelain, paper, bows, and brushes, as well as language and medicine.¹⁵ On each of these matters and many others, Pak described how advanced the Qing was, then compared it to Chosŏn. He suggested that it was Chosŏn’s self-imposed isolation, informed by the civilized–barbarian discourse, that prevented the country from perceiving the Qing’s accomplishments and embracing the Qing’s sophisticated practical skills. For example, he pointed out that Korean emissaries to Bei- jing did not directly contact local Chinese officials on their journey from Fenghuang Gate to Beijing but rather commissioned Korean interpreters to do so, which caused much inconvenience. Pak passionately urged his fellow scholars to study the Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, and Japanese languages. Proposals such as this one came very close to calling for a comprehensive reform of Chosŏn’s daily practices and statecraft. At the end of his treatise, Pak wrote a short piece under the title “On Worshipping the Zhou” (K., Chonju non), addressing Chosŏn’s understanding of the Qing based on the civilized–barbarian discourse. Pak followed the popular anti-Qing trend in acknowledging that the Qing were among the barbarians, but he critically pointed out that Chosŏn could nonetheless learn from the Qing in many aspects. Otherwise, Pak warned, Chosŏn could neither expel “China’s barbarians” nor transform the “eastern country’s barbarians.” “If we want to expel the barbarians,” Pak stated, “we had better know who the barbarians are first.” Pak stressed that it would not be too late for Chosŏn to seek revenge for the Ming’s demise after first carefully learning from the Qing for twenty years. Pak followed this piece with “Debate on Northern Learning” (K., Pukhak pyŏl), in which he justified his call to learn from the Qing on the basis of Neo-Confucian principles. He divided those Korean scholars who denigrated the Qing while acclaiming Chosŏn into three groups: the “lower savants” (K., hasa), focused on grains and foods; the “middle sa- vants” (K., chongsa), who were concerned with literature; and the “upper savants” (K., sangsa), who concentrated on Neo-Confucian principles. Pak argued that Chosŏn’s perception of Qing China was based on woefully incomplete knowledge of it and that Chosŏn was in fact underdeveloped compared to the prosperous Qing. Citing Zhu Xi, Pak expressed a wish that Chosŏn had more people who truly understood the principles as he did.¹⁶ Pak’s proposal that Chosŏn learn from the Qing before it fought against the Qing bore a striking resemblance to the strategy of “learning the superior techniques of the barbarians to constrain the bar- barians” (Ch., shiyi changji yi zhiyi) put forward by the Chinese scholar Wei Yuan (1794–1857) in the 1840s, although Wei’s “barbarians” referred to Europeans. Pak’s acknowledgment that the Qing was the civilized country disillusioned many of his fellow scholars. For those who had never seen the Qing, Pak described a society prosperous beyond their imaginations. Following Hong, Pak constructed a new image of the Qing, one the upper savants were reluctant to accept. Ch’ae Che-gong, the emissary who had invited Pak to Beijing, was one such upper savant. Ch’ae mourned the fall of the Ming and called the Manchu general of Fenghuang Gate “barbarous.” When he arrived in Beijing and saw the artificial hill next to the Forbidden City on which Chongzhen had committed suicide in 1644, Ch’ae composed a poem commemorating the Ming. He lamented that Chinese children on the street jeered at his Ming-style clothing. After the summer solstice rituals at the Temple of Earth, the Qianlong emperor praised the Korean mission for the best ritual performance among the outer fan. Ch’ae interpreted this as evidence that the Manchu emperor, whom he sometimes referred to as “khan,” tacitly approved of the “Han Chinese clothes and hats” that he and the other Korean visitors wore.¹⁷ When he returned to Chosŏn, Ch’ae collected the poems he had written on the trip into an anthology entitled Records of Enduring Contempt and Insults (K., Ham’in nok). In stark contrast, Korean scholars at the middle and lower levels found Pak’s proposal to “use techniques to benefit peo- ple’s livelihoods” (K., iyong husaeng) very attractive. Seeking to avoid pedanticism, these scholars contributed to the remarkable rise and dissemination of
northern learning. One of them was Pak Chi-wŏn. Reenvisioning the Barbarous Qing: Pak Chi-wŏn’s Trip to Beijing Pak Chi-wŏn was also of an aristocratic yangban background. In 1780, his cousin Pak Myŏng-wŏn (1725–90) was appointed the emissary to Beijing for Emperor Qianlong’s seventieth birthday, providing Pak Chi-wŏn an opportunity for “tourism in the upper country.” Shocked by the Qing’s wealth, evident everywhere from small towns on the Sino-Korean border to the metropolitan areas of Mukden and Beijing, Pak realized that the stereotypical perception of the Qing among the meritocracy of Chosŏn had become an obstacle to progress. Pak found it difficult to overcome the prejudices rooted in the hegemonic assumption of the Qing’s barbarity, although he was deeply influenced by Hong and had an open mind. In his Rehe Diary (K., Yŏlha ilgi), Pak frequently struggled with the moral correctness of the pro-Ming, anti-Qing principles, on the one hand, and his desire to learn from the Qing, on the other. He was uncomfortable, even pained, by any admission of the achievements of the Qing, which implied that the Qing was civilized but Chosŏn was not, just as Pak Che-ka had painfully suggested. Pak Chi-wŏn’s astonishment began on the first day of his journey, when he reached Fenghuang Gate and saw the small town inside the fence. Pak noticed that the houses, walls, doors, and streets of the town were well designed and maintained, and that the town bore no “indication of inferior rural style.” He realized that a scene like this at the “eastern end” of the Qing’s territory could only portend still more prosperous vistas in the inner reaches of the empire. How could the Manchu barbarians manage the land so efficiently, in such an impressive way, and to such a significant degree of control? Pak felt so unsettled that he wanted to return to Hansŏng. He asked his private servant, Chang Bok, “How would it be if you were born in China?” Chang, an illiterate boy, immediately answered, “China is barbarian [K., Chungguk ho ya], so I would not want to be born in China.”¹⁸ The boy’s answer was exactly the reassurance his master needed. It also reflects the prevalence among Koreans of the perception of the Qing as barbarians. Nevertheless, Pak realized that his journey would not be as peaceful as he had wished. Indeed, after he entered Fenghuang Gate, Pak’s preconceptions about the barbarous Qing crumbled a little more each day. As he passed by Liaoyang, Mukden, and many small towns and villages, Pak was confronted by beautiful buildings, thriving markets, and flourishing urban and rural communities where local civil- ians and officials treated him in a friendly manner. He enjoyed written conversations with Han Chinese and Manchu scholars and officials and appreciated local scenery and historical sites. In the course of these experiences, the charge that the Qing was barbarous completely vanished from Pak’s diary. Rather, Pak began to discern a gap between himself and his Chinese counterparts in practical terms that had been caused by Chosŏn’s cultural isolation from the Qing after 1644. His experience in two villages illustrates this point vividly. When Pak visited a pawnshop in a village called Xinmin, he was invited by the owner to write some Chinese characters as an honorable gift. Pak recalled that he had seen four big characters denoting “exceeding frost, surpassing snow” (Ch., qishuang saixue) on the front doors of some shops in Mukden and Liaoyang, so he wrote these down, assuming that they must mean that a businessman’s heart should be as pure as frost and snow. However, the four characters were actually a metaphor for the high quality of flour. The confused shop owner shook his head and murmured that the characters were not at all related to his business. Pak left the store in anger. The next day, when he camped at Xiaoheishan Village, he wrote the same four characters for a jewelry shop owner. Just as puzzled as the Xin- min merchant had been, the jeweler said, “I am selling women’s jewelry, not flour, so why did you write these characters for me?” Pak, suddenly aware of the char- acters’ actual meaning, overcame his embarrassment and calmly wrote other characters that won him high praise from the shop owner.¹⁹ Frustrated by this episode, Pak took a critical look at Chosŏn’s perception of the Qing and put forward the idea of “using techniques to benefit people’s liveli- hoods” by comparing different attitudes toward the Qing among his fellow Korean intellectuals. Like Pak Che-ka, he divided Korean scholars into upper savants, middle savants, and lower savants. He began with a scenario in which Korean people who had never visited the Qing would ask those returning from Beijing
about the impressive things they had observed on their journey. According to Pak, whereas many visitors would list without hesitation such things as the White Pagoda in Liaodong, Chinese markets, and Shanhai Pass, the upper savants would instead insist that “nothing is impressive” because the people in China, from the Son of Heaven to the common subjects, were “barbarians as long as they shaved their foreheads.” Since “barbarians are dogs and sheep,” nothing of theirs was worth praising. The middle savants would also argue that “the mountains and lands became barbarous and nothing over there is impressive until we lead a hundred thousand troops to cross Shanhai Pass to recover China.” Identifying himself as one of the lower savants who shared with the upper and middle savants the belief in “revering China and expelling the barbarians,” Pak nevertheless passionately called on his colleagues to “learn the good ways and useful systems [of the Qing] as long as they benefit our people and country, even if they are created by barbarians.” He argued, “If we want to expel the barbarians, we should learn all the good Chinese systems to change ours, after which we might be able to say that China has nothing impressive.”²⁰ Pak tried to separate recognition of the Qing’s superior practical techniques from the cultural and moral charges against the Qing. Yet this approach, which meant blurring the boundaries between civi- lized and barbarian, was a double-edged sword not only for himself but also for the general moral foundation of his country. On August 30, 1780, when Pak arrived in Beijing, he was stunned by the grandness of the splendid metropolis. In his diary, for the first time, he embraced the Qing regnal title to express the date—“the first day of the eighth month of the forty-fifth year of Qianlong”—thus incorporating himself into the Zongfan mindset by identifying the Qing as the center of the world. On that day, Pak completely overlooked the fact that he was in a country of “barbarians.”²¹ Identifying Chosŏn as a Loyal Subordinate of the Qing: Pak Chi-wŏn at Rehe When Pak Chi-wŏn and his fellow Koreans arrived in Beijing, they learned that the emperor had moved to the summer palace at Rehe, where the sixth Panchen Er- deni (1738–80) and Mongol princes would convene to celebrate the imperial birthday on September 11. On September 2, the emperor instructed the Ministry of Rites to ask the Korean emissaries to visit Rehe and ordered a minister of the Grand Council (Ch., Junjichu) to Beijing to welcome them, an act of “extraordinary imperial benevolence.” The Koreans immediately organized a special ad hoc team to travel to Rehe, to which Pak Chi-wŏn was attached. Five days later, the group arrived at Rehe, where it quickly became involved in subtle conflicts with the Chinese side. The emperor and his officials were keen to showcase Chosŏn’s sub- servience as a model outer fan, but the Koreans were equally keen to avoid this role, given their ambivalence about the Qing. However, Chosŏn’s subordinate position in the bilateral framework meant that the emissaries had few alternatives. The first incident that revealed this tension took place upon the emissaries’ arrival, when the emperor informed the emissaries that they would stand at the end of the right wing of China’s second-rank civil officials during the grand ceremony on the celebration day. This was a “special and unprecedented grace” from the emperor, because the ritual code generally required the emissaries to stand at the end of the left wing of civil officials. The ministers of the Ministry of Rites asked the emissaries to submit a memorial showing their sincere appreciation. The emissaries hesitated, as it would have been inappropriate to do so without the king’s authorization, but the ministers pushed them to draft the memorial. Pak commented that as the aged emperor became more suspicious, the ministers had to work harder to meet his wishes.²² On a subsequent occasion, the emperor sent a minister of the Grand Council to inquire whether the two emissaries would like to visit “the saintly monk from the western area” (Ch., xifan shengseng), referring to the Panchen Erdeni. The Koreans replied that they never stopped communicating with “people of China” (K., Chungguk insa), but that they did not dare to communicate with “people of other countries” (K., taguk in). Undeterred, the emperor ordered the emissaries to visit the lama at his monastery. At the monastery, the communications between the Korean emissaries and the Panchen Erdeni followed a labyrinthine path: the Erdeni spoke to the Mongol prince next to him, who relayed the message to the minister of the Grand Council, who forwarded it to the Qing interpreter, who passed it to
the interpreter from Chosŏn, who finally translated the words into Korean for the emissaries. The conversation involved Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, Chinese, and Korean, highlighting the multiethnic and multicultural nature of the unified empire, but the extent to which the Panchen Erdeni and the Korean emissaries could actually understand each other and grasp the political meanings behind the words used remains unclear. Acting on the guidance of the minister of the Grand Council, the emissaries, who were as stiff as “clay dolls and wooden puppets,” presented the Panchen Erdeni with silk handkerchiefs, and the Panchen Er- deni gave the Koreans three small bronze figurines of the Buddha and some Hada, Pulu, and Tibetan incense in return. Since the figurines contravened Confucian beliefs, the emissaries traded them for silver that they then distributed among their servants instead of bringing the figurines back to Chosŏn.²³ Behind the envoys’ reluctance to visit the Panchen Erdeni was the problem of the ritual of kowtow: the Korean emissaries refused to perform the ceremony to the lama. Pak later defended their behavior in a written conversation with a Manchu official: “Our humble country is in the same family with the big country, and there is no difference between inside and outside between us. Yet the lama is a man of the western area, so how could our envoys dare go and visit him? There is a rule that ‘subordinates have no right to conduct diplomacy’ [K., insin mu oegyo].”²⁴ Chosŏn was demonstrating its loyalty as China’s fan and subordinate. The principle that a subordinate country had no right to conduct diplomacy would be emphasized by the king of Chosŏn again and again when Western states tried to open direct lines of contact with Chosŏn between the 1830s and the 1870s. Their overtures created a tremendous and insurmountable dilemma for the scholars of Chosŏn. Although they viewed the Qing as a barbarous place and themselves as the civilized successors of the Ming within a Chosŏn-centric cultural world, as soon as another political entity approached Chosŏn, they would identify the Qing as China and hew to the Qing’s Zongfan line to embrace their unique role as the representatives of the men from afar cherished by China.²⁵ At a banquet held for representatives of the Qing’s subordinates and attended by the Panchen Erdeni, Mongol princes from Mongolia, Muslim princes from Xinjiang, emissaries from Chosŏn, and indigenous chiefs from southwestern China, the emperor lauded Chosŏn’s fealty, declaring to those gathered at the ban- quet that “Chosŏn has been serving as a fan for generations and has always been loyal. It pays its annual tribute on time, and that is truly worth praising.” The em- peror added, “We, the monarch and the subordinates, trust each other fully and belong to the same family inside and outside China, so we should not bother our- selves with these overelaborate rituals.” He then issued an edict according to which Chosŏn needed to present only an annual tribute; all other tributes, along with humble memorials, would be permanently canceled, reflecting the Qing’s policy of “cherishing men from afar with substantial measures rather than rhetoric” (Ch., rouhui yuanren, yishi bu yiwen).²⁶ Again, the Korean emissaries served as the typical men from afar for the purposes of imperial discourse extolling the Qing’s civilization and centrality. After returning home, Pak Chi-wŏn, like Pak Che-ka before him, called on his fellow scholars to learn from the Qing. In 1781 he wrote a foreword to Pak Cheka’s “Discussions on Northern Learning,” in which he reiterated that Chosŏn should abandon its incorrect assumptions about the Qing.²⁷ As other Korean scholars followed in Pak’s footsteps and made their own visits to Beijing, the Koreans’ perceptions about the Ming and the Qing continued to evolve. The Way of the Heavenly Dynasty: The Qing and the Tributary Missions of 1790 and 1793 The Imperial Grand Banquet and the Korean Mission of 1790 The Chosŏn meritocracy increasingly realized that it could not restore the Ming in China, and this recognition helped normalize its service to the Qing under the rubric of “serving the great.” Compared to Pak Che-ka in 1778 and Pak Chi-wŏn in 1780, Sŏ Ho-su (1736–99), who visited Rehe as an associate envoy to celebrate Emperor Qianlong’s eightieth birthday in 1790, described Chosŏn’s Zongfan contacts with the Qing in very moderate terms. The mission, led by envoy Hwang
In-jŏm (?–1802), associate envoy Sŏ, and secretary Yi Paek-hyŏng (1737–?), left Hansŏng on July 9 and two weeks later arrived at Ŭiju, where it could not cross the Yalu River because of flooding. During his sojourn in Ŭiju, Sŏ commented in one of his poems that “the Yalu River is the boundary between the civilized and the barbarians” (K., Hwa–I bungye), but in his diary he used the Qing’s regnal title for the date.²⁸ The Qianlong emperor was concerned about the time it would take for the Koreans to reach the celebration at Rehe. As the representatives of the Qing’s outer and inner fan convened again at Rehe, the emperor saw the attendance of Chosŏn’s emissaries as an indispensable part of the “system,” “way,” or “funda- mentals” (Ch., tizhi) of the big family. On August 1, the Korean emissaries, still in Ŭiju, received an official note from the Ministry of Rites in Beijing via the Manchu general of Mukden. The message had traveled 500 li (about 155 miles) per day, one of the fastest rates possible for the Qing mail system. The ministry in- structed the Koreans to head directly to Rehe, as they needed to arrive by August 19, the same deadline that the emperor had set for the king of Annam and the emissaries of Lanchang and Burma. When the mission crossed the river the next day, a second note from Beijing arrived, urging the envoys to meet the deadline because Chosŏn’s presence was “particularly crucial to the system” (Ch., shu yu tizhi youguan). They subsequently received a third note in a completely different tone, saying that it would be fine if the mission could not reach Rehe in time. The emissaries, perceiving the reversal as a subtle way of cherishing the men from afar, immediately organized a special team that would head directly for Rehe with humble palace memorials and selected tributes, while the rest of the mission would go to Beijing as planned. Covering more than 260 miles after passing Mukden, the emissaries reached Rehe on August 24 and learned that the emperor had changed the date of the grand banquet to August 25 to accommodate Chosŏn’s mission. The Mongol and Muslim princes, the emissaries of Burma and Lanchang, the indigenous chiefs of Taiwan, and the king of Annam had all ar- rived several days earlier.²⁹ The emperor’s decision conveyed eloquently that Chosŏn’s position was irreplaceable in the Qing-centric world. The following day, the Ministry of Rites guided Chosŏn’s emissaries to the imperial palace for an audience with the Qianlong emperor. After asking for the emissaries’ names and ranks, the emperor instructed them to attend the grand banquet and to watch the Peking opera. In further illustration of Chosŏn’s prom- inent status, the Korean emissaries were arranged in first position in the wing of the “emissaries of other countries,” while those of Annam were in second posi- tion, those of Lanchang in third, those of Burma in fourth, and the indigenous chiefs in fifth. In addition, Chosŏn’s well-written humble palace memorials were considered exemplary. Hešen (1750–99), the most influential Manchu minister in the Grand Council, showed one of the Korean memorials to the king of Annam, Nguyễn Huệ, and commented, “Chosŏn serves the great in such a good manner that it is the model for other fan .” The Vietnamese king inspected the memo- rial several times and praised it highly.³⁰ With the move of the grand meeting from Rehe to Beijing in early September, the emissaries of Chosŏn retained their prominent role in all ritual performances in the palaces of Yuan-Ming-Yuan and the Forbidden City. The emperor frequently granted the emissaries audiences, invited them to watch operas, treated them to Manchu banquets, and gave them gifts. On October 11 the Korean mission finally left Beijing for their homeland after a successful stay. Local Banquets and the Vietnamese Mission in 1790 The Qing expected the tributary emissaries from its other fan to accept and follow the imperial etiquette as readily as those from Chosŏn did. Any deviation from the prescribed practices would not only cause conflict between the Qing and the specific fan but also result in internal tension between the Qing monarch and his local officials. Such an instance occurred during the visit to Beijing of the king of Annam, Nguyễn Huệ, in 1790. Annam experienced a turbulent period toward the end of the eighteenth century, and the Qing was drawn into the turmoil. In 1771, in what was called the Tây- so’n Rebellion, Nguyễn Huệ and his two brothers overthrew the Nguyễn family, which controlled the south of Vietnam, and restored the later Lê Dynasty
(1428–1788). In 1788, worried about Nguyễn’s growing power, the young king, Lê Duy Kỳ (1765–93), fled the capital. At Lê’s request, Emperor Qianlong sent troops to Annam, which had been the Qing’s “outer fan for more than one hundred years.” Under the command of the governor-general of Liangguang, Sun Shiyi (1720–96), the Chinese army quickly occupied Hanoi and restored the government of Lê Duy Kỳ. But the Chinese forces were defeated in an unexpected attack by Nguyễn in January 1789, and Lê fled Hanoi again. Emperor Qianlong appointed his favorite Manchu general, Fuk’anggan (1753–96), who had just suppressed a rebellion in Taiwan, to replace Sun and organize a counterattack. However, the emperor was not interested in conquering Vietnam through a large-scale war, and he instructed Fuk’anggan and Sun to be receptive to any attempts by Nguyễn to sue for peace. The emperor reviewed China’s frustrating experience with “con- verting Vietnam into China’s prefectures and counties” (Ch., junxian qi di) in pre-Qing history and stressed that the Qing would not “integrate Annam into China’s map and register” (Ch., shouru bantu) by imitating the case of Xinjiang, where the court had had to dispatch numerous officials to manage the land after the mili- tary conquest, in particular after the war with the Zunghar Mongols.³¹ Qing policymakers thus clearly understood that policies were to be applied flexibly in dif- ferent parts of the Qing frontier. As it turned out, Nguyễn was not ready for another fight with the Qing either, so in the same month he presented Sun with “a humble palace memorial” to express his willingness to become a subordinate of the “Heavenly Dynasty,” marking the end of the conflict on the battlefield. Recognizing the motivation behind Nguyễn’s act of submission to the Qing, Qianlong issued an edict on May 15, declaring that he would not use force against the country for the sake of the “barbarian people of Annam.” Believing that “Heaven has abandoned the Lê,” the emperor settled the Lê family and its loyal fol- lowers in the city of Guilin in Guangxi, a Chinese province bordering Vietnam.³² This arrangement signaled that the Qing was preparing to support a new Viet- namese regime. To that end, the emperor indicated that he might invest Nguyễn as king if Nguyễn visited Beijing in person. This, according to the emperor, was precisely how he managed foreign barbarians—with mercy and discipline. The emperor also confirmed that Lê and his followers would not be sent back to Annam for restoration, and to prove his intentions he ordered them to cut their hair according to the Qing style and to wear Qing clothes. In Guilin, Fuk’anggan and Sun Shiyi told the desperate young king, “You are in the land of the central civilized country [Ch., Zhonghua zhi tu], so you should follow China’s system [Ch., Zhongguo zhi zhi] and change your hairstyle and clothes.”³³ As the manager of communications at the border, Fuk’anggan understood the mood of his aging and vainglorious master in Beijing, so he impressed on the emperor Nguyễn’s willingness to visit Beijing. In August the emperor quickly invested Nguyễn as the new king in order to provide him with the necessary ortho- dox legitimacy to govern and stabilize Annam domestically. In the book of investiture, the emperor emphasized the importance of the principle of “serving the great” on the part of an outer fan and that of “cherishing the small” on the part of China, highlighting the same ideological reciprocity that existed between Chosŏn and the Qing. The emperor took four steps to welcome the new king to Beijing. First, he instructed the Grand Secretariat and the Ministry of Rites to cre- ate new “guest-host rituals” (Ch., binzhu zhi li) between the king and the Qing’s governors-general and governors. He also endowed the king with a golden belt that was reserved for the Qing’s “royal vassals” (Ch., Zongfan).³⁴ Second, he moved the dethroned Lê to Beijing and appointed him a hereditary major in the Han Eight Banners. The 376 followers who had accompanied Lê were registered with the banner household system, and many were moved to Jiangnan, Zhejiang, Sichuan, and other provinces. Third, the emperor allowed the new Nguyễn regime to pick up their Chinese calendar books every year from the governor of Guangxi instead of traveling to Beijing for them. And fourth, he promised to open a border market after Nguyễn had visited Beijing, in recognition of the idea that “the barbarian people of that country are all loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty.” All of these measures were aimed at encouraging Nguyễn’s “sincerity in transforming into a subordinate of the civilized” (Ch., xianghua zhi cheng).³⁵ On May 26, 1790, the king and his mission of 150 members reached the Qing border, where he performed the highest level of kowtow to the imperial edicts and
gifts.³⁶ Fuk’anggan then accompanied Nguyễn to Rehe, passing through Guangxi, Guangdong, Hunan, Jiangxi, Hubei, Henan, and Zhili Provinces. In early June the mission arrived in the port of Guangzhou, and the “Western barbarians” of the Cohongs (referring to local factories through which the Western merchants traded with the Chinese side) gathered to witness the homage paid to the Qing by the king of an outer fan.³⁷ Two months later the Qing court invested Nguyễn’s son as crown prince, and the emperor applauded the father-son relationship between the emperor and Nguyễn. Following the precedents set by his reception of the king of Chosŏn and the Mongol khan of Korcin, the emperor dispatched a minister from the Ministry of Rites to welcome the king to a tea ceremony at Liangx- iang, a few miles south of Beijing. The practice of the policy of cherishing the men from afar went smoothly until a report from Rehe in late July made the emperor uncomfortable. The officials there sent word that they had received an unofficial note (Ch., chuandan) saying that the daily cost of entertaining and accommodating the Vietnamese mission in Jiangxi was around four thousand taels of silver—an astounding sum. The officials were worried that it would be inappropriate for them to host the mission with less luxury once it reached Rehe, but they could only work with the funds they had available. The emperor, too, was shocked by the cost, as he had treated Mongol princes and emissaries of other countries to annual banquets for less than one thousand taels. An expense of 4,000 taels per day meant that the total amount spent on the king and his entourage would reach 0.8 million taels during their two-hundred-day sojourn in China. Believing that this issue “deeply concerned the way of the Heavenly Dynasty,” the emperor lectured his officials that “the great Heavenly Dynasty should not welcome one or two subordinates from the remote lands in a luxurious way.” In addition, said the emperor, if the king were entertained too lavishly in the prov- inces, he would not sufficiently appreciate the imperial grace when treated with less opulence in Rehe. Chosŏn’s missions illustrated the emperor’s point. The Koreans prepared their own meals at each transfer station, but once they arrived in Beijing or Rehe, their daily logistics were entirely taken over by Qing personnel and the emissaries were hosted in a sumptuous manner. This substantial difference in hospitality between the provinces and Beijing created exactly the effect that the emperor sought. The danger posed by the luxurious treatment of Annam’s emissaries along their route lay in its potential to undermine the spectacle of impe- rial generosity that the emperor, informed by the Chosŏn model, wished to present at the mission’s final destination. Thus, the emperor instructed the provincial authorities in Jiangxi, Hubei, Henan, and Zhili to tone down the extravagance of their receptions, as this was the only way that “the mean between abundance and scarcity” (Ch., fengjian shizhong) could be realized. It was the first time in the Qianlong period that the emperor gave orders to temper the level of luxury in enter- taining foreign dignitaries.³⁸ The event created an opportunity for the emperor to discipline his officials. He listed two possible reasons for the astonishing costs: either local officials delib- erately spent too much in order to seek profitable reimbursement from the imperial coffers in the future, or the Chinese escorts extorted too much money from the provinces they passed through. Either possibility could damage the “way of the Heavenly Dynasty.” The emperor ordered governors in Guangdong, Jiangxi, Hubei, Anhui, and Zhili to investigate how the four-thousand-tael figure had come about. None of the officials claimed responsibility, but the emperor insisted that the origin of the unofficial note be identified and suggested it might have come from Zhili. Liang Kentang (1715–1802), the governor-general of Zhili, immedi- ately reported that the note was wrongly printed in his province. The emperor condemned Liang and closed the case, but he did not punish Liang, who was appar- ently the scapegoat of the emperor’s face-saving inquiry.³⁹ When the mission from Annam arrived in Rehe on August 20, 1790, Nguyễn was granted an imperial audience together with the indigenous chiefs of south- western China and Taiwan, the khan of Kazak, the princes of Mongolia and the Muslim tributaries, and the emissaries of Burma and Lanchang. The emperor be- stowed official Qing robes on the king and his followers. On August 25, as described in the previous section, Chosŏn’s bedraggled emissaries reached Rehe, and
all the men from afar could finally convene at the imperial hall for the grand banquet. There and later in Beijing, the envoys from the Qing’s periphery kowtowed to their shared Son of Heaven in China. What Qianlong saw and experienced was indeed a harmonious picture of the Heavenly Dynasty. The Way of the Heavenly Dynasty: The British Mission in 1793 Three years later, the emperor would receive a very different group of men from afar. This mission came from England, known in China as Yingjili. In September 1792 Lord Macartney (1737–1806) left Portsmouth for China to seek greater commercial opportunities in the name of celebrating Qianlong’s birthday. In July 1793 the mission reached Dagu Harbor in Tianjin and was welcomed by Liang Kentang and by Zhengrui, the salt tax commissioner of Changlu. On September 14 Macartney and his assistants, who were called “British tributary emissaries” (Ch., Yingjili guo gongshi), were granted an audience with Qianlong at Rehe, after which the mission was sent back to Guangzhou via the overland route. Scholars have described the visit as an epoch-making collision of two different cultural, social, and imperial systems and as the beginning of the East-West encounter that eventually led to the Opium War of 1839–42.⁴⁰ Rather than reviewing the entire event, which has been well examined, this section focuses on the connection between the British mission and the legacy of Annam’s mission in 1790 against the historical backdrop of the Qing’s institutional barbarianization of all other countries, including Britain. Until 1793 the Qing did not have a clear sense of the British presence in India and failed to connect the British activities on the Tibetan frontier with those in India.⁴¹ The Qing court saw the British embassy of 1793 as a tributary mission from an outer fan, so all bilateral contacts had to be conducted in accordance with imperial codes just like those that applied to Chosŏn, Annam, and Ryukyu. This time, the emperor made a point of instructing his local officials to treat the “for- eign barbarians” of the British tributary mission appropriately “between abundance and scarcity.” Such treatment, said the emperor, would befit “the way” of the “upper country” and ensure that the “men from afar” would not disdain China. Of the officials involved in hosting the mission, Liang Kentang, still smarting from the scandal of the overly extravagant hospitality shown to Annam in 1790, was perhaps the only one who thoroughly understood what the emperor meant. The emperor, too, might have taken the precedent of Annam as a standard for testing his officials. The game between the emperor and his officials was back on. In Au- gust, after learning that Zhejiang, Shandong, and Tianjin had lavished food on the British envoys, the emperor admonished his officials on the proper balance to be observed in welcoming the men from afar. Too little generosity, he explained, might “prevent them from transforming into the civilized,” while too much might “result in their contempt for the way and dignity of the Heavenly Dynasty.” The point was to show “neither inferiority nor superiority” in entertaining, but to “re- main in accord with the way and highlight the act of cherishing.” He reminded Liang several times of this “proper way.”⁴² When the mission reached Rehe on September 8, Macartney and his assistants refused to prostrate themselves before the emperor. The next day the emperor issued an edict to Liang and his colleagues, expressing his disappointment in the British envoys. The edict attributed the envoys’ shocking lack of respect to the extravagant treatment they had received in the provinces, which must have encouraged the barbarians’ arrogance and overshadowed the impression that Rehe ought to have made on them. To remedy the matter and punish the provinces, the emperor ordered that the mission return to Guangdong by the overland route and along interior rivers, and that all accommodations and meals at transfer stations be provided in strict conformity with tributary precedents for “such rude for- eign barbarians.” The emperor further stressed that the hospitality extended to the envoys in Beijing should be moderated in order to highlight the Chinese sys- tem through this punishment and to show the “[appropriate] way to manage an outer fan ” (Ch., jiayu waifan zhi dao).⁴³ From the emperor’s perspective, the ac- commodations and meals were meant to reflect the way of the dynasty, a point the British visitors and many local Chinese officials completely missed. For the emperor, an essential aspect of controlling the envoys of outer fan was the skillful deployment of the bureaucratic apparatus to cherish the men from afar appro- priately.
After negotiations concerning the performance of rituals, the British group—consisting of Macartney; his deputy, George Staunton (1737–1801); Staunton’s twelve-year-old son, George Thomas Staunton (1781–1859); and other members of the mission—was granted an imperial audience at the grand tent on September 14. Instead of kowtowing, the members of the mission knelt down on one knee and bowed their heads nine times. The British performed the same compromise ritual again on September 17, the imperial birthday, and days after that both in Rehe and in Beijing.⁴⁴ Simultaneously, the Manchu and Mongol princes and Burmese emissaries performed the rituals in strict observance of the imperial codes. After the ceremony, the emperor endowed the British mission with many gifts, including Korean clothing that had been piling up in Beijing as a result of Chosŏn’s annual tributes. For their part, the British submitted to the emperor their version of a “humble palace memorial,” which, among other things, asked him to station a permanent representative in Beijing and to begin trading outside Guangzhou. In reply, the emperor issued a long edict to King George III, refusing all of their requests. He ex- plained that no precedents beyond the “established rules” existed, so Britain could not hope to change China’s “way of cherishing the men from afar and the bar- barians in the four directions of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao jiahui yuanren fuyu siyi zhi dao). The emperor explained that he understood that Yingjili was so far from China that it was unfamiliar with the magnificent “way of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao tizhi), but he stressed that the British could not live and trade in Beijing because “the civilized–barbarian distinction is extremely strict” (Ch., Hua–Yi zhi bian shenyan). The Jesuit missionaries in Beijing, the emperor said, were not allowed to contact Chinese people either.⁴⁵ Macartney failed to obtain any trade concessions and thus shared the fate of his predecessors, James Flint in 1759 and Nicholas Skottowe in 1761. Instead the British embassy’s visit to China, which the Qing considered a tributary mission, strengthened the Qing’s position as the civilized center and reinforced its institutionalized norms regarding its foreign relations. After all, it was Qing China that, as Li Chen observes, “maintained a dominant position in deciding the terms of the Sino-Western economic, cultural, and political relationships.”⁴⁶ The British thus had no effect on the Qing’s worldview. On January 8, 1794, Macartney departed Guangzhou for Calcutta. The next day, three emissaries from Ryukyu were granted an audience with Qianlong in the Forbidden City, where they kowtowed to the emperor as usual. On January 22 the Mongol and Muslim princes and the chieftains of indigenous tribes from southwestern China were granted an imperial audience in which they too kowtowed to the Son of Heaven in the traditional manner. Three days later the Korean emissaries of the annual tributary mission prostrated themselves in front of the emperor. Then came New Year’s Day, and all princes and tributary emissaries convened in the Forbidden City to attend the grand assembly and lavish banquets together with Chinese offi- cials, all performing the highest level of kowtow again.⁴⁷ After the British mission left, then, the Zongfan mechanism between the Qing and its outer fan continued to operate in its accustomed seamless manner. Rebellious Western and Loyal Eastern Barbarians in the 1840s The First Opium War and the Diplomatic Paradox of Qing China Britain did not give up. In 1816 Lord Amherst (1783–1857) visited China as an ambassador. George Thomas Staunton, who had met with Qianlong as part of the Macartney mission and later served as the director of the British East India Company in Guangzhou, acted as Amherst’s deputy. By this time, China was ruled by Qianlong’s son, Jiaqing. When the British mission arrived in Tianjin and contacted local officials, the deputy governor-general of Zhili, Tojin (1755–1835), adopted the tone of the provincial hosts during the Vietnamese mission in 1790 and the British mission in 1793, assuring Jiaqing that he would adhere to precedent and welcome the tributary mission in order to prevent the foreigners from disdaining China. The crisis over kowtow, however, erupted again between the two sides. Because the dispute remained unsettled by the time the mission arrived in Beijing in late
August, the British did not immediately visit the emperor. The emperor read their absence as a sign of British contempt that “China as the common leader under the Heaven” (Ch., Zhongguo wei tianxia gongzhu) could not tolerate. The emperor also did not trust Staunton, saying that the latter should remember what cere- monies he had performed to Qianlong in 1793. In the end, the emperor refused to accept Amherst’s “humble palace memorial,” returned the British “tributes,” and ordered the envoys to be sent back to their homeland with token gifts from China.⁴⁸ The second British mission had also failed. In 1821 Staunton published a translation of the travelogue of Tulišen, the official who had visited Russia as the Qing envoy in 1712. In the preface, Staunton pointed out that the Chinese government followed an “anti-social system” in their intercourse with other nations and that China would consequently “rank very low indeed in the scale of civilized nations.”⁴⁹ Staunton’s ranking of civilization from his Eurocentric point of view served well the British strategy in China at the time. As the British-dominated opium trade reached new heights, the large inflows of opium and the dramatic outflows of silver were creating a financial crisis in China, forcing Beijing to consider banning the opium trade. In April 1840 Staunton, by then a member of the British Parliament, urged his colleagues to use force against China.⁵⁰ The ensuing Opium War between the two countries ended with the conclusion of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, the twenty-second year of Daoguang, Qianlong’s grandson. According to the Treaty of Nanjing and the Supplementary Treaty of Bogue, which was negotiated according to Western norms and signed in 1843, Britain gained the right of extraterritoriality and “most favored nation” status in China. The treaties thus planted the seeds of European imperi- alism in the Chinese world through the emerging treaty port framework. In 1844 the Qing established the position of superintendent of trade for the five ports (Ch., Wukou tongshang dachen) to manage contacts with Britain, France, the United States, and other Western countries. On the surface, the new post moved these treaty nations out of the orbit of the Ministry of Rites and the scope of the Zongfan framework. But the first official to hold the post was Qiying (1787–1858), a Manchu and a signatory of the Treaty of Nanjing who soon after became governor-general of Liangguang, where he was in charge of China’s contacts not only with Western countries in Guangzhou but also with Annam, Siam, and sev- eral other outer fan. This new post was thus added to the established Zongfan system without changing the nature of the system per se. Likewise, nothing really changed in other parts of the Qing periphery after the war. Keeping the West out of the Ritual: Qing Envoys to Chosŏn After Queen Kim of Chosŏn passed away in late 1843, the Daoguang emperor appointed two Manchu officials, Baijun (?–1859) and Hengxing, as envoys to deliver his condolences to Hansŏng. In February 1844 the two envoys left Beijing for Chosŏn with the imperial book of condolences and other items. After crossing Fenghuang Gate and marching toward the Yalu River, they found that the Koreans had set up several shanties to welcome them. In Ŭiju more Korean officials, in- cluding one with the king’s name card, greeted the envoys. On April 7 the envoys arrived in Hongjewŏn, in the suburbs of Hansŏng, where a high-ranking official with the king’s name card and a minister of the Ŭijŏngbu, the Korean cabinet, welcomed them. The grand ceremony was held the next day. In the morning the envoys were escorted to the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country outside the West Gate of the capital. The king came out through the West Gate to receive the imperial edict and returned to his palace first. The envoys were then escorted through the South Gate and dismounted from their horses near a gate to the palace. Baijun was guided by an usher to the grand hall, where he placed the imperial book of condolences and the condolence money on a desk on the east side of the hall and stood next to the desk. The king, at the foot of the steps to the hall, kowtowed to the imperial items and then proceeded to the mourning hall. There the two envoys in turn made offerings to the spirit of the dead. The king led the royal family members into the hall and knelt down in front of the envoys to receive the emperor’s condolences. Following ritual wailing, the last step of the ceremony, the imperial book of condolences was burned.⁵¹
The king then invited the envoys to the grand hall for a tea ceremony, after which the envoys went to their residence, the South Palace Annex. The next day the king visited the envoys to treat them to a tea banquet, and Korean officials visited the envoys to ask them to write Chinese characters, keeping the guests busy. The envoys also distributed 300 taels of silver and 490 felt caps among local servants. On April 12 the king sent off the envoys, giving each a gift of 2,500 taels of silver. After they returned to Beijing, the envoys reported on their mission to the emperor and suggested that the emperor preserve the 5,000 taels of silver in the Ministry of Rites, which could return the silver to Chosŏn through the country’s next mission to Beijing to show the imperial kindness of cherishing the men from afar.⁵² During their three-day sojourn in Hansŏng, the envoys did not talk with the king about any events in China related to the Opium War, the treaties signed with Western countries, or the changes in China’s foreign policies in South China, nor did the king ask about these matters. Their interactions were confined to the performance of minutely prescribed rituals that undergirded the longstanding mutual dependence of their legitimacy as Zhongguo and its outer fan, respec- tively. This primacy of ritual was demonstrated again soon afterward, in 1845. In April 1845 Emperor Daoguang appointed Huashana (1806–59), a Manchu minister of the Ministry of Revenue, and Deshun, an associate general of the Mon- gol Eight Banners, as envoys to Hansŏng to invest a new queen. The envoys arrived in Hansŏng in late May. The king went outside the city to welcome the envoys and the imperial books of investiture, after which the envoys were taken in sedan chairs to the palace, where they alighted in front of the grand hall and carried in the books of investiture. The king entered the hall to receive the imperial books by performing the kowtow. An usher read the books aloud to Chosŏn’s officials outside the hall, and then the king led his officials in three cheers of “Long live the emperor” (Ch., shanhu wansui). After a stay of three days, the envoys left the capital.⁵³ When the envoys reported to Beijing, the emperor asked them about the distance they had traveled, the king’s clothes, and the gifts sent by the king, but no mention was made of Chosŏn’s politics or other domestic Korean issues. For the emperor, the crises and challenges imposed by the war with Britain and the opening of treaty ports in Southeast China were entirely outside the purview of Qing-Chosŏn relations. At the top of the Qing administration, the Sinocentric cos- mopolitan order and the Qing’s identity as the Heavenly Dynasty remained untouched. Chosŏn, the prototypical outer fan, still maintained its loyalty to the Great Qing. Ministers and Emissaries: The British and Korean Missions to Beijing, 1860 and 1861 The Permanent Residence of Western Representatives in Beijing In 1856 the Second Opium War erupted in Guangzhou. The Chinese governor-general and imperial commissioner, Ye Mingchen (1807–59), who was in charge of foreign affairs, was captured in his office in the city in January 1858 by the Anglo-French forces under the leadership of Lord Elgin (1811–63). Part of a family that had enjoyed close contacts with Korean visitors in Beijing, Ye shared with Koreans the discourse of the civilized–barbarian distinction.⁵⁴ He had served in Guangzhou for more than a decade as one of the strongest opponents of allowing British representatives and merchants to move into the walled city. In his last memorial to the Xianfeng emperor before he was captured, Ye analyzed his negotiations with the British, French, and American ministers in Guangzhou and underlined his strategy of “secretly preparing for crises and publicly cherishing the barbarians.”⁵⁵ The Western colonial states’ expansion to East Asia remained incomprehensible to Ye, who still conceptualized all international contacts, including conflicts, skirmishes, and even the ongoing war, within the Zongfan frame- work. The emperor, with no better understanding than Ye, regarded the behavior of the British and French as “rebellion” and emphasized that China’s first imper- ative was to “cherish” these wayward subordinates to “preserve the national polity and refuse their requests.” The rationale was the same as that behind Qian- long’s instructions regarding the Macartney embassy in 1793. Neither the emperor nor his ministers at court nor his governors at the border realized that they
were dealing with several global powers engaging in gunboat diplomacy from Africa to East Asia. The war situation continued to escalate. In April 1858 the British, French, American, and Russian ministers convened in Tianjin and dispatched an ultimatum to Beijing, demanding negotiations with Chinese “plenipotentiaries” (Ch., bianyi xingshi). Among the requests made by these states, such as expanding trade to the Chinese interior and opening more ports, the most offensive to the Qing was the demand to lodge permanent representatives in Beijing, precisely as Macartney had proposed in 1793. The court instructed the governor-general of Zhili, Tan Tingxiang (?–1870), who was negotiating with the European ministers in Tianjin, to clarify that “all contacts between China and foreign countries have always been conducted at the borders, and only countries among China’s subordinates [Ch., shuguo] can visit Beijing to pay tribute [Ch., chaogong]. No commissioner from those countries has ever been allowed to reside in Beijing permanently.” The court also refused to appoint any plenipotentiaries. The emperor argued that his stance was not xenophobic because “China is not afraid of the visit of the barbarians to Beijing, however many people were to come; the problem is that such a visit does not fit the system.” Along the same lines, he refused to allow the American min- ister, William Reed (1806–76), to visit Beijing because “the United States is a friendly country [Ch., yuguo], but the imperial collection of precedents does not record how we should treat a friendly country, so the practice of entertaining might be inappropriate.”⁵⁶ The emperor asked that the ministers return to Guangzhou and discuss such issues as tariffs with the governor-general there, suggesting that the negotiations should be conducted with the superintendent of trade for the five ports at the border rather than in Beijing. The location of the negotiations was an integral aspect of the Sinocentric world order and thus mattered greatly in the eyes of the Qing rulers. The Anglo-French Alliance ignored the emperor’s instructions and occupied the Dagu Forts on May 20, after which they forwarded Tan Tingxiang a note re- questing that the four nations be allowed entry into Tianjin for negotiations with the Chinese plenipotentiaries as well as entry into Beijing, where they would ei- ther pay a visit to the emperor or meet with grand secretaries. On May 28 the emperor appointed the Manchu grand secretary, Guiliang (1785–62), as minister ex- traordinary and the Manchu minister Huashana as plenipotentiary and sent them to Tianjin for negotiations. Huashana, who had served as the deputy of the Son of Heaven on the mission to Chosŏn in 1845, now became a diplomatic representative of the Chinese sovereign who was equal to the monarchs of Britain and France. The emperor particularly instructed Tan to inform the foreign ministers that there was no need for them to visit Beijing. In the meantime, he ordered Prince Sengge Rinchen (1811–65) of the Korcin Mongols to use his Mongol warriors to reinforce the garrison between Tianjin and Beijing. The Sino-British negotiations reached a deadlock over the issue of a permanent representative in Beijing. At court, many high-ranking officials, such as Prince Yi (Dzai Yūwan, 1816–61), firmly refused the Western request to place representatives in Beijing. They suggested instead that Britain could follow the established practice of the “Russian barbarians” (Ch., E yi) and station students rather than commissioners in Beijing. The students would dress in “the clothes and caps of China” (Ch., Zhongguo yiguan), abide by local rules, and refrain from involvement in official affairs. Britain could negotiate with Chinese governors-general and governors over trade affairs at treaty ports. If the British insisted on visiting Beijing, the emperor said that they would have to travel from Shanghai via the over- land route, escorted by Chinese officials, with all accommodations and meals covered by China. They could visit Beijing once every three or five years, not annually.⁵⁷ Not coincidentally, this proposal fit precisely into the existing tributary ritual codes: Beijing was trying to draw Britain into the established Zongfan sys- tem. From 1761 to 1793, then to 1858, the Qing court’s understanding of Britain remained the same because the Qing’s institutionalized Zongfan norms never changed. This ideal model was soon partly—if opaquely—realized in the treaty with the United States, concluded on June 18, 1858, in Tianjin. Article 5 of the treaty regu- lated the visit of the American minister to Beijing in accordance with the specific ritual codes for the Qing’s outer fan.⁵⁸ The regulations specified the frequency of
the Americans’ visits to Beijing, the overland route they were to take from Tianjin to Beijing, their entertainment by local authorities, the requisite written notice to the Ministry of Rites, and especially the size of the mission—twenty members, which was the maximum head count of tributary missions allowed for Ryukyu, Lan- chang, Burma, and the Netherlands. Although the treaty granted the United States the status of a most favored nation, Beijing saw this status simply as a special favor for foreign barbarians, unrelated to China’s statehood and sovereignty. In this sense, the Qing court treated the United States as a tributary state, which the latter, of course, completely failed to realize. Within the domestic Confucianism-centered intellectual framework, neither the Qing ruling house nor the majority of its officials who had passed the imperial civil-service examinations thought beyond the framework of the civilized–barbarian distinction. The new knowledge imported from the West by American and European missionaries who were active in Southeast Asia and South China had not yet had an impact on the Chinese intellectual forces behind the post-Qianlong institutionalized order. On June 23, 1858, the Chinese minister Zhou Zupei (1793– 1867) and thirty of his colleagues submitted memorials against the permanent residence of “barbarous emissaries” in Beijing. Among the “eight evils” of such residence highlighted in Zhou’s memorial was the preaching of the gospel by the foreigners, which would “turn our manner of clothes, caps, rituals, and music into something fit for beasts” (Ch., yiguan liyue zhi zu, yi yu qinshou). He also warned that “if countries such as Chosŏn and Ryukyu, which have been loyal to China for a long time and sincerely send emissaries and pay tribute to the court, saw the disobedience of these barbarians, they, too, would despise the Heavenly Dynasty.” This argument was further underscored by Chen Rui, who emphasized the “fundamental divide between China and the others” (Ch., Zhong Wai zhi dafang).⁵⁹ In terms of their thinking, these officials were no different from Ye Mingchen, who at the time was detained by the British in Calcutta. Despite such keen resistance, Guiliang and Huashana accepted the British-drafted treaty after they realized the situation was beyond China’s control. The treaty with Britain, signed on June 26, allowed Britain to appoint diplomatic agents to the court in Beijing, where they would not kowtow to the emperor. According to article 3, the British ambassador, minister, or other diplomatic agent “shall not be called upon to perform any ceremony derogatory to him as representing the Sovereign of an independent nation, on a footing of equality with that of China. On the other hand, he shall use the same forms of ceremony and respect to His Majesty the Emperor as are employed by the Ambassadors, Ministers, or Diplomatic Agents of Her Majesty toward the Sovereigns of independent and equal European nations.”⁶⁰ In retrospect, this article opened the gates of Beijing to the representatives of Britain and other treaty nations and marked the beginning of the collapse of the centuries-long ritual system and the erosion of the Zongfan infrastructure. Being forced to fundamentally change its time-honored ritual norms, even if only in part, the Great Qing moved toward its eventual transformation from a cosmopolitan empire to a state equal to Britain according to post- Westphalian political and diplomatic norms. Historic though the change was, the Chinese may not have fully understood the treaty’s importance because of linguistic discrepancies. The Chinese version of the treaty, for instance, states that “Britain is a nation of zizhu on a footing of equality with China” (Ch., Yingguo zizhu zhi bang, yu Zhongguo pingdeng). The term zizhu, which meant self-rule or autonomy, was usually used in a Zongfan context. China regarded its outer fan as possessing this right, so it was different from the British understanding of the term “independence.” This divergence would become apparent in the following years, when China and the Western states as well as Japan tried to define the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship and Chosŏn’s international position. The seeds of further conflicts between the norms of the Chi- nese Zongfan system and those of European international law were thus planted directly in these treaties. What further shook the foundation of the civilized–barbarian discourse was article 51 of the Sino-British treaty of 1858, which decreed that the character yi (“bar- barian”) “shall not be applied to the Government or subjects of Her Britannic Majesty in any Chinese official document issued by the Chinese Authorities either in
the Capital or in the Provinces.”⁶¹ Britain and other Western nations that were eligible to invoke the most-favored-nation clause thus broke away legally and in- stitutionally from the category of barbarians in Chinese diplomatic discourse. From then on, in Chinese official narratives the character yi was increasingly re- placed by yang (“overseas,” “foreign”) and the term “barbarians” (Ch., yiren) by “foreigners” (Ch., yangren). This amendment, however, applied only to Western treaty nations that had never occupied an essential position in the Zongfan system. The Qing still consid- ered its major outer fan, such as Chosŏn, Vietnam, and Ryukyu, countries of barbarians. In this sense, the treaty port system, although it was expanding rapidly at the end of the 1850s, merely complicated the Qing’s view of the countries in the “Western Ocean.” In other words, the disintegration of Sinocentrism as a result of the 1858 treaties occurred on the Qing’s intellectual periphery, not at the core of its intellectual and ideological structure as informed and represented by the Qing’s principal outer fan. The ministers of the treaty nations residing in Beijing would soon be confronted with the complexity and perplexity of this distinction. Who Were the Barbarians Now? The British and Korean Missions to Beijing Treaties in hand, the ministers of Britain, France, Russia, and the United States left Tianjin for Shanghai, where they and Chinese representatives signed additional treaties on tariffs. The war would have been over had the British and French ministers in the summer of 1859 followed the Qing’s designated route to enter Beijing after they landed at Tianjin for the ratification of the treaties. But the ministers refused to follow Qing instructions, and their rash entry into the firth of the Beihe River near the Dagu Forts led to Chinese bombardment. The war resumed less than a year after the British Crown imposed direct control over India by nation- alizing the British East India Company in August 1858. Under the leadership of Lord Elgin, who was determined to employ gunboat diplomacy against Beijing, the Anglo-French alliance returned to China in the summer of 1860 and reoccupied the Dagu Forts. There the alliance almost annihilated the Mongol cavalry of Prince Sengge Rinchen with the Armstrong gun, a weapon created by Britain and employed in combat for the first time. The Qing succumbed not only to the joint colo- nialism of the European states but also to revolutionary post–Crimean War European military technology. The alliance occupied Tianjin and marched toward Beijing in late August. Although the Beijing court sent representatives to Tongzhou, near Beijing, for negoti- ations, on September 18 Prince Sengge Rinchen captured Harry Parkes (1828–85), the British commissioner in Guangzhou, as well as Henry Loch (1827–1900), Elgin’s private secretary, and twenty-four British and thirteen French officers and soldiers. Only half of these prisoners of war—including Parkes and Loch— survived and were eventually released on October 8, when the alliance gained control of Beijing’s suburbs and started looting the imperial palace of Yuan-Ming- Yuan. The frightened Son of Heaven, Emperor Xianfeng, had fled to Rehe on September 22 after appointing his younger brother Prince Gong (a.k.a. Prince Kung, 1833–98) as the envoy extraordinary and plenipotentiary to supervise the uncertain peace negotiations. On October 13 the Western forces took over the Anding Gate of the city. The Qing saw this as a more serious threat than it did the ongoing Taiping Rebellion in South China, as the court in Rehe and the caretaker admi- nistration in Beijing were extremely vulnerable to the aggressive European alliance and their powerful cannons positioned on the city’s old walls. From October 12 to 16, the survivors and bodies of the prisoners of war were returned to the alliance. The evident cruelty inflicted on the corpses, mutilated be- yond recognition, shocked Elgin and his fellow commanders. Elgin “at once notified to Prince Kung that he was too horrified by what had occurred to hold further communication with a government guilty of such deeds of treachery and bloodshed, until by some great punishment inflicted upon the Emperor and the gov- erning classes, he had made apparent … the detestation with which the Allies viewed such conduct.” The “great punishment” turned out to be the immolation of Yuan-Ming-Yuan. On October 18, the second day after the alliance buried the former prisoners, flames engulfed the magnificent imperial garden that had been co- designed by European Jesuit missionaries. Loch recorded that “during the whole of Friday the 19th, Yuen-Ming-Yuen was still burning; the clouds of smoke driven by the wind, hung like a vast black pall over Pekin.”⁶² Numerous buildings in which the Qing emperors had given audience to emissaries of its outer fan—once
including Britain and always including Chosŏn—were burned to the ground. On October 20 Prince Gong offered Elgin China’s submission to the alliance’s de- mands. The capital was fully opened to the alliance. Parkes and Loch entered the city the next day and ironically selected the grand hall of the Ministry of Rites as the site for the signing of the convention. Elgin departed for the grand hall on October 24, carried in a sedan chair by sixteen Chinese footmen—an honor previously reserved for the emperor—and accompanied by an escort of more than six hundred men. When the procession reached the hall, according to Loch, Prince Gong “advanced to receive Lord Elgin with an anxious, hesitating salutation,” while the latter “bowed, and at once walked forward to his seat, motioning Prince Kung to take the one on the right.” After they signed the convention, exchanged treaties, and talked briefly about maintaining friendship, “Lord Elgin rose to take leave; Prince Kung accompanied him a short distance, and then stopped; but on Lord Elgin doing so likewise, the principal mandarins in attendance urgently beckoned Prince Kung to move forward, and after a few moments of hesitation he walked with Lord Elgin to the edge of the steps.” Prince Gong was apparently adjusting to a new etiquette that he had never before performed. Witnessing the entire procedure, Loch enthusiastically claimed, “Thus was happily concluded an event which was the commencement of a new era, not only in the history of the Empire of China, but of the world, by the introduction of four hundred millions of the human race into the family of civi- lized nations.”⁶³ Like George Thomas Staunton’s, Loch’s judgment on civilization was thoroughly Eurocentric. Loch was correct in asserting that China had entered a new era. In January 1861 the Qing court established a temporary “office in charge of affairs concerning all countries” (Ch., Zongli geguo shiwu yamen, hereafter “the Zongli Yamen”) under Prince Gong’s supervision. The Yamen was responsible for China’s foreign rela- tions only with Britain, France, the United States, Russia, and other treaty nations, not with Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Vietnam, and other outer fan, whose contacts with Beijing were still under the auspices of the Ministry of Rites. The new institution was designed with the goal of expediency to meet challenges in a time of crisis, and it was modeled on the Grand Council.⁶⁴ The officials who served in the Yamen did so only on a part-time basis. The official tablet hanging at the main en- trance of the institution read, “Goodness and happiness between the center and the outside” (Ch., Zhong Wai tifu), highlighting the key Confucian doctrine of the mean. More importantly, the Yamen was deemed an imitation of the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations and was consequently categorized as part of the established Zongfan system. According to the court’s plan, once the momentary crisis had passed, foreign affairs would revert to the management of the Min- istry of Rites as usual, for the sake of “cherishing the outer fan .”⁶⁵ Yet like the Grand Council, the Zongli Yamen continued to serve the court after the crisis, and in 1901 it became the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ch., Waiwu bu). The Yamen survived primarily because China’s treaty partners always treated it as a ministry of foreign affairs at which Western diplomats could apply the con- cepts of international law to their negotiations with the Chinese side; still, the diplomats were not blind to the fact that the Yamen was different from a ministry of foreign affairs in the Western sense.⁶⁶ Beijing also realized that it was impossible to disband the Zongli Yamen, in particular after March 1861, when the French, British, Russian, and American ministers arrived in Beijing and established their offices next to the Forbidden City. In response, Beijing quickly organized a diplo- matic network from the top down by appointing superintendents of trade for Tianjin and Shanghai. So began a new era. As noted earlier, these institutional changes to the Zongfan framework affected only those parts that governed relations with treaty nations; beyond those, the Zongfan system stood unchanged. As ever, Chosŏn played an exemplary role in maintaining the Qing’s superiority within this established system. After learning from the 1860 annual tributary mission to Beijing that the emperor had moved to Rehe, the king of Chosŏn immediately sent a special mission to China with the aim of visiting the emperor at Rehe and demonstrating to him Chosŏn’s concern as a loyal subordinate of the imperial dynasty. In early 1861 the Korean emis- saries reached postwar Beijing, bearing various tributes. The Ministry of Rites asked the emperor whether the emissaries should visit Rehe, following the
precedents of Annam’s mission in 1790, Lanchang’s and Burma’s missions in 1795, and Annam’s mission in 1803. The emperor responded that there was no need for the Korean emissaries to travel to Rehe, but he instructed the ministry to follow convention by treating the emissaries to banquets and endowing them and the king with generous gifts in order to show his “ultimate kindness of cherishing the fan in a favored way.”⁶⁷ In fact, between November 1858 and May 1861, Chosŏn dispatched five tributary missions to Beijing in spite of the war in China. In the early 1790s, Chosŏn and British emissaries had convened in Rehe and Beijing as representatives of two outer fan—both of them nations of barbarians in the Qing’s eyes. But whereas the British emissaries had violently changed their status in the Chinese world by the early 1860s by entering Beijing under the cover of cannons, their Korean counter- parts continued to approach the imperial capital with humble palace memorials and tributes. Although the Korean emissaries also pursued the secret mission of obtaining intelligence in China in order to enable the Korean court to assess the situation there, their frequent presence in Beijing provided the Qing with a steady stream of resources to maintain its conventional ritual code, politico-cultural hierarchy, and imperial norms, which were under fire from the British and the French. However, the Korean emissaries never again saw the Xianfeng emperor, who died in Rehe in August and became the last emperor who refused to allow the Western barbarians to stand before him without kowtowing.⁶⁸ It was not until 1873 that Xianfeng’s son, Tongzhi, gave foreign ministers their first imperial audience at which the ministers did not kowtow. The audience took place at the Purple Light Pavilion (Ch., Ziguang ge) in the Forbidden City, the same venue at which the Qing emperor had met with emissaries of China’s outer fan since 1761—the year in which the Qing institutionalized the status of all other countries within its own imperial norms, as described in chapter 2. In 1873 the pavil- ion no longer witnessed the ritual of kowtow, but the politico-cultural significance of the imperial audience in that location remained essentially the same. Inter- estingly, and ironically, since 1949 the state leaders of the People’s Republic of China, who converted part of the Qing imperial palace into their living quarters and political headquarters, have used the pavilion to meet with foreign guests from other, equal states of the world—if no longer in the sense of all-under-Heaven.
3
JUSTIFYING THE CIVILIZED
The Qing’s Contacts with Chosŏn, Annam, and Britain, 1762–1861
As Chosŏn carefully maintained its political subordination to the Qing on the surface, and the Manchu ruling house used this submission to reinforce the Qing’s centrality and Chineseness, Chosŏn simultaneously constructed its own Chineseness within its borders by depicting the Qing as barbarians in particular moments. The civilized–barbarian discourse pervaded Chosŏn, nourishing a strong pro-Ming and anti-Qing attitude among the educated in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century. Chosŏn entered the contest for civilized status in a cultural sense, and its perennial missions to the Qing served this domestic construction of identity. As the Qing was proclaiming Chineseness in the post-Ming era, Chosŏn, too, sought to establish itself as the exclusive legitimate successor to the Ming. In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, a group of Korean scholars who observed the Qing’s prosperity and the economic gap between the Qing and Chosŏn dared to voice their support for the Qing’s claim to civilized status. Their arguments counterbalanced the prevalent anti-Qing attitude among Korean scholars and helped Chosŏn cope with the paradox of the civilized–barbarian discourse in a practical sense.
This chapter examines the interior aspects and function of the Zongfan order by showing how the Qing’s rule of cherishing the men from afar operated in the ritual protocol and presentations of diplomatic missions between the Qing, Chosŏn, and other countries from 1762 to 1861. The chapter discusses several cases of emissary exchanges between the Qing and Chosŏn against the background of the sharp reversal of the civilized–barbarian discourse that both sides exploited intensively for their own domestic politico-cultural legitimacy. It suggests that the Qing eventually prevailed over Chosŏn. By introducing Annam’s and Britain’s missions to China as a point of comparison for those from Chosŏn, the chapter further explores how the Manchu ruling house navigated the balance between the Chinese rhetoric commensurate with China’s claimed preeminence in the cosmopolitan world and the practical consequences of this superiority in bilateral communications. This balance illustrates the Qing state-craft and helps explain why, in the second half of the nineteenth century, both the Qing and Chosŏn, along with Vietnam and Ryukyu, encountered such tremendous difficulty in defining the nature of their relationship in accordance with the newly imported international law, a topic examined in part 2 of this book.
Historical Memory of the Civilized: Chosŏn’s Anti-Manchu Mentality
The Perception of a Barbarous Qing within Little China after 1644
With the irreversible downfall of the Ming in 1644, Chosŏn intensified its efforts to identify itself as the exclusive and genuine heir to Chinese civilization. In their daily training and practices, Korean intellectuals who were followers of Neo-Confucianism shared a consensus that the Manchu conquest of China proper in 1644 marked the fall of the central civilized country (K., Chunghwa hamnak).¹ In Chosŏn, numerous scholars used the regnal title of the last emperor of the Ming, Chongzhen, to date their personal letters and domestic documents. Their attitude was consolidated in the Little China discourse that emphasized the succession of Confucian orthodox legitimacy (K., tot’ong) instead of denying explicitly that the Qing possessed political orthodox legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom. Thus, within its borders Chosŏn presented itself as the successor to Confucius, Mencius, and Zhu Xi after the demise of the Ming.
On the Qing side, Chosŏn’s status as Little China was widely accepted by both ethnic Han and Manchu scholars. The Chinese officials and intelligentsia did not treat their Korean counterparts as barbarians, as they did many Europeans. On occasion, the Qing court explicitly appraised Chosŏn as "a country of rituals
and literature" (Ch., wenwu zhi bang; Ma., doro yoso i gurun), a statement also endorsed by many Chinese scholars of the Qing.² Yet when it came to locating Chosŏn within the multilevel structure of all-under-Heaven in the Qing’s political and cultural discourse, Chosŏn was inevitably designated a country of barbarians on China’s periphery. As this chapter shows, Korean scholars who visited Beijing had to face the challenge of reconciling their country’s putative barbarity with their conviction in its superior cultural pedigree.
In late seventeenth-century Chosŏn, in particular during the reigns of King Hyojong and King Hyŏngjong, anti-Qing sentiment was widespread among intellectuals. Song Si-yŏl (1607–89), a leading scholar and King Hyojong’s mentor, zealously proposed a northern expedition (K., bukpŏl) against the Manchus in order to recover the central plain on behalf of the Ming.³ Song’s plan was never put into practice, but it won strong moral support from the court and from Confucian scholars and contributed to the rise of a Korean national identity in the post-Ming period when the country was struggling for a new episteme.⁴ Another scholar, Sin Yu-han (1681–1752), in a letter to a friend who was about to visit Beijing as a member of a tributary mission, claimed that we are also Chinese (K., uri yŏk Chunggukin) and that Chosŏn was China—a "China with Classic of Poetry and Book of Documents " (K., sisŏ Chungguk) and a China with [Chinese-style] clothes and belts (K., ŭidae Chungguk). Sin went on to claim that since the fall of the Ming in 1644 China had not had a Son of Heaven, implying that political orthodox legitimacy also lay in Chosŏn, the successor to Kija (Jizi).⁵
The cases of Song and Sin reveal a pronounced victim mentality within the Korean ruling house and intellectual stratum after the humiliating Manchu invasions and the fall of the Ming. Highlighting Korea’s filial duty to the deposed Ming became an ideological tool to maintain Chosŏn’s domestic order and raise the morale of the learned class. On the one hand, the king presented himself as a loyal subordinate of the Qing for the sake of the political orthodox legitimacy granted by the Qing; but on the other hand, he was the moral sponsor of the anti-Qing movement inside Chosŏn, seeking to capture the political orthodox legitimacy embedded in the connection between his rulership and his subjects. Like the Qing emperors, the Korean kings had to deal with grave challenges arising from the framework of the civilized–barbarian discourse.
Against the background of this volatile balance, Chosŏn entered a more radical period of actively commemorating the imperial Ming during the reign of King Sukchong, when the Qing’s control over Chosŏn was loosened as the Kangxi emperor was preoccupied with suppressing the revolt of the Three Feudatories in the 1680s. In April 1704, on the sixtieth anniversary of Emperor Chongzhen’s suicide, the king established an altar near the palace in Hansŏng and performed a new ceremony to commemorate Chongzhen. Although it was the forty-third year of Kangxi, the king called the moment the seventy-seventh year of Chongzhen, setting the starting year to 1628, when Chongzhen ascended the throne. The king declared that the imperial Ming was the owner of the civilized and the barbarians (K., Hwa–I ju) but that the northern barbarians—that is, the Manchus—had taken the opportunity to occupy our central plain (K., kŏ a chungwŏn), with the result that the rituals and clothes (K., yeak ŭigwan)—the traditional metaphor for civilization—had become barbarous. Chosŏn, the king claimed, was the only place that still loyally worshipped the old motherland (K., koguk). Reciting these words at the ceremony, the king burst into tears. All of the officials around him wept too.
Soon thereafter, in October of the same year, the king had a long discussion with several ministers about building a temple to Wanli, the Ming emperor who saved Chosŏn from the Japanese invasion in the 1590s. The ministers endorsed the king’s pro-Ming attitude but pointed out that it was inappropriate for a vassal to offer sacrifices to the Son of Heaven, so the king instead constructed a nine-floor altar and named it the Great Altar for Gratitude (K., Taebodan), where a state ceremony would be performed twice a year, in spring and autumn. The altar was completed in January 1705.⁶ Thereafter, Chosŏn continued to commemorate the Ming for another 190 years until 1895, when it declared independence from the Qing. The altar was permanently closed in 1908, three years after Chosŏn
became a protectorate of Japan and two years before it was annexed by Japan.
Korean emissaries to Beijing continuously fed the popular antipathy toward the Qing in Chosŏn by providing firsthand accounts of their dealings with the barbarous usurpers of the Ming. For these emissaries, the trip to Beijing was a journey for mourning the Ming, deprecating the Qing, and strengthening Chosŏn’s identity as Little China. As they reached various landmarks—the Yalu River, Fenghuang Gate, Liaoyang, the Korean compound in Mukden where Crown Prince Sohyŏn had been detained between 1637 and 1644, Shanhai Pass, and the Forbidden City in Beijing, where the Ming emperors had resided for centuries—the emissaries often wrote poems lamenting the fall of the Ming. These poems became part of their journals, which were widely circulated in Chosŏn and were generically known as Yŏnhaengnok (The records of the journey to Beijing).⁷
From the second half of the eighteenth century, however, some Korean intellectuals, having witnessed the Qing’s prosperity on their journeys to Beijing and having engaged in extensive conversations with Han Chinese and Manchu scholars in Beijing, started to reconsider their entrenched view of the barbarous Qing. Disillusioned with Chosŏn’s self-proclaimed cultural superiority, these pundits recognized the Qing as a civilized country and called for Chosŏn to learn from Qing China for its own good, beyond the popular doctrine of revering China and expelling the barbarians. These scholars constituted the School of Northern Learning (K., Pukhak p’ae), focusing on practical knowledge (K., Sirhak). They successfully resumed contacts between the literati of Korea and those of China that had been suspended for more than 120 years since 1644. Among these scholars, three in particular stood out: Hong Tae-yong, Pak Che-ka (1750–1805), and Pak Chi-wŏn (1737–1805).
Honoring the Great Ming: Hong Tae-yong’s Perception of the Qing
Hong Tae-yong was born in Hansŏng in 1731 into Chosŏn’s ruling gentry and the hereditary class of yangban (lit. two branches [of the ruling class]), and he studied with Kim Wŏn-haeng (1702–72), a leading scholar of the time. In late 1765, when his uncle was appointed the secretary of the annual tributary mission to Beijing, Hong became affiliated with the mission as an officer of the emissaries’ junior relatives (K., chaje gungwan).⁸ Although Hong regarded the Qing as a barbarous country, he was excited about the trip and was eager to exchange ideas with his Chinese counterparts. After arriving in Beijing in early 1766, Hong put almost all his time and energy into getting to know Chinese scholars, mainly through written conversations (K., p’iltam, conversing by writing Chinese characters). These dialogues led him to conclude that the Qing, no matter how barbarous in Chosŏn’s eyes, was indeed the civilized Middle Kingdom, whereas Chosŏn, no matter how superior in its own mind, nonetheless fell into the category of barbarians.
Hong, like other Koreans, was extremely proud of Chosŏn’s fashion of Ming-style clothes and hats and disparaged the Manchu hairstyle and robes. His choice of dress signaled that he maintained the true way of Chinese culture. In his conversations with Chinese intellectuals in the first weeks of his stay in Beijing, Hong frequently used his clothing to highlight Chosŏn’s cultural superiority over the Qing.⁹ Shortly thereafter, however, Hong entered into dialogue with other Chinese intellectuals, in particular Yan Cheng and Pan Tingyun (1743–?), and these highly trained scholars dramatically changed his view of the Qing.
Yan and Pan, both Han Chinese, were from Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province, where they had successfully passed the imperial civil-service examinations and won the title of Juren (a qualified graduate at the provincial level). They were determined to pass the last round of imperial exams in Beijing to realize their dream of serving their country as officials. To enhance their communications with Hong, they shared with him their provincial exam essays. In the first conversation among Hong, Yan, Pan, and their Korean and Chinese peers, another Korean, Kim P’yŏng-jung, asked Pan why he had said in his exam essay that people should worship only the Zhou Dynasty—a statement that, Kim felt, could be seen as an expression of nostalgia for the deposed Ming and as an act of defiance against the Manchus. Pan explained that his words referred to the central civilized country, which was the patriarch for myriad countries (Ch., wanguo suozong), and
he emphasized that the current Son of Heaven, the Qianlong emperor, was so great that all subjects should show him obedience and respect. Worshipping the Zhou, Pan concluded, was akin to worshipping the current dynasty. Hong, for the first time in his life, heard the Qing called the central civilized country. Seeing Pan’s response as a consequence of the sensitive Manchu–Han Chinese ethnic relationship, Hong disregarded his claim and instead responded by highlighting Chosŏn’s identity as Little China. But by the end of the conversation, the two sides had found common ground in celebrating the Qing conceit that all-under-Heaven is one unified family (Ch., tianxia yijia).¹⁰
Hong did not reveal his sense of cultural superiority until his second conversation with Yan and Pan at the Korean residence. The conversation included a long discussion about clothes and hats, in which the Korean hosts and the Chinese guests articulated their respective understandings of the Ming-Qing transition and the Qing’s position in Chinese history. Hong emphasized several times that Koreans wore Ming-style garments, which in China by this time were worn only on the opera stage. Hong indicated that the garments served as a visible reminder of the dignified manner of Han Chinese officials (Ch., hanguan weiyi). The Korean hosts asked Pan and Yan critical questions regarding the Manchu hair-style, clothes, and hats, and about the Ming’s stories. Pan, who was in charge of recording the conversation, answered their questions carefully and praised the Qing volubly.¹¹ Pan later became an official in Beijing and never gave Hong the copies of their correspondence that Hong had requested after returning to Hansŏng, although the two maintained a good relationship.¹²
In another long conversation with Yan, Hong again used Chosŏn’s style of dress to criticize the Qing and mourn the Ming. Hong told Yan he felt extremely sad that China had lost itself with its adoption of Manchu fashions in hair and clothes and that China’s situation was in his view even worse than it had been under the Jin and Yuan Dynasties. In comparison, Hong proudly noted Chosŏn’s loyalty to the Ming, which he called the parent nation. Yan, however, argued that in 1644 the Qing had legitimately become the ruler of the country by defeating the rebels and defending and enacting justice. At the end of the conversation, Hong acknowledged that whereas the Ming had exploited his country, the Qing was much more generous toward Chosŏn.¹³ Hong realized that Han Chinese scholars identified the Qing both as a legitimate successor to the Ming in the political sense and as a legitimate heir to Confucianism in the cultural sense. Although the Han Chinese had adopted the Manchu queue and clothes, Hong concluded, they were still the offspring of the old home of the central civilized country (K., Chunghwa koga chi ye). By contrast, Hong conceded that although Koreans took pride in their Ming-style dress, on a fundamental level they still belonged to the barbarians by the sea. By arguing that the civilized and the barbarians are the same, he acknowledged the Qing’s civilized status.¹⁴ Hong returned to Chosŏn with a new perception of Qing China, and he made an immense contribution to the School of Northern Learning.
Learning from the North: The Korean Visitors’ New Tone toward the Qing
Revisiting the Civilized–Barbarian Discourse: Pak Che-ka’s Visit to Beijing
After Hong returned to Hansŏng in 1766, his strong relationships with Pan, Yan, and other Chinese friends, and his continuous correspondence with them, swiftly became legend among his fellow scholars in Chosŏn. One of them was Pak Che-ka, born in 1750 in Hansŏng, where his father served as a minister at the court. Because his mother was a concubine, Pak was not allowed to take the civil-service examinations, but he won fame as a poet when he was young and joined a wide aristocratic and intellectual social network, through which he became acquainted with Hong. Pak was fascinated by the contacts between Hong and Chinese scholars and hoped to visit Beijing himself. His opportunity came in the spring of 1778, when the emissary Ch’ae Che-gong (1720–99) invited Pak and another famous young scholar, Yi Tŏng-mu (1741–93), to join him on a tributary mission to Beijing. This trip helped transform Pak into a leading proponent of Sirhak—practical knowledge.
In Beijing Pak exchanged poems or conducted written conversations with more than fifty famous Han Chinese and Manchu scholars, almost all of them high-ranking officials at court, including Ji Yun (1724–1805), Pan Tingyun, Tiyeboo (1752–1824), and Fengšen Yendehe (1775–1810). He also conversed with a Muslim prince from Central Asia. After returning to Chosŏn, he spent three months composing a treatise entitled Discussions on Northern Learning (K., Pukhak ŭi), in which he discussed what Chosŏn could learn from the Qing in matters ranging from the construction of bridges, roads, ships, and cities to the production of porcelain, paper, bows, and brushes, as well as language and medicine.¹⁵ On each of these matters and many others, Pak described how advanced the Qing was, then compared it to Chosŏn. He suggested that it was Chosŏn’s self-imposed isolation, informed by the civilized–barbarian discourse, that prevented the country from perceiving the Qing’s accomplishments and embracing the Qing’s sophisticated practical skills. For example, he pointed out that Korean emissaries to Beijing did not directly contact local Chinese officials on their journey from Fenghuang Gate to Beijing but rather commissioned Korean interpreters to do so, which caused much inconvenience. Pak passionately urged his fellow scholars to study the Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, and Japanese languages. Proposals such as this one came very close to calling for a comprehensive reform of Chosŏn’s daily practices and statecraft.
At the end of his treatise, Pak wrote a short piece under the title On Worshipping the Zhou (K., Chonju non), addressing Chosŏn’s understanding of the Qing based on the civilized–barbarian discourse. Pak followed the popular anti-Qing trend in acknowledging that the Qing were among the barbarians, but he critically pointed out that Chosŏn could nonetheless learn from the Qing in many aspects. Otherwise, Pak warned, Chosŏn could neither expel China’s barbarians nor transform the eastern country’s barbarians. If we want to expel the barbarians, Pak stated, we had better know who the barbarians are first. Pak stressed that it would not be too late for Chosŏn to seek revenge for the Ming’s demise after first carefully learning from the Qing for twenty years. Pak followed this piece with Debate on Northern Learning (K., Pukhak pyŏl), in which he justified his call to learn from the Qing on the basis of Neo-Confucian principles. He divided those Korean scholars who denigrated the Qing while acclaiming Chosŏn into three groups: the lower savants (K., hasa), focused on grains and foods; the middle savants (K., chongsa), who were concerned with literature; and the upper savants (K., sangsa), who concentrated on Neo-Confucian principles. Pak argued that Chosŏn’s perception of Qing China was based on woefully incomplete knowledge of it and that Chosŏn was in fact underdeveloped compared to the prosperous Qing. Citing Zhu Xi, Pak expressed a wish that Chosŏn had more people who truly understood the principles as he did.¹⁶ Pak’s proposal that Chosŏn learn from the Qing before it fought against the Qing bore a striking resemblance to the strategy of learning the superior techniques of the barbarians to constrain the barbarians (Ch., shiyi changji yi zhiyi) put forward by the Chinese scholar Wei Yuan (1794–1857) in the 1840s, although Wei’s barbarians referred to Europeans.
Pak’s acknowledgment that the Qing was the civilized country disillusioned many of his fellow scholars. For those who had never seen the Qing, Pak described a society prosperous beyond their imaginations. Following Hong, Pak constructed a new image of the Qing, one the upper savants were reluctant to accept. Ch’ae Che-gong, the emissary who had invited Pak to Beijing, was one such upper savant. Ch’ae mourned the fall of the Ming and called the Manchu general of Fenghuang Gate barbarous. When he arrived in Beijing and saw the artificial hill next to the Forbidden City on which Chongzhen had committed suicide in 1644, Ch’ae composed a poem commemorating the Ming. He lamented that Chinese children on the street jeered at his Ming-style clothing. After the summer solstice rituals at the Temple of Earth, the Qianlong emperor praised the Korean mission for the best ritual performance among the outer fan. Ch’ae interpreted this as evidence that the Manchu emperor, whom he sometimes referred to as khan, tacitly approved of the Han Chinese clothes and hats that he and the other Korean visitors wore.¹⁷ When he returned to Chosŏn, Ch’ae collected the poems he had written on the trip into an anthology entitled Records of Enduring Contempt and Insults (K., Ham’in nok). In stark contrast, Korean scholars at the middle and lower levels found Pak’s proposal to use techniques to benefit people’s livelihoods (K., iyong husaeng) very attractive. Seeking to avoid pedanticism, these scholars contributed to the remarkable rise and dissemination of
northern learning. One of them was Pak Chi-wŏn.
Reenvisioning the Barbarous Qing: Pak Chi-wŏn’s Trip to Beijing
Pak Chi-wŏn was also of an aristocratic yangban background. In 1780, his cousin Pak Myŏng-wŏn (1725–90) was appointed the emissary to Beijing for Emperor Qianlong’s seventieth birthday, providing Pak Chi-wŏn an opportunity for tourism in the upper country. Shocked by the Qing’s wealth, evident everywhere from small towns on the Sino-Korean border to the metropolitan areas of Mukden and Beijing, Pak realized that the stereotypical perception of the Qing among the meritocracy of Chosŏn had become an obstacle to progress. Pak found it difficult to overcome the prejudices rooted in the hegemonic assumption of the Qing’s barbarity, although he was deeply influenced by Hong and had an open mind. In his Rehe Diary (K., Yŏlha ilgi), Pak frequently struggled with the moral correctness of the pro-Ming, anti-Qing principles, on the one hand, and his desire to learn from the Qing, on the other. He was uncomfortable, even pained, by any admission of the achievements of the Qing, which implied that the Qing was civilized but Chosŏn was not, just as Pak Che-ka had painfully suggested.
Pak Chi-wŏn’s astonishment began on the first day of his journey, when he reached Fenghuang Gate and saw the small town inside the fence. Pak noticed that the houses, walls, doors, and streets of the town were well designed and maintained, and that the town bore no indication of inferior rural style. He realized that a scene like this at the eastern end of the Qing’s territory could only portend still more prosperous vistas in the inner reaches of the empire. How could the Manchu barbarians manage the land so efficiently, in such an impressive way, and to such a significant degree of control? Pak felt so unsettled that he wanted to return to Hansŏng. He asked his private servant, Chang Bok, How would it be if you were born in China? Chang, an illiterate boy, immediately answered, "China is barbarian [K., Chungguk ho ya], so I would not want to be born in China."¹⁸ The boy’s answer was exactly the reassurance his master needed. It also reflects the prevalence among Koreans of the perception of the Qing as barbarians. Nevertheless, Pak realized that his journey would not be as peaceful as he had wished.
Indeed, after he entered Fenghuang Gate, Pak’s preconceptions about the barbarous Qing crumbled a little more each day. As he passed by Liaoyang, Mukden, and many small towns and villages, Pak was confronted by beautiful buildings, thriving markets, and flourishing urban and rural communities where local civilians and officials treated him in a friendly manner. He enjoyed written conversations with Han Chinese and Manchu scholars and officials and appreciated local scenery and historical sites. In the course of these experiences, the charge that the Qing was barbarous completely vanished from Pak’s diary. Rather, Pak began to discern a gap between himself and his Chinese counterparts in practical terms that had been caused by Chosŏn’s cultural isolation from the Qing after 1644. His experience in two villages illustrates this point vividly.
When Pak visited a pawnshop in a village called Xinmin, he was invited by the owner to write some Chinese characters as an honorable gift. Pak recalled that he had seen four big characters denoting exceeding frost, surpassing snow (Ch., qishuang saixue) on the front doors of some shops in Mukden and Liaoyang, so he wrote these down, assuming that they must mean that a businessman’s heart should be as pure as frost and snow. However, the four characters were actually a metaphor for the high quality of flour. The confused shop owner shook his head and murmured that the characters were not at all related to his business. Pak left the store in anger. The next day, when he camped at Xiaoheishan Village, he wrote the same four characters for a jewelry shop owner. Just as puzzled as the Xinmin merchant had been, the jeweler said, I am selling women’s jewelry, not flour, so why did you write these characters for me? Pak, suddenly aware of the characters’ actual meaning, overcame his embarrassment and calmly wrote other characters that won him high praise from the shop owner.¹⁹
Frustrated by this episode, Pak took a critical look at Chosŏn’s perception of the Qing and put forward the idea of using techniques to benefit people’s livelihoods by comparing different attitudes toward the Qing among his fellow Korean intellectuals. Like Pak Che-ka, he divided Korean scholars into upper savants, middle savants, and lower savants. He began with a scenario in which Korean people who had never visited the Qing would ask those returning from Beijing
about the impressive things they had observed on their journey. According to Pak, whereas many visitors would list without hesitation such things as the White Pagoda in Liaodong, Chinese markets, and Shanhai Pass, the upper savants would instead insist that nothing is impressive because the people in China, from the Son of Heaven to the common subjects, were barbarians as long as they shaved their foreheads. Since barbarians are dogs and sheep, nothing of theirs was worth praising. The middle savants would also argue that the mountains and lands became barbarous and nothing over there is impressive until we lead a hundred thousand troops to cross Shanhai Pass to recover China. Identifying himself as one of the lower savants who shared with the upper and middle savants the belief in revering China and expelling the barbarians, Pak nevertheless passionately called on his colleagues to learn the good ways and useful systems [of the Qing] as long as they benefit our people and country, even if they are created by barbarians. He argued, If we want to expel the barbarians, we should learn all the good Chinese systems to change ours, after which we might be able to say that China has nothing impressive.²⁰ Pak tried to separate recognition of the Qing’s superior practical techniques from the cultural and moral charges against the Qing. Yet this approach, which meant blurring the boundaries between civilized and barbarian, was a double-edged sword not only for himself but also for the general moral foundation of his country.
On August 30, 1780, when Pak arrived in Beijing, he was stunned by the grandness of the splendid metropolis. In his diary, for the first time, he embraced the Qing regnal title to express the date—the first day of the eighth month of the forty-fifth year of Qianlong—thus incorporating himself into the Zongfan mindset by identifying the Qing as the center of the world. On that day, Pak completely overlooked the fact that he was in a country of barbarians.²¹
Identifying Chosŏn as a Loyal Subordinate of the Qing: Pak Chi-wŏn at Rehe
When Pak Chi-wŏn and his fellow Koreans arrived in Beijing, they learned that the emperor had moved to the summer palace at Rehe, where the sixth Panchen Erdeni (1738–80) and Mongol princes would convene to celebrate the imperial birthday on September 11. On September 2, the emperor instructed the Ministry of Rites to ask the Korean emissaries to visit Rehe and ordered a minister of the Grand Council (Ch., Junjichu) to Beijing to welcome them, an act of extraordinary imperial benevolence. The Koreans immediately organized a special ad hoc team to travel to Rehe, to which Pak Chi-wŏn was attached. Five days later, the group arrived at Rehe, where it quickly became involved in subtle conflicts with the Chinese side. The emperor and his officials were keen to showcase Chosŏn’s subservience as a model outer fan, but the Koreans were equally keen to avoid this role, given their ambivalence about the Qing. However, Chosŏn’s subordinate position in the bilateral framework meant that the emissaries had few alternatives.
The first incident that revealed this tension took place upon the emissaries’ arrival, when the emperor informed the emissaries that they would stand at the end of the right wing of China’s second-rank civil officials during the grand ceremony on the celebration day. This was a special and unprecedented grace from the emperor, because the ritual code generally required the emissaries to stand at the end of the left wing of civil officials. The ministers of the Ministry of Rites asked the emissaries to submit a memorial showing their sincere appreciation. The emissaries hesitated, as it would have been inappropriate to do so without the king’s authorization, but the ministers pushed them to draft the memorial. Pak commented that as the aged emperor became more suspicious, the ministers had to work harder to meet his wishes.²²
On a subsequent occasion, the emperor sent a minister of the Grand Council to inquire whether the two emissaries would like to visit the saintly monk from the western area (Ch., xifan shengseng), referring to the Panchen Erdeni. The Koreans replied that they never stopped communicating with people of China (K., Chungguk insa), but that they did not dare to communicate with people of other countries (K., taguk in). Undeterred, the emperor ordered the emissaries to visit the lama at his monastery. At the monastery, the communications between the Korean emissaries and the Panchen Erdeni followed a labyrinthine path: the Erdeni spoke to the Mongol prince next to him, who relayed the message to the minister of the Grand Council, who forwarded it to the Qing interpreter, who passed it to
the interpreter from Chosŏn, who finally translated the words into Korean for the emissaries. The conversation involved Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, Chinese, and Korean, highlighting the multiethnic and multicultural nature of the unified empire, but the extent to which the Panchen Erdeni and the Korean emissaries could actually understand each other and grasp the political meanings behind the words used remains unclear. Acting on the guidance of the minister of the Grand Council, the emissaries, who were as stiff as clay dolls and wooden puppets, presented the Panchen Erdeni with silk handkerchiefs, and the Panchen Erdeni gave the Koreans three small bronze figurines of the Buddha and some Hada, Pulu, and Tibetan incense in return. Since the figurines contravened Confucian beliefs, the emissaries traded them for silver that they then distributed among their servants instead of bringing the figurines back to Chosŏn.²³
Behind the envoys’ reluctance to visit the Panchen Erdeni was the problem of the ritual of kowtow: the Korean emissaries refused to perform the ceremony to the lama. Pak later defended their behavior in a written conversation with a Manchu official: "Our humble country is in the same family with the big country, and there is no difference between inside and outside between us. Yet the lama is a man of the western area, so how could our envoys dare go and visit him? There is a rule that ‘subordinates have no right to conduct diplomacy’ [K., insin mu oegyo]."²⁴ Chosŏn was demonstrating its loyalty as China’s fan and subordinate. The principle that a subordinate country had no right to conduct diplomacy would be emphasized by the king of Chosŏn again and again when Western states tried to open direct lines of contact with Chosŏn between the 1830s and the 1870s. Their overtures created a tremendous and insurmountable dilemma for the scholars of Chosŏn. Although they viewed the Qing as a barbarous place and themselves as the civilized successors of the Ming within a Chosŏn-centric cultural world, as soon as another political entity approached Chosŏn, they would identify the Qing as China and hew to the Qing’s Zongfan line to embrace their unique role as the representatives of the men from afar cherished by China.²⁵
At a banquet held for representatives of the Qing’s subordinates and attended by the Panchen Erdeni, Mongol princes from Mongolia, Muslim princes from Xinjiang, emissaries from Chosŏn, and indigenous chiefs from southwestern China, the emperor lauded Chosŏn’s fealty, declaring to those gathered at the banquet that "Chosŏn has been serving as a fan for generations and has always been loyal. It pays its annual tribute on time, and that is truly worth praising. The emperor added, We, the monarch and the subordinates, trust each other fully and belong to the same family inside and outside China, so we should not bother ourselves with these overelaborate rituals. He then issued an edict according to which Chosŏn needed to present only an annual tribute; all other tributes, along with humble memorials, would be permanently canceled, reflecting the Qing’s policy of cherishing men from afar with substantial measures rather than rhetoric" (Ch., rouhui yuanren, yishi bu yiwen).²⁶ Again, the Korean emissaries served as the typical men from afar for the purposes of imperial discourse extolling the Qing’s civilization and centrality.
After returning home, Pak Chi-wŏn, like Pak Che-ka before him, called on his fellow scholars to learn from the Qing. In 1781 he wrote a foreword to Pak Cheka’s Discussions on Northern Learning, in which he reiterated that Chosŏn should abandon its incorrect assumptions about the Qing.²⁷ As other Korean scholars followed in Pak’s footsteps and made their own visits to Beijing, the Koreans’ perceptions about the Ming and the Qing continued to evolve.
The Way of the Heavenly Dynasty: The Qing and the Tributary Missions of 1790 and 1793
The Imperial Grand Banquet and the Korean Mission of 1790
The Chosŏn meritocracy increasingly realized that it could not restore the Ming in China, and this recognition helped normalize its service to the Qing under the rubric of serving the great. Compared to Pak Che-ka in 1778 and Pak Chi-wŏn in 1780, Sŏ Ho-su (1736–99), who visited Rehe as an associate envoy to celebrate Emperor Qianlong’s eightieth birthday in 1790, described Chosŏn’s Zongfan contacts with the Qing in very moderate terms. The mission, led by envoy Hwang
In-jŏm (?–1802), associate envoy Sŏ, and secretary Yi Paek-hyŏng (1737–?), left Hansŏng on July 9 and two weeks later arrived at Ŭiju, where it could not cross the Yalu River because of flooding. During his sojourn in Ŭiju, Sŏ commented in one of his poems that the Yalu River is the boundary between the civilized and the barbarians (K., Hwa–I bungye), but in his diary he used the Qing’s regnal title for the date.²⁸
The Qianlong emperor was concerned about the time it would take for the Koreans to reach the celebration at Rehe. As the representatives of the Qing’s outer and inner fan convened again at Rehe, the emperor saw the attendance of Chosŏn’s emissaries as an indispensable part of the system, way, or fundamentals (Ch., tizhi) of the big family. On August 1, the Korean emissaries, still in Ŭiju, received an official note from the Ministry of Rites in Beijing via the Manchu general of Mukden. The message had traveled 500 li (about 155 miles) per day, one of the fastest rates possible for the Qing mail system. The ministry instructed the Koreans to head directly to Rehe, as they needed to arrive by August 19, the same deadline that the emperor had set for the king of Annam and the emissaries of Lanchang and Burma. When the mission crossed the river the next day, a second note from Beijing arrived, urging the envoys to meet the deadline because Chosŏn’s presence was particularly crucial to the system (Ch., shu yu tizhi youguan). They subsequently received a third note in a completely different tone, saying that it would be fine if the mission could not reach Rehe in time.
The emissaries, perceiving the reversal as a subtle way of cherishing the men from afar, immediately organized a special team that would head directly for Rehe with humble palace memorials and selected tributes, while the rest of the mission would go to Beijing as planned. Covering more than 260 miles after passing Mukden, the emissaries reached Rehe on August 24 and learned that the emperor had changed the date of the grand banquet to August 25 to accommodate Chosŏn’s mission. The Mongol and Muslim princes, the emissaries of Burma and Lanchang, the indigenous chiefs of Taiwan, and the king of Annam had all arrived several days earlier.²⁹ The emperor’s decision conveyed eloquently that Chosŏn’s position was irreplaceable in the Qing-centric world.
The following day, the Ministry of Rites guided Chosŏn’s emissaries to the imperial palace for an audience with the Qianlong emperor. After asking for the emissaries’ names and ranks, the emperor instructed them to attend the grand banquet and to watch the Peking opera. In further illustration of Chosŏn’s prominent status, the Korean emissaries were arranged in first position in the wing of the emissaries of other countries, while those of Annam were in second position, those of Lanchang in third, those of Burma in fourth, and the indigenous chiefs in fifth. In addition, Chosŏn’s well-written humble palace memorials were considered exemplary. Hešen (1750–99), the most influential Manchu minister in the Grand Council, showed one of the Korean memorials to the king of Annam, Nguyễn Huệ, and commented, "Chosŏn serves the great in such a good manner that it is the model for other fan ." The Vietnamese king inspected the memorial several times and praised it highly.³⁰
With the move of the grand meeting from Rehe to Beijing in early September, the emissaries of Chosŏn retained their prominent role in all ritual performances in the palaces of Yuan-Ming-Yuan and the Forbidden City. The emperor frequently granted the emissaries audiences, invited them to watch operas, treated them to Manchu banquets, and gave them gifts. On October 11 the Korean mission finally left Beijing for their homeland after a successful stay.
Local Banquets and the Vietnamese Mission in 1790
The Qing expected the tributary emissaries from its other fan to accept and follow the imperial etiquette as readily as those from Chosŏn did. Any deviation from the prescribed practices would not only cause conflict between the Qing and the specific fan but also result in internal tension between the Qing monarch and his local officials. Such an instance occurred during the visit to Beijing of the king of Annam, Nguyễn Huệ, in 1790.
Annam experienced a turbulent period toward the end of the eighteenth century, and the Qing was drawn into the turmoil. In 1771, in what was called the Tây-so’n Rebellion, Nguyễn Huệ and his two brothers overthrew the Nguyễn family, which controlled the south of Vietnam, and restored the later Lê Dynasty
(1428–1788). In 1788, worried about Nguyễn’s growing power, the young king, Lê Duy Kỳ (1765–93), fled the capital. At Lê’s request, Emperor Qianlong sent troops to Annam, which had been the Qing’s "outer fan for more than one hundred years. Under the command of the governor-general of Liangguang, Sun Shiyi (1720–96), the Chinese army quickly occupied Hanoi and restored the government of Lê Duy Kỳ. But the Chinese forces were defeated in an unexpected attack by Nguyễn in January 1789, and Lê fled Hanoi again. Emperor Qianlong appointed his favorite Manchu general, Fuk’anggan (1753–96), who had just suppressed a rebellion in Taiwan, to replace Sun and organize a counterattack. However, the emperor was not interested in conquering Vietnam through a large-scale war, and he instructed Fuk’anggan and Sun to be receptive to any attempts by Nguyễn to sue for peace. The emperor reviewed China’s frustrating experience with converting Vietnam into China’s prefectures and counties" (Ch., junxian qi di) in pre-Qing history and stressed that the Qing would not integrate Annam into China’s map and register (Ch., shouru bantu) by imitating the case of Xinjiang, where the court had had to dispatch numerous officials to manage the land after the military conquest, in particular after the war with the Zunghar Mongols.³¹ Qing policymakers thus clearly understood that policies were to be applied flexibly in different parts of the Qing frontier. As it turned out, Nguyễn was not ready for another fight with the Qing either, so in the same month he presented Sun with a humble palace memorial to express his willingness to become a subordinate of the Heavenly Dynasty, marking the end of the conflict on the battlefield.
Recognizing the motivation behind Nguyễn’s act of submission to the Qing, Qianlong issued an edict on May 15, declaring that he would not use force against the country for the sake of the barbarian people of Annam. Believing that Heaven has abandoned the Lê, the emperor settled the Lê family and its loyal followers in the city of Guilin in Guangxi, a Chinese province bordering Vietnam.³² This arrangement signaled that the Qing was preparing to support a new Vietnamese regime. To that end, the emperor indicated that he might invest Nguyễn as king if Nguyễn visited Beijing in person. This, according to the emperor, was precisely how he managed foreign barbarians—with mercy and discipline. The emperor also confirmed that Lê and his followers would not be sent back to Annam for restoration, and to prove his intentions he ordered them to cut their hair according to the Qing style and to wear Qing clothes. In Guilin, Fuk’anggan and Sun Shiyi told the desperate young king, "You are in the land of the central civilized country [Ch., Zhonghua zhi tu], so you should follow China’s system [Ch., Zhongguo zhi zhi] and change your hairstyle and clothes."³³
As the manager of communications at the border, Fuk’anggan understood the mood of his aging and vainglorious master in Beijing, so he impressed on the emperor Nguyễn’s willingness to visit Beijing. In August the emperor quickly invested Nguyễn as the new king in order to provide him with the necessary orthodox legitimacy to govern and stabilize Annam domestically. In the book of investiture, the emperor emphasized the importance of the principle of serving the great on the part of an outer fan and that of cherishing the small on the part of China, highlighting the same ideological reciprocity that existed between Chosŏn and the Qing. The emperor took four steps to welcome the new king to Beijing. First, he instructed the Grand Secretariat and the Ministry of Rites to create new guest-host rituals (Ch., binzhu zhi li) between the king and the Qing’s governors-general and governors. He also endowed the king with a golden belt that was reserved for the Qing’s royal vassals (Ch., Zongfan).³⁴ Second, he moved the dethroned Lê to Beijing and appointed him a hereditary major in the Han Eight Banners. The 376 followers who had accompanied Lê were registered with the banner household system, and many were moved to Jiangnan, Zhejiang, Sichuan, and other provinces. Third, the emperor allowed the new Nguyễn regime to pick up their Chinese calendar books every year from the governor of Guangxi instead of traveling to Beijing for them. And fourth, he promised to open a border market after Nguyễn had visited Beijing, in recognition of the idea that the barbarian people of that country are all loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty. All of these measures were aimed at encouraging Nguyễn’s sincerity in transforming into a subordinate of the civilized (Ch., xianghua zhi cheng).³⁵
On May 26, 1790, the king and his mission of 150 members reached the Qing border, where he performed the highest level of kowtow to the imperial edicts and
gifts.³⁶ Fuk’anggan then accompanied Nguyễn to Rehe, passing through Guangxi, Guangdong, Hunan, Jiangxi, Hubei, Henan, and Zhili Provinces. In early June the mission arrived in the port of Guangzhou, and the Western barbarians of the Cohongs (referring to local factories through which the Western merchants traded with the Chinese side) gathered to witness the homage paid to the Qing by the king of an outer fan.³⁷ Two months later the Qing court invested Nguyễn’s son as crown prince, and the emperor applauded the father-son relationship between the emperor and Nguyễn. Following the precedents set by his reception of the king of Chosŏn and the Mongol khan of Korcin, the emperor dispatched a minister from the Ministry of Rites to welcome the king to a tea ceremony at Liangxiang, a few miles south of Beijing.
The practice of the policy of cherishing the men from afar went smoothly until a report from Rehe in late July made the emperor uncomfortable. The officials there sent word that they had received an unofficial note (Ch., chuandan) saying that the daily cost of entertaining and accommodating the Vietnamese mission in Jiangxi was around four thousand taels of silver—an astounding sum. The officials were worried that it would be inappropriate for them to host the mission with less luxury once it reached Rehe, but they could only work with the funds they had available. The emperor, too, was shocked by the cost, as he had treated Mongol princes and emissaries of other countries to annual banquets for less than one thousand taels. An expense of 4,000 taels per day meant that the total amount spent on the king and his entourage would reach 0.8 million taels during their two-hundred-day sojourn in China.
Believing that this issue deeply concerned the way of the Heavenly Dynasty, the emperor lectured his officials that the great Heavenly Dynasty should not welcome one or two subordinates from the remote lands in a luxurious way. In addition, said the emperor, if the king were entertained too lavishly in the provinces, he would not sufficiently appreciate the imperial grace when treated with less opulence in Rehe. Chosŏn’s missions illustrated the emperor’s point. The Koreans prepared their own meals at each transfer station, but once they arrived in Beijing or Rehe, their daily logistics were entirely taken over by Qing personnel and the emissaries were hosted in a sumptuous manner. This substantial difference in hospitality between the provinces and Beijing created exactly the effect that the emperor sought. The danger posed by the luxurious treatment of Annam’s emissaries along their route lay in its potential to undermine the spectacle of imperial generosity that the emperor, informed by the Chosŏn model, wished to present at the mission’s final destination. Thus, the emperor instructed the provincial authorities in Jiangxi, Hubei, Henan, and Zhili to tone down the extravagance of their receptions, as this was the only way that the mean between abundance and scarcity (Ch., fengjian shizhong) could be realized. It was the first time in the Qianlong period that the emperor gave orders to temper the level of luxury in entertaining foreign dignitaries.³⁸
The event created an opportunity for the emperor to discipline his officials. He listed two possible reasons for the astonishing costs: either local officials deliberately spent too much in order to seek profitable reimbursement from the imperial coffers in the future, or the Chinese escorts extorted too much money from the provinces they passed through. Either possibility could damage the way of the Heavenly Dynasty. The emperor ordered governors in Guangdong, Jiangxi, Hubei, Anhui, and Zhili to investigate how the four-thousand-tael figure had come about. None of the officials claimed responsibility, but the emperor insisted that the origin of the unofficial note be identified and suggested it might have come from Zhili. Liang Kentang (1715–1802), the governor-general of Zhili, immediately reported that the note was wrongly printed in his province. The emperor condemned Liang and closed the case, but he did not punish Liang, who was apparently the scapegoat of the emperor’s face-saving inquiry.³⁹
When the mission from Annam arrived in Rehe on August 20, 1790, Nguyễn was granted an imperial audience together with the indigenous chiefs of southwestern China and Taiwan, the khan of Kazak, the princes of Mongolia and the Muslim tributaries, and the emissaries of Burma and Lanchang. The emperor bestowed official Qing robes on the king and his followers. On August 25, as described in the previous section, Chosŏn’s bedraggled emissaries reached Rehe, and
all the men from afar could finally convene at the imperial hall for the grand banquet. There and later in Beijing, the envoys from the Qing’s periphery kowtowed to their shared Son of Heaven in China. What Qianlong saw and experienced was indeed a harmonious picture of the Heavenly Dynasty.
The Way of the Heavenly Dynasty: The British Mission in 1793
Three years later, the emperor would receive a very different group of men from afar. This mission came from England, known in China as Yingjili. In September 1792 Lord Macartney (1737–1806) left Portsmouth for China to seek greater commercial opportunities in the name of celebrating Qianlong’s birthday. In July 1793 the mission reached Dagu Harbor in Tianjin and was welcomed by Liang Kentang and by Zhengrui, the salt tax commissioner of Changlu. On September 14 Macartney and his assistants, who were called British tributary emissaries (Ch., Yingjili guo gongshi), were granted an audience with Qianlong at Rehe, after which the mission was sent back to Guangzhou via the overland route. Scholars have described the visit as an epoch-making collision of two different cultural, social, and imperial systems and as the beginning of the East-West encounter that eventually led to the Opium War of 1839–42.⁴⁰ Rather than reviewing the entire event, which has been well examined, this section focuses on the connection between the British mission and the legacy of Annam’s mission in 1790 against the historical backdrop of the Qing’s institutional barbarianization of all other countries, including Britain.
Until 1793 the Qing did not have a clear sense of the British presence in India and failed to connect the British activities on the Tibetan frontier with those in India.⁴¹ The Qing court saw the British embassy of 1793 as a tributary mission from an outer fan, so all bilateral contacts had to be conducted in accordance with imperial codes just like those that applied to Chosŏn, Annam, and Ryukyu. This time, the emperor made a point of instructing his local officials to treat the foreign barbarians of the British tributary mission appropriately between abundance and scarcity. Such treatment, said the emperor, would befit the way of the upper country and ensure that the men from afar would not disdain China. Of the officials involved in hosting the mission, Liang Kentang, still smarting from the scandal of the overly extravagant hospitality shown to Annam in 1790, was perhaps the only one who thoroughly understood what the emperor meant. The emperor, too, might have taken the precedent of Annam as a standard for testing his officials. The game between the emperor and his officials was back on. In August, after learning that Zhejiang, Shandong, and Tianjin had lavished food on the British envoys, the emperor admonished his officials on the proper balance to be observed in welcoming the men from afar. Too little generosity, he explained, might prevent them from transforming into the civilized, while too much might result in their contempt for the way and dignity of the Heavenly Dynasty. The point was to show neither inferiority nor superiority in entertaining, but to remain in accord with the way and highlight the act of cherishing. He reminded Liang several times of this proper way.⁴²
When the mission reached Rehe on September 8, Macartney and his assistants refused to prostrate themselves before the emperor. The next day the emperor issued an edict to Liang and his colleagues, expressing his disappointment in the British envoys. The edict attributed the envoys’ shocking lack of respect to the extravagant treatment they had received in the provinces, which must have encouraged the barbarians’ arrogance and overshadowed the impression that Rehe ought to have made on them. To remedy the matter and punish the provinces, the emperor ordered that the mission return to Guangdong by the overland route and along interior rivers, and that all accommodations and meals at transfer stations be provided in strict conformity with tributary precedents for such rude foreign barbarians. The emperor further stressed that the hospitality extended to the envoys in Beijing should be moderated in order to highlight the Chinese system through this punishment and to show the "[appropriate] way to manage an outer fan " (Ch., jiayu waifan zhi dao).⁴³ From the emperor’s perspective, the accommodations and meals were meant to reflect the way of the dynasty, a point the British visitors and many local Chinese officials completely missed. For the emperor, an essential aspect of controlling the envoys of outer fan was the skillful deployment of the bureaucratic apparatus to cherish the men from afar appropriately.
After negotiations concerning the performance of rituals, the British group—consisting of Macartney; his deputy, George Staunton (1737–1801); Staunton’s twelve-year-old son, George Thomas Staunton (1781–1859); and other members of the mission—was granted an imperial audience at the grand tent on September 14. Instead of kowtowing, the members of the mission knelt down on one knee and bowed their heads nine times. The British performed the same compromise ritual again on September 17, the imperial birthday, and days after that both in Rehe and in Beijing.⁴⁴ Simultaneously, the Manchu and Mongol princes and Burmese emissaries performed the rituals in strict observance of the imperial codes. After the ceremony, the emperor endowed the British mission with many gifts, including Korean clothing that had been piling up in Beijing as a result of Chosŏn’s annual tributes.
For their part, the British submitted to the emperor their version of a humble palace memorial, which, among other things, asked him to station a permanent representative in Beijing and to begin trading outside Guangzhou. In reply, the emperor issued a long edict to King George III, refusing all of their requests. He explained that no precedents beyond the established rules existed, so Britain could not hope to change China’s way of cherishing the men from afar and the barbarians in the four directions of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao jiahui yuanren fuyu siyi zhi dao). The emperor explained that he understood that Yingjili was so far from China that it was unfamiliar with the magnificent way of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao tizhi), but he stressed that the British could not live and trade in Beijing because the civilized–barbarian distinction is extremely strict (Ch., Hua–Yi zhi bian shenyan). The Jesuit missionaries in Beijing, the emperor said, were not allowed to contact Chinese people either.⁴⁵ Macartney failed to obtain any trade concessions and thus shared the fate of his predecessors, James Flint in 1759 and Nicholas Skottowe in 1761. Instead the British embassy’s visit to China, which the Qing considered a tributary mission, strengthened the Qing’s position as the civilized center and reinforced its institutionalized norms regarding its foreign relations. After all, it was Qing China that, as Li Chen observes, maintained a dominant position in deciding the terms of the Sino-Western economic, cultural, and political relationships.⁴⁶
The British thus had no effect on the Qing’s worldview. On January 8, 1794, Macartney departed Guangzhou for Calcutta. The next day, three emissaries from Ryukyu were granted an audience with Qianlong in the Forbidden City, where they kowtowed to the emperor as usual. On January 22 the Mongol and Muslim princes and the chieftains of indigenous tribes from southwestern China were granted an imperial audience in which they too kowtowed to the Son of Heaven in the traditional manner. Three days later the Korean emissaries of the annual tributary mission prostrated themselves in front of the emperor. Then came New Year’s Day, and all princes and tributary emissaries convened in the Forbidden City to attend the grand assembly and lavish banquets together with Chinese officials, all performing the highest level of kowtow again.⁴⁷ After the British mission left, then, the Zongfan mechanism between the Qing and its outer fan continued to operate in its accustomed seamless manner.
Rebellious Western and Loyal Eastern Barbarians in the 1840s
The First Opium War and the Diplomatic Paradox of Qing China
Britain did not give up. In 1816 Lord Amherst (1783–1857) visited China as an ambassador. George Thomas Staunton, who had met with Qianlong as part of the Macartney mission and later served as the director of the British East India Company in Guangzhou, acted as Amherst’s deputy. By this time, China was ruled by Qianlong’s son, Jiaqing. When the British mission arrived in Tianjin and contacted local officials, the deputy governor-general of Zhili, Tojin (1755–1835), adopted the tone of the provincial hosts during the Vietnamese mission in 1790 and the British mission in 1793, assuring Jiaqing that he would adhere to precedent and welcome the tributary mission in order to prevent the foreigners from disdaining China.
The crisis over kowtow, however, erupted again between the two sides. Because the dispute remained unsettled by the time the mission arrived in Beijing in late
August, the British did not immediately visit the emperor. The emperor read their absence as a sign of British contempt that China as the common leader under the Heaven (Ch., Zhongguo wei tianxia gongzhu) could not tolerate. The emperor also did not trust Staunton, saying that the latter should remember what ceremonies he had performed to Qianlong in 1793. In the end, the emperor refused to accept Amherst’s humble palace memorial, returned the British tributes, and ordered the envoys to be sent back to their homeland with token gifts from China.⁴⁸ The second British mission had also failed.
In 1821 Staunton published a translation of the travelogue of Tulišen, the official who had visited Russia as the Qing envoy in 1712. In the preface, Staunton pointed out that the Chinese government followed an anti-social system in their intercourse with other nations and that China would consequently rank very low indeed in the scale of civilized nations.⁴⁹ Staunton’s ranking of civilization from his Eurocentric point of view served well the British strategy in China at the time. As the British-dominated opium trade reached new heights, the large inflows of opium and the dramatic outflows of silver were creating a financial crisis in China, forcing Beijing to consider banning the opium trade. In April 1840 Staunton, by then a member of the British Parliament, urged his colleagues to use force against China.⁵⁰ The ensuing Opium War between the two countries ended with the conclusion of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, the twenty-second year of Daoguang, Qianlong’s grandson. According to the Treaty of Nanjing and the Supplementary Treaty of Bogue, which was negotiated according to Western norms and signed in 1843, Britain gained the right of extraterritoriality and most favored nation status in China. The treaties thus planted the seeds of European imperialism in the Chinese world through the emerging treaty port framework.
In 1844 the Qing established the position of superintendent of trade for the five ports (Ch., Wukou tongshang dachen) to manage contacts with Britain, France, the United States, and other Western countries. On the surface, the new post moved these treaty nations out of the orbit of the Ministry of Rites and the scope of the Zongfan framework. But the first official to hold the post was Qiying (1787–1858), a Manchu and a signatory of the Treaty of Nanjing who soon after became governor-general of Liangguang, where he was in charge of China’s contacts not only with Western countries in Guangzhou but also with Annam, Siam, and several other outer fan. This new post was thus added to the established Zongfan system without changing the nature of the system per se. Likewise, nothing really changed in other parts of the Qing periphery after the war.
Keeping the West out of the Ritual: Qing Envoys to Chosŏn
After Queen Kim of Chosŏn passed away in late 1843, the Daoguang emperor appointed two Manchu officials, Baijun (?–1859) and Hengxing, as envoys to deliver his condolences to Hansŏng. In February 1844 the two envoys left Beijing for Chosŏn with the imperial book of condolences and other items. After crossing Fenghuang Gate and marching toward the Yalu River, they found that the Koreans had set up several shanties to welcome them. In Ŭiju more Korean officials, including one with the king’s name card, greeted the envoys. On April 7 the envoys arrived in Hongjewŏn, in the suburbs of Hansŏng, where a high-ranking official with the king’s name card and a minister of the Ŭijŏngbu, the Korean cabinet, welcomed them.
The grand ceremony was held the next day. In the morning the envoys were escorted to the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country outside the West Gate of the capital. The king came out through the West Gate to receive the imperial edict and returned to his palace first. The envoys were then escorted through the South Gate and dismounted from their horses near a gate to the palace. Baijun was guided by an usher to the grand hall, where he placed the imperial book of condolences and the condolence money on a desk on the east side of the hall and stood next to the desk. The king, at the foot of the steps to the hall, kowtowed to the imperial items and then proceeded to the mourning hall. There the two envoys in turn made offerings to the spirit of the dead. The king led the royal family members into the hall and knelt down in front of the envoys to receive the emperor’s condolences. Following ritual wailing, the last step of the ceremony, the imperial book of condolences was burned.⁵¹
The king then invited the envoys to the grand hall for a tea ceremony, after which the envoys went to their residence, the South Palace Annex. The next day the king visited the envoys to treat them to a tea banquet, and Korean officials visited the envoys to ask them to write Chinese characters, keeping the guests busy. The envoys also distributed 300 taels of silver and 490 felt caps among local servants. On April 12 the king sent off the envoys, giving each a gift of 2,500 taels of silver. After they returned to Beijing, the envoys reported on their mission to the emperor and suggested that the emperor preserve the 5,000 taels of silver in the Ministry of Rites, which could return the silver to Chosŏn through the country’s next mission to Beijing to show the imperial kindness of cherishing the men from afar.⁵² During their three-day sojourn in Hansŏng, the envoys did not talk with the king about any events in China related to the Opium War, the treaties signed with Western countries, or the changes in China’s foreign policies in South China, nor did the king ask about these matters. Their interactions were confined to the performance of minutely prescribed rituals that undergirded the longstanding mutual dependence of their legitimacy as Zhongguo and its outer fan, respectively. This primacy of ritual was demonstrated again soon afterward, in 1845.
In April 1845 Emperor Daoguang appointed Huashana (1806–59), a Manchu minister of the Ministry of Revenue, and Deshun, an associate general of the Mongol Eight Banners, as envoys to Hansŏng to invest a new queen. The envoys arrived in Hansŏng in late May. The king went outside the city to welcome the envoys and the imperial books of investiture, after which the envoys were taken in sedan chairs to the palace, where they alighted in front of the grand hall and carried in the books of investiture. The king entered the hall to receive the imperial books by performing the kowtow. An usher read the books aloud to Chosŏn’s officials outside the hall, and then the king led his officials in three cheers of Long live the emperor (Ch., shanhu wansui). After a stay of three days, the envoys left the capital.⁵³ When the envoys reported to Beijing, the emperor asked them about the distance they had traveled, the king’s clothes, and the gifts sent by the king, but no mention was made of Chosŏn’s politics or other domestic Korean issues. For the emperor, the crises and challenges imposed by the war with Britain and the opening of treaty ports in Southeast China were entirely outside the purview of Qing-Chosŏn relations. At the top of the Qing administration, the Sinocentric cosmopolitan order and the Qing’s identity as the Heavenly Dynasty remained untouched. Chosŏn, the prototypical outer fan, still maintained its loyalty to the Great Qing.
Ministers and Emissaries: The British and Korean Missions to Beijing, 1860 and 1861
The Permanent Residence of Western Representatives in Beijing
In 1856 the Second Opium War erupted in Guangzhou. The Chinese governor-general and imperial commissioner, Ye Mingchen (1807–59), who was in charge of foreign affairs, was captured in his office in the city in January 1858 by the Anglo-French forces under the leadership of Lord Elgin (1811–63). Part of a family that had enjoyed close contacts with Korean visitors in Beijing, Ye shared with Koreans the discourse of the civilized–barbarian distinction.⁵⁴ He had served in Guangzhou for more than a decade as one of the strongest opponents of allowing British representatives and merchants to move into the walled city. In his last memorial to the Xianfeng emperor before he was captured, Ye analyzed his negotiations with the British, French, and American ministers in Guangzhou and underlined his strategy of secretly preparing for crises and publicly cherishing the barbarians.⁵⁵ The Western colonial states’ expansion to East Asia remained incomprehensible to Ye, who still conceptualized all international contacts, including conflicts, skirmishes, and even the ongoing war, within the Zongfan framework. The emperor, with no better understanding than Ye, regarded the behavior of the British and French as rebellion and emphasized that China’s first imperative was to cherish these wayward subordinates to preserve the national polity and refuse their requests. The rationale was the same as that behind Qianlong’s instructions regarding the Macartney embassy in 1793. Neither the emperor nor his ministers at court nor his governors at the border realized that they
were dealing with several global powers engaging in gunboat diplomacy from Africa to East Asia.
The war situation continued to escalate. In April 1858 the British, French, American, and Russian ministers convened in Tianjin and dispatched an ultimatum to Beijing, demanding negotiations with Chinese plenipotentiaries (Ch., bianyi xingshi). Among the requests made by these states, such as expanding trade to the Chinese interior and opening more ports, the most offensive to the Qing was the demand to lodge permanent representatives in Beijing, precisely as Macartney had proposed in 1793. The court instructed the governor-general of Zhili, Tan Tingxiang (?–1870), who was negotiating with the European ministers in Tianjin, to clarify that "all contacts between China and foreign countries have always been conducted at the borders, and only countries among China’s subordinates [Ch., shuguo] can visit Beijing to pay tribute [Ch., chaogong]. No commissioner from those countries has ever been allowed to reside in Beijing permanently. The court also refused to appoint any plenipotentiaries. The emperor argued that his stance was not xenophobic because China is not afraid of the visit of the barbarians to Beijing, however many people were to come; the problem is that such a visit does not fit the system. Along the same lines, he refused to allow the American minister, William Reed (1806–76), to visit Beijing because the United States is a friendly country [Ch., yuguo], but the imperial collection of precedents does not record how we should treat a friendly country, so the practice of entertaining might be inappropriate."⁵⁶ The emperor asked that the ministers return to Guangzhou and discuss such issues as tariffs with the governor-general there, suggesting that the negotiations should be conducted with the superintendent of trade for the five ports at the border rather than in Beijing. The location of the negotiations was an integral aspect of the Sinocentric world order and thus mattered greatly in the eyes of the Qing rulers.
The Anglo-French Alliance ignored the emperor’s instructions and occupied the Dagu Forts on May 20, after which they forwarded Tan Tingxiang a note requesting that the four nations be allowed entry into Tianjin for negotiations with the Chinese plenipotentiaries as well as entry into Beijing, where they would either pay a visit to the emperor or meet with grand secretaries. On May 28 the emperor appointed the Manchu grand secretary, Guiliang (1785–62), as minister extraordinary and the Manchu minister Huashana as plenipotentiary and sent them to Tianjin for negotiations. Huashana, who had served as the deputy of the Son of Heaven on the mission to Chosŏn in 1845, now became a diplomatic representative of the Chinese sovereign who was equal to the monarchs of Britain and France. The emperor particularly instructed Tan to inform the foreign ministers that there was no need for them to visit Beijing. In the meantime, he ordered Prince Sengge Rinchen (1811–65) of the Korcin Mongols to use his Mongol warriors to reinforce the garrison between Tianjin and Beijing.
The Sino-British negotiations reached a deadlock over the issue of a permanent representative in Beijing. At court, many high-ranking officials, such as Prince Yi (Dzai Yūwan, 1816–61), firmly refused the Western request to place representatives in Beijing. They suggested instead that Britain could follow the established practice of the Russian barbarians (Ch., E yi) and station students rather than commissioners in Beijing. The students would dress in the clothes and caps of China (Ch., Zhongguo yiguan), abide by local rules, and refrain from involvement in official affairs. Britain could negotiate with Chinese governors-general and governors over trade affairs at treaty ports. If the British insisted on visiting Beijing, the emperor said that they would have to travel from Shanghai via the overland route, escorted by Chinese officials, with all accommodations and meals covered by China. They could visit Beijing once every three or five years, not annually.⁵⁷ Not coincidentally, this proposal fit precisely into the existing tributary ritual codes: Beijing was trying to draw Britain into the established Zongfan system. From 1761 to 1793, then to 1858, the Qing court’s understanding of Britain remained the same because the Qing’s institutionalized Zongfan norms never changed.
This ideal model was soon partly—if opaquely—realized in the treaty with the United States, concluded on June 18, 1858, in Tianjin. Article 5 of the treaty regulated the visit of the American minister to Beijing in accordance with the specific ritual codes for the Qing’s outer fan.⁵⁸ The regulations specified the frequency of
the Americans’ visits to Beijing, the overland route they were to take from Tianjin to Beijing, their entertainment by local authorities, the requisite written notice to the Ministry of Rites, and especially the size of the mission—twenty members, which was the maximum head count of tributary missions allowed for Ryukyu, Lanchang, Burma, and the Netherlands. Although the treaty granted the United States the status of a most favored nation, Beijing saw this status simply as a special favor for foreign barbarians, unrelated to China’s statehood and sovereignty. In this sense, the Qing court treated the United States as a tributary state, which the latter, of course, completely failed to realize.
Within the domestic Confucianism-centered intellectual framework, neither the Qing ruling house nor the majority of its officials who had passed the imperial civil-service examinations thought beyond the framework of the civilized–barbarian distinction. The new knowledge imported from the West by American and European missionaries who were active in Southeast Asia and South China had not yet had an impact on the Chinese intellectual forces behind the post-Qianlong institutionalized order. On June 23, 1858, the Chinese minister Zhou Zupei (1793– 1867) and thirty of his colleagues submitted memorials against the permanent residence of barbarous emissaries in Beijing. Among the eight evils of such residence highlighted in Zhou’s memorial was the preaching of the gospel by the foreigners, which would turn our manner of clothes, caps, rituals, and music into something fit for beasts (Ch., yiguan liyue zhi zu, yi yu qinshou). He also warned that if countries such as Chosŏn and Ryukyu, which have been loyal to China for a long time and sincerely send emissaries and pay tribute to the court, saw the disobedience of these barbarians, they, too, would despise the Heavenly Dynasty. This argument was further underscored by Chen Rui, who emphasized the fundamental divide between China and the others (Ch., Zhong Wai zhi dafang).⁵⁹ In terms of their thinking, these officials were no different from Ye Mingchen, who at the time was detained by the British in Calcutta.
Despite such keen resistance, Guiliang and Huashana accepted the British-drafted treaty after they realized the situation was beyond China’s control. The treaty with Britain, signed on June 26, allowed Britain to appoint diplomatic agents to the court in Beijing, where they would not kowtow to the emperor. According to article 3, the British ambassador, minister, or other diplomatic agent shall not be called upon to perform any ceremony derogatory to him as representing the Sovereign of an independent nation, on a footing of equality with that of China. On the other hand, he shall use the same forms of ceremony and respect to His Majesty the Emperor as are employed by the Ambassadors, Ministers, or Diplomatic Agents of Her Majesty toward the Sovereigns of independent and equal European nations.⁶⁰ In retrospect, this article opened the gates of Beijing to the representatives of Britain and other treaty nations and marked the beginning of the collapse of the centuries-long ritual system and the erosion of the Zongfan infrastructure. Being forced to fundamentally change its time-honored ritual norms, even if only in part, the Great Qing moved toward its eventual transformation from a cosmopolitan empire to a state equal to Britain according to post-Westphalian political and diplomatic norms.
Historic though the change was, the Chinese may not have fully understood the treaty’s importance because of linguistic discrepancies. The Chinese version of the treaty, for instance, states that "Britain is a nation of zizhu on a footing of equality with China" (Ch., Yingguo zizhu zhi bang, yu Zhongguo pingdeng). The term zizhu, which meant self-rule or autonomy, was usually used in a Zongfan context. China regarded its outer fan as possessing this right, so it was different from the British understanding of the term independence. This divergence would become apparent in the following years, when China and the Western states as well as Japan tried to define the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship and Chosŏn’s international position. The seeds of further conflicts between the norms of the Chinese Zongfan system and those of European international law were thus planted directly in these treaties.
What further shook the foundation of the civilized–barbarian discourse was article 51 of the Sino-British treaty of 1858, which decreed that the character yi (barbarian) "shall not be applied to the Government or subjects of Her Britannic Majesty in any Chinese official document issued by the Chinese Authorities either in
the Capital or in the Provinces."⁶¹ Britain and other Western nations that were eligible to invoke the most-favored-nation clause thus broke away legally and institutionally from the category of barbarians in Chinese diplomatic discourse. From then on, in Chinese official narratives the character yi was increasingly replaced by yang (overseas, foreign) and the term barbarians (Ch., yiren) by foreigners (Ch., yangren).
This amendment, however, applied only to Western treaty nations that had never occupied an essential position in the Zongfan system. The Qing still considered its major outer fan, such as Chosŏn, Vietnam, and Ryukyu, countries of barbarians. In this sense, the treaty port system, although it was expanding rapidly at the end of the 1850s, merely complicated the Qing’s view of the countries in the Western Ocean. In other words, the disintegration of Sinocentrism as a result of the 1858 treaties occurred on the Qing’s intellectual periphery, not at the core of its intellectual and ideological structure as informed and represented by the Qing’s principal outer fan. The ministers of the treaty nations residing in Beijing would soon be confronted with the complexity and perplexity of this distinction.
Who Were the Barbarians Now? The British and Korean Missions to Beijing
Treaties in hand, the ministers of Britain, France, Russia, and the United States left Tianjin for Shanghai, where they and Chinese representatives signed additional treaties on tariffs. The war would have been over had the British and French ministers in the summer of 1859 followed the Qing’s designated route to enter Beijing after they landed at Tianjin for the ratification of the treaties. But the ministers refused to follow Qing instructions, and their rash entry into the firth of the Beihe River near the Dagu Forts led to Chinese bombardment. The war resumed less than a year after the British Crown imposed direct control over India by nationalizing the British East India Company in August 1858. Under the leadership of Lord Elgin, who was determined to employ gunboat diplomacy against Beijing, the Anglo-French alliance returned to China in the summer of 1860 and reoccupied the Dagu Forts. There the alliance almost annihilated the Mongol cavalry of Prince Sengge Rinchen with the Armstrong gun, a weapon created by Britain and employed in combat for the first time. The Qing succumbed not only to the joint colonialism of the European states but also to revolutionary post–Crimean War European military technology.
The alliance occupied Tianjin and marched toward Beijing in late August. Although the Beijing court sent representatives to Tongzhou, near Beijing, for negotiations, on September 18 Prince Sengge Rinchen captured Harry Parkes (1828–85), the British commissioner in Guangzhou, as well as Henry Loch (1827–1900), Elgin’s private secretary, and twenty-four British and thirteen French officers and soldiers. Only half of these prisoners of war—including Parkes and Loch—survived and were eventually released on October 8, when the alliance gained control of Beijing’s suburbs and started looting the imperial palace of Yuan-Ming-Yuan. The frightened Son of Heaven, Emperor Xianfeng, had fled to Rehe on September 22 after appointing his younger brother Prince Gong (a.k.a. Prince Kung, 1833–98) as the envoy extraordinary and plenipotentiary to supervise the uncertain peace negotiations. On October 13 the Western forces took over the Anding Gate of the city. The Qing saw this as a more serious threat than it did the ongoing Taiping Rebellion in South China, as the court in Rehe and the caretaker administration in Beijing were extremely vulnerable to the aggressive European alliance and their powerful cannons positioned on the city’s old walls.
From October 12 to 16, the survivors and bodies of the prisoners of war were returned to the alliance. The evident cruelty inflicted on the corpses, mutilated beyond recognition, shocked Elgin and his fellow commanders. Elgin at once notified to Prince Kung that he was too horrified by what had occurred to hold further communication with a government guilty of such deeds of treachery and bloodshed, until by some great punishment inflicted upon the Emperor and the governing classes, he had made apparent … the detestation with which the Allies viewed such conduct. The great punishment turned out to be the immolation of Yuan-Ming-Yuan. On October 18, the second day after the alliance buried the former prisoners, flames engulfed the magnificent imperial garden that had been co-designed by European Jesuit missionaries. Loch recorded that during the whole of Friday the 19th, Yuen-Ming-Yuen was still burning; the clouds of smoke driven by the wind, hung like a vast black pall over Pekin.⁶² Numerous buildings in which the Qing emperors had given audience to emissaries of its outer fan—once
including Britain and always including Chosŏn—were burned to the ground. On October 20 Prince Gong offered Elgin China’s submission to the alliance’s demands. The capital was fully opened to the alliance. Parkes and Loch entered the city the next day and ironically selected the grand hall of the Ministry of Rites as the site for the signing of the convention.
Elgin departed for the grand hall on October 24, carried in a sedan chair by sixteen Chinese footmen—an honor previously reserved for the emperor—and accompanied by an escort of more than six hundred men. When the procession reached the hall, according to Loch, Prince Gong advanced to receive Lord Elgin with an anxious, hesitating salutation, while the latter bowed, and at once walked forward to his seat, motioning Prince Kung to take the one on the right. After they signed the convention, exchanged treaties, and talked briefly about maintaining friendship, Lord Elgin rose to take leave; Prince Kung accompanied him a short distance, and then stopped; but on Lord Elgin doing so likewise, the principal mandarins in attendance urgently beckoned Prince Kung to move forward, and after a few moments of hesitation he walked with Lord Elgin to the edge of the steps. Prince Gong was apparently adjusting to a new etiquette that he had never before performed. Witnessing the entire procedure, Loch enthusiastically claimed, Thus was happily concluded an event which was the commencement of a new era, not only in the history of the Empire of China, but of the world, by the introduction of four hundred millions of the human race into the family of civilized nations.⁶³ Like George Thomas Staunton’s, Loch’s judgment on civilization was thoroughly Eurocentric.
Loch was correct in asserting that China had entered a new era. In January 1861 the Qing court established a temporary office in charge of affairs concerning all countries (Ch., Zongli geguo shiwu yamen, hereafter the Zongli Yamen) under Prince Gong’s supervision. The Yamen was responsible for China’s foreign relations only with Britain, France, the United States, Russia, and other treaty nations, not with Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Vietnam, and other outer fan, whose contacts with Beijing were still under the auspices of the Ministry of Rites. The new institution was designed with the goal of expediency to meet challenges in a time of crisis, and it was modeled on the Grand Council.⁶⁴ The officials who served in the Yamen did so only on a part-time basis. The official tablet hanging at the main entrance of the institution read, Goodness and happiness between the center and the outside (Ch., Zhong Wai tifu), highlighting the key Confucian doctrine of the mean. More importantly, the Yamen was deemed an imitation of the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations and was consequently categorized as part of the established Zongfan system. According to the court’s plan, once the momentary crisis had passed, foreign affairs would revert to the management of the Ministry of Rites as usual, for the sake of "cherishing the outer fan ."⁶⁵
Yet like the Grand Council, the Zongli Yamen continued to serve the court after the crisis, and in 1901 it became the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ch., Waiwu bu). The Yamen survived primarily because China’s treaty partners always treated it as a ministry of foreign affairs at which Western diplomats could apply the concepts of international law to their negotiations with the Chinese side; still, the diplomats were not blind to the fact that the Yamen was different from a ministry of foreign affairs in the Western sense.⁶⁶ Beijing also realized that it was impossible to disband the Zongli Yamen, in particular after March 1861, when the French, British, Russian, and American ministers arrived in Beijing and established their offices next to the Forbidden City. In response, Beijing quickly organized a diplomatic network from the top down by appointing superintendents of trade for Tianjin and Shanghai. So began a new era.
As noted earlier, these institutional changes to the Zongfan framework affected only those parts that governed relations with treaty nations; beyond those, the Zongfan system stood unchanged. As ever, Chosŏn played an exemplary role in maintaining the Qing’s superiority within this established system. After learning from the 1860 annual tributary mission to Beijing that the emperor had moved to Rehe, the king of Chosŏn immediately sent a special mission to China with the aim of visiting the emperor at Rehe and demonstrating to him Chosŏn’s concern as a loyal subordinate of the imperial dynasty. In early 1861 the Korean emissaries reached postwar Beijing, bearing various tributes. The Ministry of Rites asked the emperor whether the emissaries should visit Rehe, following the
precedents of Annam’s mission in 1790, Lanchang’s and Burma’s missions in 1795, and Annam’s mission in 1803. The emperor responded that there was no need for the Korean emissaries to travel to Rehe, but he instructed the ministry to follow convention by treating the emissaries to banquets and endowing them and the king with generous gifts in order to show his "ultimate kindness of cherishing the fan in a favored way."⁶⁷
In fact, between November 1858 and May 1861, Chosŏn dispatched five tributary missions to Beijing in spite of the war in China. In the early 1790s, Chosŏn and British emissaries had convened in Rehe and Beijing as representatives of two outer fan—both of them nations of barbarians in the Qing’s eyes. But whereas the British emissaries had violently changed their status in the Chinese world by the early 1860s by entering Beijing under the cover of cannons, their Korean counterparts continued to approach the imperial capital with humble palace memorials and tributes. Although the Korean emissaries also pursued the secret mission of obtaining intelligence in China in order to enable the Korean court to assess the situation there, their frequent presence in Beijing provided the Qing with a steady stream of resources to maintain its conventional ritual code, politico-cultural hierarchy, and imperial norms, which were under fire from the British and the French. However, the Korean emissaries never again saw the Xianfeng emperor, who died in Rehe in August and became the last emperor who refused to allow the Western barbarians to stand before him without kowtowing.⁶⁸
It was not until 1873 that Xianfeng’s son, Tongzhi, gave foreign ministers their first imperial audience at which the ministers did not kowtow. The audience took place at the Purple Light Pavilion (Ch., Ziguang ge) in the Forbidden City, the same venue at which the Qing emperor had met with emissaries of China’s outer fan since 1761—the year in which the Qing institutionalized the status of all other countries within its own imperial norms, as described in chapter 2. In 1873 the pavilion no longer witnessed the ritual of kowtow, but the politico-cultural significance of the imperial audience in that location remained essentially the same. Interestingly, and ironically, since 1949 the state leaders of the People’s Republic of China, who converted part of the Qing imperial palace into their living quarters and political headquarters, have used the pavilion to meet with foreign guests from other, equal states of the world—if no longer in the sense of all-under-Heaven.
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3 JUSTIFYING THE CIVILIZED The Qing’s Contacts with Chosŏn, Annam, and Britain, 1762–1861 As Chosŏn carefully maintained its political subordination to the Qing on the surface, and the Manchu ruling house used this submission to reinforce the Qing’s centrality and Chineseness, Chosŏn simultaneously constructed its own Chineseness within its borders by depicting the Qing as barbarians in particular mo- ments. The civilized–barbarian discourse pervaded Chosŏn, nourishing a strong pro-Ming and anti-Qing attitude among the educated in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century. Chosŏn entered the contest for civilized status in a cultural sense, and its perennial missions to the Qing served this domestic construc- tion of identity. As the Qing was proclaiming Chineseness in the post-Ming era, Chosŏn, too, sought to establish itself as the exclusive legitimate successor to the Ming. In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, a group of Korean scholars who observed the Qing’s prosperity and the economic gap between the Qing and Chosŏn dared to voice their support for the Qing’s claim to civilized status. Their arguments counterbalanced the prevalent anti-Qing attitude among Korean scholars and helped Chosŏn cope with the paradox of the civilized–barbarian discourse in a practical sense. This chapter examines the interior aspects and function of the Zongfan order by showing how the Qing’s rule of “cherishing the men from afar” operated in the ritual protocol and presentations of diplomatic missions between the Qing, Chosŏn, and other countries from 1762 to 1861. The chapter discusses several cases of emissary exchanges between the Qing and Chosŏn against the background of the sharp reversal of the civilized–barbarian discourse that both sides exploited intensively for their own domestic politico-cultural legitimacy. It suggests that the Qing eventually prevailed over Chosŏn. By introducing Annam’s and Britain’s missions to China as a point of comparison for those from Chosŏn, the chapter further explores how the Manchu ruling house navigated the balance between the Chinese rhetoric commensurate with China’s claimed preeminence in the cosmopolitan world and the practical consequences of this superiority in bilateral com- munications. This balance illustrates the Qing state-craft and helps explain why, in the second half of the nineteenth century, both the Qing and Chosŏn, along with Vietnam and Ryukyu, encountered such tremendous difficulty in defining the nature of their relationship in accordance with the newly imported international law, a topic examined in part 2 of this book. Historical Memory of the Civilized: Chosŏn’s Anti-Manchu Mentality The Perception of a Barbarous Qing within Little China after 1644 With the irreversible downfall of the Ming in 1644, Chosŏn intensified its efforts to identify itself as the exclusive and genuine heir to Chinese civilization. In their daily training and practices, Korean intellectuals who were followers of Neo-Confucianism shared a consensus that the Manchu conquest of China proper in 1644 marked the “fall of the central civilized country” (K., Chunghwa hamnak).¹ In Chosŏn, numerous scholars used the regnal title of the last emperor of the Ming, Chongzhen, to date their personal letters and domestic documents. Their attitude was consolidated in the “Little China” discourse that emphasized the succes- sion of Confucian orthodox legitimacy (K., tot’ong) instead of denying explicitly that the Qing possessed political orthodox legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom. Thus, within its borders Chosŏn presented itself as the successor to Confucius, Mencius, and Zhu Xi after the demise of the Ming. On the Qing side, Chosŏn’s status as Little China was widely accepted by both ethnic Han and Manchu scholars. The Chinese officials and intelligentsia did not treat their Korean counterparts as barbarians, as they did many Europeans. On occasion, the Qing court explicitly appraised Chosŏn as “a country of rituals
and literature” (Ch., wenwu zhi bang; Ma., doro yoso i gurun), a statement also endorsed by many Chinese scholars of the Qing.² Yet when it came to locating Chosŏn within the multilevel structure of all-under-Heaven in the Qing’s political and cultural discourse, Chosŏn was inevitably designated a country of barbar- ians on China’s periphery. As this chapter shows, Korean scholars who visited Beijing had to face the challenge of reconciling their country’s putative barbarity with their conviction in its superior cultural pedigree. In late seventeenth-century Chosŏn, in particular during the reigns of King Hyojong and King Hyŏngjong, anti-Qing sentiment was widespread among intel- lectuals. Song Si-yŏl (1607–89), a leading scholar and King Hyojong’s mentor, zealously proposed a northern expedition (K., bukpŏl) against the Manchus in order to “recover the central plain” on behalf of the Ming.³ Song’s plan was never put into practice, but it won strong moral support from the court and from Confucian scholars and contributed to the rise of a Korean national identity in the post-Ming period when the country was struggling for a new episteme.⁴ Another scholar, Sin Yu-han (1681–1752), in a letter to a friend who was about to visit Beijing as a member of a tributary mission, claimed that “we are also Chinese” (K., uri yŏk Chunggukin) and that Chosŏn was “China”—a “China with Classic of Poetry and Book of Documents ” (K., sisŏ Chungguk) and a “China with [Chinese-style] clothes and belts” (K., ŭidae Chungguk). Sin went on to claim that since the fall of the Ming in 1644 China had not had a Son of Heaven, implying that political orthodox legitimacy also lay in Chosŏn, the successor to Kija (Jizi).⁵ The cases of Song and Sin reveal a pronounced victim mentality within the Korean ruling house and intellectual stratum after the humiliating Manchu invasions and the fall of the Ming. Highlighting Korea’s filial duty to the deposed Ming became an ideological tool to maintain Chosŏn’s domestic order and raise the morale of the learned class. On the one hand, the king presented himself as a loyal subordinate of the Qing for the sake of the political orthodox legitimacy grant- ed by the Qing; but on the other hand, he was the moral sponsor of the anti-Qing movement inside Chosŏn, seeking to capture the political orthodox legitimacy embedded in the connection between his rulership and his subjects. Like the Qing emperors, the Korean kings had to deal with grave challenges arising from the framework of the civilized–barbarian discourse. Against the background of this volatile balance, Chosŏn entered a more radical period of actively commemorating the “imperial Ming” during the reign of King Sukchong, when the Qing’s control over Chosŏn was loosened as the Kangxi emperor was preoccupied with suppressing the revolt of the Three Feudatories in the 1680s. In April 1704, on the sixtieth anniversary of Emperor Chongzhen’s suicide, the king established an altar near the palace in Hansŏng and performed a new ceremony to commemorate Chongzhen. Although it was the forty-third year of Kangxi, the king called the moment the “seventy-seventh year of Chongzhen,” setting the starting year to 1628, when Chongzhen ascended the throne. The king declared that the “imperial Ming” was the “owner of the civilized and the barbar- ians” (K., Hwa–I ju) but that the “northern barbarians”—that is, the Manchus—had taken the opportunity to “occupy our central plain” (K., kŏ a chungwŏn), with the result that the “rituals and clothes” (K., yeak ŭigwan)—the traditional metaphor for civilization—had become barbarous. Chosŏn, the king claimed, was the only place that still loyally worshipped the “old motherland” (K., koguk). Reciting these words at the ceremony, the king burst into tears. All of the officials around him wept too. Soon thereafter, in October of the same year, the king had a long discussion with several ministers about building a temple to Wanli, the Ming emperor who saved Chosŏn from the Japanese invasion in the 1590s. The ministers endorsed the king’s pro-Ming attitude but pointed out that it was inappropriate for a “vas- sal” to offer sacrifices to the “Son of Heaven,” so the king instead constructed a nine-floor altar and named it the Great Altar for Gratitude (K., Taebodan), where a state ceremony would be performed twice a year, in spring and autumn. The altar was completed in January 1705.⁶ Thereafter, Chosŏn continued to commemorate the Ming for another 190 years until 1895, when it declared independence from the Qing. The altar was permanently closed in 1908, three years after Chosŏn
became a protectorate of Japan and two years before it was annexed by Japan. Korean emissaries to Beijing continuously fed the popular antipathy toward the Qing in Chosŏn by providing firsthand accounts of their dealings with the bar- barous usurpers of the Ming. For these emissaries, the trip to Beijing was a journey for mourning the Ming, deprecating the Qing, and strengthening Chosŏn’s identity as Little China. As they reached various landmarks—the Yalu River, Fenghuang Gate, Liaoyang, the Korean compound in Mukden where Crown Prince So- hyŏn had been detained between 1637 and 1644, Shanhai Pass, and the Forbidden City in Beijing, where the Ming emperors had resided for centuries—the emis- saries often wrote poems lamenting the fall of the Ming. These poems became part of their journals, which were widely circulated in Chosŏn and were generically known as Yŏnhaengnok (The records of the journey to Beijing).⁷ From the second half of the eighteenth century, however, some Korean intellectuals, having witnessed the Qing’s prosperity on their journeys to Beijing and having engaged in extensive conversations with Han Chinese and Manchu scholars in Beijing, started to reconsider their entrenched view of the barbarous Qing. Disillusioned with Chosŏn’s self-proclaimed cultural superiority, these pundits recognized the Qing as a civilized country and called for Chosŏn to learn from Qing China for its own good, beyond the popular doctrine of “revering China and expelling the barbarians.” These scholars constituted the School of Northern Learning (K., Pukhak p’ae), focusing on “practical knowledge” (K., Sirhak). They successfully resumed contacts between the literati of Korea and those of China that had been suspended for more than 120 years since 1644. Among these scholars, three in particular stood out: Hong Tae-yong, Pak Che-ka (1750–1805), and Pak Chi-wŏn (1737–1805). Honoring the Great Ming: Hong Tae-yong’s Perception of the Qing Hong Tae-yong was born in Hansŏng in 1731 into Chosŏn’s ruling gentry and the hereditary class of yangban (lit. “two branches [of the ruling class]”), and he studied with Kim Wŏn-haeng (1702–72), a leading scholar of the time. In late 1765, when his uncle was appointed the secretary of the annual tributary mission to Beijing, Hong became affiliated with the mission as an officer of the emissaries’ junior relatives (K., chaje gungwan).⁸ Although Hong regarded the Qing as a bar- barous country, he was excited about the trip and was eager to exchange ideas with his Chinese counterparts. After arriving in Beijing in early 1766, Hong put al- most all his time and energy into getting to know Chinese scholars, mainly through written conversations (K., p’iltam, “conversing by writing Chinese char- acters”). These dialogues led him to conclude that the Qing, no matter how barbarous in Chosŏn’s eyes, was indeed the civilized Middle Kingdom, whereas Chosŏn, no matter how superior in its own mind, nonetheless fell into the category of barbarians. Hong, like other Koreans, was extremely proud of Chosŏn’s fashion of Ming-style clothes and hats and disparaged the Manchu hairstyle and robes. His choice of dress signaled that he maintained the true way of Chinese culture. In his conversations with Chinese intellectuals in the first weeks of his stay in Beijing, Hong frequently used his clothing to highlight Chosŏn’s cultural superiority over the Qing.⁹ Shortly thereafter, however, Hong entered into dialogue with other Chinese intellectuals, in particular Yan Cheng and Pan Tingyun (1743–?), and these highly trained scholars dramatically changed his view of the Qing. Yan and Pan, both Han Chinese, were from Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province, where they had successfully passed the imperial civil-service examinations and won the title of Juren (a qualified graduate at the provincial level). They were determined to pass the last round of imperial exams in Beijing to realize their dream of serving their country as officials. To enhance their communications with Hong, they shared with him their provincial exam essays. In the first conversation among Hong, Yan, Pan, and their Korean and Chinese peers, another Korean, Kim P’yŏng-jung, asked Pan why he had said in his exam essay that people should worship only the Zhou Dynasty—a statement that, Kim felt, could be seen as an expression of nostalgia for the deposed Ming and as an act of defiance against the Manchus. Pan explained that his words referred to the “central civilized country,” which was the “patriarch for myriad countries” (Ch., wanguo suozong), and
he emphasized that the current Son of Heaven, the Qianlong emperor, was so great that all subjects should show him obedience and respect. Worshipping the Zhou, Pan concluded, was akin to worshipping the current dynasty. Hong, for the first time in his life, heard the Qing called the central civilized country. Seeing Pan’s response as a consequence of the sensitive Manchu–Han Chinese ethnic relationship, Hong disregarded his claim and instead responded by highlighting Chosŏn’s identity as Little China. But by the end of the conversation, the two sides had found common ground in celebrating the Qing conceit that “all-under- Heav- is one unified family” (Ch., tianxia yijia).¹⁰ Hong did not reveal his sense of cultural superiority until his second conversation with Yan and Pan at the Korean residence. The conversation included a long discussion about clothes and hats, in which the Korean hosts and the Chinese guests articulated their respective understandings of the Ming-Qing transition and the Qing’s position in Chinese history. Hong emphasized several times that Koreans wore Ming-style garments, which in China by this time were worn only on the opera stage. Hong indicated that the garments served as a visible reminder of the “dignified manner of Han Chinese officials” (Ch., hanguan weiyi). The Ko- rean hosts asked Pan and Yan critical questions regarding the Manchu hair-style, clothes, and hats, and about the Ming’s stories. Pan, who was in charge of recording the conversation, answered their questions carefully and praised the Qing volubly.¹¹ Pan later became an official in Beijing and never gave Hong the copies of their correspondence that Hong had requested after returning to Hansŏng, although the two maintained a good relationship.¹² In another long conversation with Yan, Hong again used Chosŏn’s style of dress to criticize the Qing and mourn the Ming. Hong told Yan he felt extremely sad that China had lost itself with its adoption of Manchu fashions in hair and clothes and that China’s situation was in his view even worse than it had been under the Jin and Yuan Dynasties. In comparison, Hong proudly noted Chosŏn’s loyalty to the Ming, which he called the “parent nation.” Yan, however, argued that in 1644 the Qing had legitimately become the ruler of the country by defeating the rebels and defending and enacting justice. At the end of the conversation, Hong acknowledged that whereas the Ming had exploited his country, the Qing was much more generous toward Chosŏn.¹³ Hong realized that Han Chinese scholars identified the Qing both as a legitimate successor to the Ming in the political sense and as a legitimate heir to Confucianism in the cultural sense. Although the Han Chinese had adopted the Manchu queue and clothes, Hong concluded, they were still the “offspring of the old home of the central civilized country” (K., Chunghwa koga chi ye). By contrast, Hong conceded that although Koreans took pride in their Ming-style dress, on a fundamental level they still belonged to the “barbarians by the sea.” By arguing that “the civilized and the barbarians are the same,” he acknowledged the Qing’s civilized status.¹⁴ Hong returned to Chosŏn with a new perception of Qing China, and he made an immense contribution to the School of Northern Learning. Learning from the North: The Korean Visitors’ New Tone toward the Qing Revisiting the Civilized–Barbarian Discourse: Pak Che-ka’s Visit to Beijing After Hong returned to Hansŏng in 1766, his strong relationships with Pan, Yan, and other Chinese friends, and his continuous correspondence with them, swiftly became legend among his fellow scholars in Chosŏn. One of them was Pak Che-ka, born in 1750 in Hansŏng, where his father served as a minister at the court. Because his mother was a concubine, Pak was not allowed to take the civil-service examinations, but he won fame as a poet when he was young and joined a wide aristocratic and intellectual social network, through which he became acquainted with Hong. Pak was fascinated by the contacts between Hong and Chinese scholars and hoped to visit Beijing himself. His opportunity came in the spring of 1778, when the emissary Ch’ae Che-gong (1720–99) invited Pak and another fa- mous young scholar, Yi Tŏng-mu (1741–93), to join him on a tributary mission to Beijing. This trip helped transform Pak into a leading proponent of Sirhak—“practical knowledge.”
In Beijing Pak exchanged poems or conducted written conversations with more than fifty famous Han Chinese and Manchu scholars, almost all of them high- ranking officials at court, including Ji Yun (1724–1805), Pan Tingyun, Tiyeboo (1752–1824), and Fengšen Yendehe (1775–1810). He also conversed with a Muslim prince from Central Asia. After returning to Chosŏn, he spent three months composing a treatise entitled “Discussions on Northern Learning” (K., Pukhak ŭi), in which he discussed what Chosŏn could learn from the Qing in matters ranging from the construction of bridges, roads, ships, and cities to the production of porcelain, paper, bows, and brushes, as well as language and medicine.¹⁵ On each of these matters and many others, Pak described how advanced the Qing was, then compared it to Chosŏn. He suggested that it was Chosŏn’s self-imposed isolation, informed by the civilized–barbarian discourse, that prevented the country from perceiving the Qing’s accomplishments and embracing the Qing’s sophisticated practical skills. For example, he pointed out that Korean emissaries to Bei- jing did not directly contact local Chinese officials on their journey from Fenghuang Gate to Beijing but rather commissioned Korean interpreters to do so, which caused much inconvenience. Pak passionately urged his fellow scholars to study the Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, and Japanese languages. Proposals such as this one came very close to calling for a comprehensive reform of Chosŏn’s daily practices and statecraft. At the end of his treatise, Pak wrote a short piece under the title “On Worshipping the Zhou” (K., Chonju non), addressing Chosŏn’s understanding of the Qing based on the civilized–barbarian discourse. Pak followed the popular anti-Qing trend in acknowledging that the Qing were among the barbarians, but he critically pointed out that Chosŏn could nonetheless learn from the Qing in many aspects. Otherwise, Pak warned, Chosŏn could neither expel “China’s barbarians” nor transform the “eastern country’s barbarians.” “If we want to expel the barbarians,” Pak stated, “we had better know who the barbarians are first.” Pak stressed that it would not be too late for Chosŏn to seek revenge for the Ming’s demise after first carefully learning from the Qing for twenty years. Pak followed this piece with “Debate on Northern Learning” (K., Pukhak pyŏl), in which he justified his call to learn from the Qing on the basis of Neo-Confucian principles. He divided those Korean scholars who denigrated the Qing while acclaiming Chosŏn into three groups: the “lower savants” (K., hasa), focused on grains and foods; the “middle sa- vants” (K., chongsa), who were concerned with literature; and the “upper savants” (K., sangsa), who concentrated on Neo-Confucian principles. Pak argued that Chosŏn’s perception of Qing China was based on woefully incomplete knowledge of it and that Chosŏn was in fact underdeveloped compared to the prosperous Qing. Citing Zhu Xi, Pak expressed a wish that Chosŏn had more people who truly understood the principles as he did.¹⁶ Pak’s proposal that Chosŏn learn from the Qing before it fought against the Qing bore a striking resemblance to the strategy of “learning the superior techniques of the barbarians to constrain the bar- barians” (Ch., shiyi changji yi zhiyi) put forward by the Chinese scholar Wei Yuan (1794–1857) in the 1840s, although Wei’s “barbarians” referred to Europeans. Pak’s acknowledgment that the Qing was the civilized country disillusioned many of his fellow scholars. For those who had never seen the Qing, Pak described a society prosperous beyond their imaginations. Following Hong, Pak constructed a new image of the Qing, one the upper savants were reluctant to accept. Ch’ae Che-gong, the emissary who had invited Pak to Beijing, was one such upper savant. Ch’ae mourned the fall of the Ming and called the Manchu general of Fenghuang Gate “barbarous.” When he arrived in Beijing and saw the artificial hill next to the Forbidden City on which Chongzhen had committed suicide in 1644, Ch’ae composed a poem commemorating the Ming. He lamented that Chinese children on the street jeered at his Ming-style clothing. After the summer solstice rituals at the Temple of Earth, the Qianlong emperor praised the Korean mission for the best ritual performance among the outer fan. Ch’ae interpreted this as evidence that the Manchu emperor, whom he sometimes referred to as “khan,” tacitly approved of the “Han Chinese clothes and hats” that he and the other Korean visitors wore.¹⁷ When he returned to Chosŏn, Ch’ae collected the poems he had written on the trip into an anthology entitled Records of Enduring Contempt and Insults (K., Ham’in nok). In stark contrast, Korean scholars at the middle and lower levels found Pak’s proposal to “use techniques to benefit peo- ple’s livelihoods” (K., iyong husaeng) very attractive. Seeking to avoid pedanticism, these scholars contributed to the remarkable rise and dissemination of
northern learning. One of them was Pak Chi-wŏn. Reenvisioning the Barbarous Qing: Pak Chi-wŏn’s Trip to Beijing Pak Chi-wŏn was also of an aristocratic yangban background. In 1780, his cousin Pak Myŏng-wŏn (1725–90) was appointed the emissary to Beijing for Emperor Qianlong’s seventieth birthday, providing Pak Chi-wŏn an opportunity for “tourism in the upper country.” Shocked by the Qing’s wealth, evident everywhere from small towns on the Sino-Korean border to the metropolitan areas of Mukden and Beijing, Pak realized that the stereotypical perception of the Qing among the meritocracy of Chosŏn had become an obstacle to progress. Pak found it difficult to overcome the prejudices rooted in the hegemonic assumption of the Qing’s barbarity, although he was deeply influenced by Hong and had an open mind. In his Rehe Diary (K., Yŏlha ilgi), Pak frequently struggled with the moral correctness of the pro-Ming, anti-Qing principles, on the one hand, and his desire to learn from the Qing, on the other. He was uncomfortable, even pained, by any admission of the achievements of the Qing, which implied that the Qing was civilized but Chosŏn was not, just as Pak Che-ka had painfully suggested. Pak Chi-wŏn’s astonishment began on the first day of his journey, when he reached Fenghuang Gate and saw the small town inside the fence. Pak noticed that the houses, walls, doors, and streets of the town were well designed and maintained, and that the town bore no “indication of inferior rural style.” He realized that a scene like this at the “eastern end” of the Qing’s territory could only portend still more prosperous vistas in the inner reaches of the empire. How could the Manchu barbarians manage the land so efficiently, in such an impressive way, and to such a significant degree of control? Pak felt so unsettled that he wanted to return to Hansŏng. He asked his private servant, Chang Bok, “How would it be if you were born in China?” Chang, an illiterate boy, immediately answered, “China is barbarian [K., Chungguk ho ya], so I would not want to be born in China.”¹⁸ The boy’s answer was exactly the reassurance his master needed. It also reflects the prevalence among Koreans of the perception of the Qing as barbarians. Nevertheless, Pak realized that his journey would not be as peaceful as he had wished. Indeed, after he entered Fenghuang Gate, Pak’s preconceptions about the barbarous Qing crumbled a little more each day. As he passed by Liaoyang, Mukden, and many small towns and villages, Pak was confronted by beautiful buildings, thriving markets, and flourishing urban and rural communities where local civil- ians and officials treated him in a friendly manner. He enjoyed written conversations with Han Chinese and Manchu scholars and officials and appreciated local scenery and historical sites. In the course of these experiences, the charge that the Qing was barbarous completely vanished from Pak’s diary. Rather, Pak began to discern a gap between himself and his Chinese counterparts in practical terms that had been caused by Chosŏn’s cultural isolation from the Qing after 1644. His experience in two villages illustrates this point vividly. When Pak visited a pawnshop in a village called Xinmin, he was invited by the owner to write some Chinese characters as an honorable gift. Pak recalled that he had seen four big characters denoting “exceeding frost, surpassing snow” (Ch., qishuang saixue) on the front doors of some shops in Mukden and Liaoyang, so he wrote these down, assuming that they must mean that a businessman’s heart should be as pure as frost and snow. However, the four characters were actually a metaphor for the high quality of flour. The confused shop owner shook his head and murmured that the characters were not at all related to his business. Pak left the store in anger. The next day, when he camped at Xiaoheishan Village, he wrote the same four characters for a jewelry shop owner. Just as puzzled as the Xin- min merchant had been, the jeweler said, “I am selling women’s jewelry, not flour, so why did you write these characters for me?” Pak, suddenly aware of the char- acters’ actual meaning, overcame his embarrassment and calmly wrote other characters that won him high praise from the shop owner.¹⁹ Frustrated by this episode, Pak took a critical look at Chosŏn’s perception of the Qing and put forward the idea of “using techniques to benefit people’s liveli- hoods” by comparing different attitudes toward the Qing among his fellow Korean intellectuals. Like Pak Che-ka, he divided Korean scholars into upper savants, middle savants, and lower savants. He began with a scenario in which Korean people who had never visited the Qing would ask those returning from Beijing
about the impressive things they had observed on their journey. According to Pak, whereas many visitors would list without hesitation such things as the White Pagoda in Liaodong, Chinese markets, and Shanhai Pass, the upper savants would instead insist that “nothing is impressive” because the people in China, from the Son of Heaven to the common subjects, were “barbarians as long as they shaved their foreheads.” Since “barbarians are dogs and sheep,” nothing of theirs was worth praising. The middle savants would also argue that “the mountains and lands became barbarous and nothing over there is impressive until we lead a hundred thousand troops to cross Shanhai Pass to recover China.” Identifying himself as one of the lower savants who shared with the upper and middle savants the belief in “revering China and expelling the barbarians,” Pak nevertheless passionately called on his colleagues to “learn the good ways and useful systems [of the Qing] as long as they benefit our people and country, even if they are created by barbarians.” He argued, “If we want to expel the barbarians, we should learn all the good Chinese systems to change ours, after which we might be able to say that China has nothing impressive.”²⁰ Pak tried to separate recognition of the Qing’s superior practical techniques from the cultural and moral charges against the Qing. Yet this approach, which meant blurring the boundaries between civi- lized and barbarian, was a double-edged sword not only for himself but also for the general moral foundation of his country. On August 30, 1780, when Pak arrived in Beijing, he was stunned by the grandness of the splendid metropolis. In his diary, for the first time, he embraced the Qing regnal title to express the date—“the first day of the eighth month of the forty-fifth year of Qianlong”—thus incorporating himself into the Zongfan mindset by identifying the Qing as the center of the world. On that day, Pak completely overlooked the fact that he was in a country of “barbarians.”²¹ Identifying Chosŏn as a Loyal Subordinate of the Qing: Pak Chi-wŏn at Rehe When Pak Chi-wŏn and his fellow Koreans arrived in Beijing, they learned that the emperor had moved to the summer palace at Rehe, where the sixth Panchen Er- deni (1738–80) and Mongol princes would convene to celebrate the imperial birthday on September 11. On September 2, the emperor instructed the Ministry of Rites to ask the Korean emissaries to visit Rehe and ordered a minister of the Grand Council (Ch., Junjichu) to Beijing to welcome them, an act of “extraordinary imperial benevolence.” The Koreans immediately organized a special ad hoc team to travel to Rehe, to which Pak Chi-wŏn was attached. Five days later, the group arrived at Rehe, where it quickly became involved in subtle conflicts with the Chinese side. The emperor and his officials were keen to showcase Chosŏn’s sub- servience as a model outer fan, but the Koreans were equally keen to avoid this role, given their ambivalence about the Qing. However, Chosŏn’s subordinate position in the bilateral framework meant that the emissaries had few alternatives. The first incident that revealed this tension took place upon the emissaries’ arrival, when the emperor informed the emissaries that they would stand at the end of the right wing of China’s second-rank civil officials during the grand ceremony on the celebration day. This was a “special and unprecedented grace” from the emperor, because the ritual code generally required the emissaries to stand at the end of the left wing of civil officials. The ministers of the Ministry of Rites asked the emissaries to submit a memorial showing their sincere appreciation. The emissaries hesitated, as it would have been inappropriate to do so without the king’s authorization, but the ministers pushed them to draft the memorial. Pak commented that as the aged emperor became more suspicious, the ministers had to work harder to meet his wishes.²² On a subsequent occasion, the emperor sent a minister of the Grand Council to inquire whether the two emissaries would like to visit “the saintly monk from the western area” (Ch., xifan shengseng), referring to the Panchen Erdeni. The Koreans replied that they never stopped communicating with “people of China” (K., Chungguk insa), but that they did not dare to communicate with “people of other countries” (K., taguk in). Undeterred, the emperor ordered the emissaries to visit the lama at his monastery. At the monastery, the communications between the Korean emissaries and the Panchen Erdeni followed a labyrinthine path: the Erdeni spoke to the Mongol prince next to him, who relayed the message to the minister of the Grand Council, who forwarded it to the Qing interpreter, who passed it to
the interpreter from Chosŏn, who finally translated the words into Korean for the emissaries. The conversation involved Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, Chinese, and Korean, highlighting the multiethnic and multicultural nature of the unified empire, but the extent to which the Panchen Erdeni and the Korean emissaries could actually understand each other and grasp the political meanings behind the words used remains unclear. Acting on the guidance of the minister of the Grand Council, the emissaries, who were as stiff as “clay dolls and wooden puppets,” presented the Panchen Erdeni with silk handkerchiefs, and the Panchen Er- deni gave the Koreans three small bronze figurines of the Buddha and some Hada, Pulu, and Tibetan incense in return. Since the figurines contravened Confucian beliefs, the emissaries traded them for silver that they then distributed among their servants instead of bringing the figurines back to Chosŏn.²³ Behind the envoys’ reluctance to visit the Panchen Erdeni was the problem of the ritual of kowtow: the Korean emissaries refused to perform the ceremony to the lama. Pak later defended their behavior in a written conversation with a Manchu official: “Our humble country is in the same family with the big country, and there is no difference between inside and outside between us. Yet the lama is a man of the western area, so how could our envoys dare go and visit him? There is a rule that ‘subordinates have no right to conduct diplomacy’ [K., insin mu oegyo].”²⁴ Chosŏn was demonstrating its loyalty as China’s fan and subordinate. The principle that a subordinate country had no right to conduct diplomacy would be emphasized by the king of Chosŏn again and again when Western states tried to open direct lines of contact with Chosŏn between the 1830s and the 1870s. Their overtures created a tremendous and insurmountable dilemma for the scholars of Chosŏn. Although they viewed the Qing as a barbarous place and themselves as the civilized successors of the Ming within a Chosŏn-centric cultural world, as soon as another political entity approached Chosŏn, they would identify the Qing as China and hew to the Qing’s Zongfan line to embrace their unique role as the representatives of the men from afar cherished by China.²⁵ At a banquet held for representatives of the Qing’s subordinates and attended by the Panchen Erdeni, Mongol princes from Mongolia, Muslim princes from Xinjiang, emissaries from Chosŏn, and indigenous chiefs from southwestern China, the emperor lauded Chosŏn’s fealty, declaring to those gathered at the ban- quet that “Chosŏn has been serving as a fan for generations and has always been loyal. It pays its annual tribute on time, and that is truly worth praising.” The em- peror added, “We, the monarch and the subordinates, trust each other fully and belong to the same family inside and outside China, so we should not bother our- selves with these overelaborate rituals.” He then issued an edict according to which Chosŏn needed to present only an annual tribute; all other tributes, along with humble memorials, would be permanently canceled, reflecting the Qing’s policy of “cherishing men from afar with substantial measures rather than rhetoric” (Ch., rouhui yuanren, yishi bu yiwen).²⁶ Again, the Korean emissaries served as the typical men from afar for the purposes of imperial discourse extolling the Qing’s civilization and centrality. After returning home, Pak Chi-wŏn, like Pak Che-ka before him, called on his fellow scholars to learn from the Qing. In 1781 he wrote a foreword to Pak Cheka’s “Discussions on Northern Learning,” in which he reiterated that Chosŏn should abandon its incorrect assumptions about the Qing.²⁷ As other Korean scholars followed in Pak’s footsteps and made their own visits to Beijing, the Koreans’ perceptions about the Ming and the Qing continued to evolve. The Way of the Heavenly Dynasty: The Qing and the Tributary Missions of 1790 and 1793 The Imperial Grand Banquet and the Korean Mission of 1790 The Chosŏn meritocracy increasingly realized that it could not restore the Ming in China, and this recognition helped normalize its service to the Qing under the rubric of “serving the great.” Compared to Pak Che-ka in 1778 and Pak Chi-wŏn in 1780, Sŏ Ho-su (1736–99), who visited Rehe as an associate envoy to celebrate Emperor Qianlong’s eightieth birthday in 1790, described Chosŏn’s Zongfan contacts with the Qing in very moderate terms. The mission, led by envoy Hwang
In-jŏm (?–1802), associate envoy Sŏ, and secretary Yi Paek-hyŏng (1737–?), left Hansŏng on July 9 and two weeks later arrived at Ŭiju, where it could not cross the Yalu River because of flooding. During his sojourn in Ŭiju, Sŏ commented in one of his poems that “the Yalu River is the boundary between the civilized and the barbarians” (K., Hwa–I bungye), but in his diary he used the Qing’s regnal title for the date.²⁸ The Qianlong emperor was concerned about the time it would take for the Koreans to reach the celebration at Rehe. As the representatives of the Qing’s outer and inner fan convened again at Rehe, the emperor saw the attendance of Chosŏn’s emissaries as an indispensable part of the “system,” “way,” or “funda- mentals” (Ch., tizhi) of the big family. On August 1, the Korean emissaries, still in Ŭiju, received an official note from the Ministry of Rites in Beijing via the Manchu general of Mukden. The message had traveled 500 li (about 155 miles) per day, one of the fastest rates possible for the Qing mail system. The ministry in- structed the Koreans to head directly to Rehe, as they needed to arrive by August 19, the same deadline that the emperor had set for the king of Annam and the emissaries of Lanchang and Burma. When the mission crossed the river the next day, a second note from Beijing arrived, urging the envoys to meet the deadline because Chosŏn’s presence was “particularly crucial to the system” (Ch., shu yu tizhi youguan). They subsequently received a third note in a completely different tone, saying that it would be fine if the mission could not reach Rehe in time. The emissaries, perceiving the reversal as a subtle way of cherishing the men from afar, immediately organized a special team that would head directly for Rehe with humble palace memorials and selected tributes, while the rest of the mission would go to Beijing as planned. Covering more than 260 miles after passing Mukden, the emissaries reached Rehe on August 24 and learned that the emperor had changed the date of the grand banquet to August 25 to accommodate Chosŏn’s mission. The Mongol and Muslim princes, the emissaries of Burma and Lanchang, the indigenous chiefs of Taiwan, and the king of Annam had all ar- rived several days earlier.²⁹ The emperor’s decision conveyed eloquently that Chosŏn’s position was irreplaceable in the Qing-centric world. The following day, the Ministry of Rites guided Chosŏn’s emissaries to the imperial palace for an audience with the Qianlong emperor. After asking for the emissaries’ names and ranks, the emperor instructed them to attend the grand banquet and to watch the Peking opera. In further illustration of Chosŏn’s prom- inent status, the Korean emissaries were arranged in first position in the wing of the “emissaries of other countries,” while those of Annam were in second posi- tion, those of Lanchang in third, those of Burma in fourth, and the indigenous chiefs in fifth. In addition, Chosŏn’s well-written humble palace memorials were considered exemplary. Hešen (1750–99), the most influential Manchu minister in the Grand Council, showed one of the Korean memorials to the king of Annam, Nguyễn Huệ, and commented, “Chosŏn serves the great in such a good manner that it is the model for other fan .” The Vietnamese king inspected the memo- rial several times and praised it highly.³⁰ With the move of the grand meeting from Rehe to Beijing in early September, the emissaries of Chosŏn retained their prominent role in all ritual performances in the palaces of Yuan-Ming-Yuan and the Forbidden City. The emperor frequently granted the emissaries audiences, invited them to watch operas, treated them to Manchu banquets, and gave them gifts. On October 11 the Korean mission finally left Beijing for their homeland after a successful stay. Local Banquets and the Vietnamese Mission in 1790 The Qing expected the tributary emissaries from its other fan to accept and follow the imperial etiquette as readily as those from Chosŏn did. Any deviation from the prescribed practices would not only cause conflict between the Qing and the specific fan but also result in internal tension between the Qing monarch and his local officials. Such an instance occurred during the visit to Beijing of the king of Annam, Nguyễn Huệ, in 1790. Annam experienced a turbulent period toward the end of the eighteenth century, and the Qing was drawn into the turmoil. In 1771, in what was called the Tây- so’n Rebellion, Nguyễn Huệ and his two brothers overthrew the Nguyễn family, which controlled the south of Vietnam, and restored the later Lê Dynasty
(1428–1788). In 1788, worried about Nguyễn’s growing power, the young king, Lê Duy Kỳ (1765–93), fled the capital. At Lê’s request, Emperor Qianlong sent troops to Annam, which had been the Qing’s “outer fan for more than one hundred years.” Under the command of the governor-general of Liangguang, Sun Shiyi (1720–96), the Chinese army quickly occupied Hanoi and restored the government of Lê Duy Kỳ. But the Chinese forces were defeated in an unexpected attack by Nguyễn in January 1789, and Lê fled Hanoi again. Emperor Qianlong appointed his favorite Manchu general, Fuk’anggan (1753–96), who had just suppressed a rebellion in Taiwan, to replace Sun and organize a counterattack. However, the emperor was not interested in conquering Vietnam through a large-scale war, and he instructed Fuk’anggan and Sun to be receptive to any attempts by Nguyễn to sue for peace. The emperor reviewed China’s frustrating experience with “con- verting Vietnam into China’s prefectures and counties” (Ch., junxian qi di) in pre-Qing history and stressed that the Qing would not “integrate Annam into China’s map and register” (Ch., shouru bantu) by imitating the case of Xinjiang, where the court had had to dispatch numerous officials to manage the land after the mili- tary conquest, in particular after the war with the Zunghar Mongols.³¹ Qing policymakers thus clearly understood that policies were to be applied flexibly in dif- ferent parts of the Qing frontier. As it turned out, Nguyễn was not ready for another fight with the Qing either, so in the same month he presented Sun with “a humble palace memorial” to express his willingness to become a subordinate of the “Heavenly Dynasty,” marking the end of the conflict on the battlefield. Recognizing the motivation behind Nguyễn’s act of submission to the Qing, Qianlong issued an edict on May 15, declaring that he would not use force against the country for the sake of the “barbarian people of Annam.” Believing that “Heaven has abandoned the Lê,” the emperor settled the Lê family and its loyal fol- lowers in the city of Guilin in Guangxi, a Chinese province bordering Vietnam.³² This arrangement signaled that the Qing was preparing to support a new Viet- namese regime. To that end, the emperor indicated that he might invest Nguyễn as king if Nguyễn visited Beijing in person. This, according to the emperor, was precisely how he managed foreign barbarians—with mercy and discipline. The emperor also confirmed that Lê and his followers would not be sent back to Annam for restoration, and to prove his intentions he ordered them to cut their hair according to the Qing style and to wear Qing clothes. In Guilin, Fuk’anggan and Sun Shiyi told the desperate young king, “You are in the land of the central civilized country [Ch., Zhonghua zhi tu], so you should follow China’s system [Ch., Zhongguo zhi zhi] and change your hairstyle and clothes.”³³ As the manager of communications at the border, Fuk’anggan understood the mood of his aging and vainglorious master in Beijing, so he impressed on the emperor Nguyễn’s willingness to visit Beijing. In August the emperor quickly invested Nguyễn as the new king in order to provide him with the necessary ortho- dox legitimacy to govern and stabilize Annam domestically. In the book of investiture, the emperor emphasized the importance of the principle of “serving the great” on the part of an outer fan and that of “cherishing the small” on the part of China, highlighting the same ideological reciprocity that existed between Chosŏn and the Qing. The emperor took four steps to welcome the new king to Beijing. First, he instructed the Grand Secretariat and the Ministry of Rites to cre- ate new “guest-host rituals” (Ch., binzhu zhi li) between the king and the Qing’s governors-general and governors. He also endowed the king with a golden belt that was reserved for the Qing’s “royal vassals” (Ch., Zongfan).³⁴ Second, he moved the dethroned Lê to Beijing and appointed him a hereditary major in the Han Eight Banners. The 376 followers who had accompanied Lê were registered with the banner household system, and many were moved to Jiangnan, Zhejiang, Sichuan, and other provinces. Third, the emperor allowed the new Nguyễn regime to pick up their Chinese calendar books every year from the governor of Guangxi instead of traveling to Beijing for them. And fourth, he promised to open a border market after Nguyễn had visited Beijing, in recognition of the idea that “the barbarian people of that country are all loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty.” All of these measures were aimed at encouraging Nguyễn’s “sincerity in transforming into a subordinate of the civilized” (Ch., xianghua zhi cheng).³⁵ On May 26, 1790, the king and his mission of 150 members reached the Qing border, where he performed the highest level of kowtow to the imperial edicts and
gifts.³⁶ Fuk’anggan then accompanied Nguyễn to Rehe, passing through Guangxi, Guangdong, Hunan, Jiangxi, Hubei, Henan, and Zhili Provinces. In early June the mission arrived in the port of Guangzhou, and the “Western barbarians” of the Cohongs (referring to local factories through which the Western merchants traded with the Chinese side) gathered to witness the homage paid to the Qing by the king of an outer fan.³⁷ Two months later the Qing court invested Nguyễn’s son as crown prince, and the emperor applauded the father-son relationship between the emperor and Nguyễn. Following the precedents set by his reception of the king of Chosŏn and the Mongol khan of Korcin, the emperor dispatched a minister from the Ministry of Rites to welcome the king to a tea ceremony at Liangx- iang, a few miles south of Beijing. The practice of the policy of cherishing the men from afar went smoothly until a report from Rehe in late July made the emperor uncomfortable. The officials there sent word that they had received an unofficial note (Ch., chuandan) saying that the daily cost of entertaining and accommodating the Vietnamese mission in Jiangxi was around four thousand taels of silver—an astounding sum. The officials were worried that it would be inappropriate for them to host the mission with less luxury once it reached Rehe, but they could only work with the funds they had available. The emperor, too, was shocked by the cost, as he had treated Mongol princes and emissaries of other countries to annual banquets for less than one thousand taels. An expense of 4,000 taels per day meant that the total amount spent on the king and his entourage would reach 0.8 million taels during their two-hundred-day sojourn in China. Believing that this issue “deeply concerned the way of the Heavenly Dynasty,” the emperor lectured his officials that “the great Heavenly Dynasty should not welcome one or two subordinates from the remote lands in a luxurious way.” In addition, said the emperor, if the king were entertained too lavishly in the prov- inces, he would not sufficiently appreciate the imperial grace when treated with less opulence in Rehe. Chosŏn’s missions illustrated the emperor’s point. The Koreans prepared their own meals at each transfer station, but once they arrived in Beijing or Rehe, their daily logistics were entirely taken over by Qing personnel and the emissaries were hosted in a sumptuous manner. This substantial difference in hospitality between the provinces and Beijing created exactly the effect that the emperor sought. The danger posed by the luxurious treatment of Annam’s emissaries along their route lay in its potential to undermine the spectacle of impe- rial generosity that the emperor, informed by the Chosŏn model, wished to present at the mission’s final destination. Thus, the emperor instructed the provincial authorities in Jiangxi, Hubei, Henan, and Zhili to tone down the extravagance of their receptions, as this was the only way that “the mean between abundance and scarcity” (Ch., fengjian shizhong) could be realized. It was the first time in the Qianlong period that the emperor gave orders to temper the level of luxury in enter- taining foreign dignitaries.³⁸ The event created an opportunity for the emperor to discipline his officials. He listed two possible reasons for the astonishing costs: either local officials delib- erately spent too much in order to seek profitable reimbursement from the imperial coffers in the future, or the Chinese escorts extorted too much money from the provinces they passed through. Either possibility could damage the “way of the Heavenly Dynasty.” The emperor ordered governors in Guangdong, Jiangxi, Hubei, Anhui, and Zhili to investigate how the four-thousand-tael figure had come about. None of the officials claimed responsibility, but the emperor insisted that the origin of the unofficial note be identified and suggested it might have come from Zhili. Liang Kentang (1715–1802), the governor-general of Zhili, immedi- ately reported that the note was wrongly printed in his province. The emperor condemned Liang and closed the case, but he did not punish Liang, who was appar- ently the scapegoat of the emperor’s face-saving inquiry.³⁹ When the mission from Annam arrived in Rehe on August 20, 1790, Nguyễn was granted an imperial audience together with the indigenous chiefs of south- western China and Taiwan, the khan of Kazak, the princes of Mongolia and the Muslim tributaries, and the emissaries of Burma and Lanchang. The emperor be- stowed official Qing robes on the king and his followers. On August 25, as described in the previous section, Chosŏn’s bedraggled emissaries reached Rehe, and
all the men from afar could finally convene at the imperial hall for the grand banquet. There and later in Beijing, the envoys from the Qing’s periphery kowtowed to their shared Son of Heaven in China. What Qianlong saw and experienced was indeed a harmonious picture of the Heavenly Dynasty. The Way of the Heavenly Dynasty: The British Mission in 1793 Three years later, the emperor would receive a very different group of men from afar. This mission came from England, known in China as Yingjili. In September 1792 Lord Macartney (1737–1806) left Portsmouth for China to seek greater commercial opportunities in the name of celebrating Qianlong’s birthday. In July 1793 the mission reached Dagu Harbor in Tianjin and was welcomed by Liang Kentang and by Zhengrui, the salt tax commissioner of Changlu. On September 14 Macartney and his assistants, who were called “British tributary emissaries” (Ch., Yingjili guo gongshi), were granted an audience with Qianlong at Rehe, after which the mission was sent back to Guangzhou via the overland route. Scholars have described the visit as an epoch-making collision of two different cultural, social, and imperial systems and as the beginning of the East-West encounter that eventually led to the Opium War of 1839–42.⁴⁰ Rather than reviewing the entire event, which has been well examined, this section focuses on the connection between the British mission and the legacy of Annam’s mission in 1790 against the historical backdrop of the Qing’s institutional barbarianization of all other countries, including Britain. Until 1793 the Qing did not have a clear sense of the British presence in India and failed to connect the British activities on the Tibetan frontier with those in India.⁴¹ The Qing court saw the British embassy of 1793 as a tributary mission from an outer fan, so all bilateral contacts had to be conducted in accordance with imperial codes just like those that applied to Chosŏn, Annam, and Ryukyu. This time, the emperor made a point of instructing his local officials to treat the “for- eign barbarians” of the British tributary mission appropriately “between abundance and scarcity.” Such treatment, said the emperor, would befit “the way” of the “upper country” and ensure that the “men from afar” would not disdain China. Of the officials involved in hosting the mission, Liang Kentang, still smarting from the scandal of the overly extravagant hospitality shown to Annam in 1790, was perhaps the only one who thoroughly understood what the emperor meant. The emperor, too, might have taken the precedent of Annam as a standard for testing his officials. The game between the emperor and his officials was back on. In Au- gust, after learning that Zhejiang, Shandong, and Tianjin had lavished food on the British envoys, the emperor admonished his officials on the proper balance to be observed in welcoming the men from afar. Too little generosity, he explained, might “prevent them from transforming into the civilized,” while too much might “result in their contempt for the way and dignity of the Heavenly Dynasty.” The point was to show “neither inferiority nor superiority” in entertaining, but to “re- main in accord with the way and highlight the act of cherishing.” He reminded Liang several times of this “proper way.”⁴² When the mission reached Rehe on September 8, Macartney and his assistants refused to prostrate themselves before the emperor. The next day the emperor issued an edict to Liang and his colleagues, expressing his disappointment in the British envoys. The edict attributed the envoys’ shocking lack of respect to the extravagant treatment they had received in the provinces, which must have encouraged the barbarians’ arrogance and overshadowed the impression that Rehe ought to have made on them. To remedy the matter and punish the provinces, the emperor ordered that the mission return to Guangdong by the overland route and along interior rivers, and that all accommodations and meals at transfer stations be provided in strict conformity with tributary precedents for “such rude for- eign barbarians.” The emperor further stressed that the hospitality extended to the envoys in Beijing should be moderated in order to highlight the Chinese sys- tem through this punishment and to show the “[appropriate] way to manage an outer fan ” (Ch., jiayu waifan zhi dao).⁴³ From the emperor’s perspective, the ac- commodations and meals were meant to reflect the way of the dynasty, a point the British visitors and many local Chinese officials completely missed. For the emperor, an essential aspect of controlling the envoys of outer fan was the skillful deployment of the bureaucratic apparatus to cherish the men from afar appro- priately.
After negotiations concerning the performance of rituals, the British group—consisting of Macartney; his deputy, George Staunton (1737–1801); Staunton’s twelve-year-old son, George Thomas Staunton (1781–1859); and other members of the mission—was granted an imperial audience at the grand tent on September 14. Instead of kowtowing, the members of the mission knelt down on one knee and bowed their heads nine times. The British performed the same compromise ritual again on September 17, the imperial birthday, and days after that both in Rehe and in Beijing.⁴⁴ Simultaneously, the Manchu and Mongol princes and Burmese emissaries performed the rituals in strict observance of the imperial codes. After the ceremony, the emperor endowed the British mission with many gifts, including Korean clothing that had been piling up in Beijing as a result of Chosŏn’s annual tributes. For their part, the British submitted to the emperor their version of a “humble palace memorial,” which, among other things, asked him to station a permanent representative in Beijing and to begin trading outside Guangzhou. In reply, the emperor issued a long edict to King George III, refusing all of their requests. He ex- plained that no precedents beyond the “established rules” existed, so Britain could not hope to change China’s “way of cherishing the men from afar and the bar- barians in the four directions of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao jiahui yuanren fuyu siyi zhi dao). The emperor explained that he understood that Yingjili was so far from China that it was unfamiliar with the magnificent “way of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao tizhi), but he stressed that the British could not live and trade in Beijing because “the civilized–barbarian distinction is extremely strict” (Ch., Hua–Yi zhi bian shenyan). The Jesuit missionaries in Beijing, the emperor said, were not allowed to contact Chinese people either.⁴⁵ Macartney failed to obtain any trade concessions and thus shared the fate of his predecessors, James Flint in 1759 and Nicholas Skottowe in 1761. Instead the British embassy’s visit to China, which the Qing considered a tributary mission, strengthened the Qing’s position as the civilized center and reinforced its institutionalized norms regarding its foreign relations. After all, it was Qing China that, as Li Chen observes, “maintained a dominant position in deciding the terms of the Sino-Western economic, cultural, and political relationships.”⁴⁶ The British thus had no effect on the Qing’s worldview. On January 8, 1794, Macartney departed Guangzhou for Calcutta. The next day, three emissaries from Ryukyu were granted an audience with Qianlong in the Forbidden City, where they kowtowed to the emperor as usual. On January 22 the Mongol and Muslim princes and the chieftains of indigenous tribes from southwestern China were granted an imperial audience in which they too kowtowed to the Son of Heaven in the traditional manner. Three days later the Korean emissaries of the annual tributary mission prostrated themselves in front of the emperor. Then came New Year’s Day, and all princes and tributary emissaries convened in the Forbidden City to attend the grand assembly and lavish banquets together with Chinese offi- cials, all performing the highest level of kowtow again.⁴⁷ After the British mission left, then, the Zongfan mechanism between the Qing and its outer fan continued to operate in its accustomed seamless manner. Rebellious Western and Loyal Eastern Barbarians in the 1840s The First Opium War and the Diplomatic Paradox of Qing China Britain did not give up. In 1816 Lord Amherst (1783–1857) visited China as an ambassador. George Thomas Staunton, who had met with Qianlong as part of the Macartney mission and later served as the director of the British East India Company in Guangzhou, acted as Amherst’s deputy. By this time, China was ruled by Qianlong’s son, Jiaqing. When the British mission arrived in Tianjin and contacted local officials, the deputy governor-general of Zhili, Tojin (1755–1835), adopted the tone of the provincial hosts during the Vietnamese mission in 1790 and the British mission in 1793, assuring Jiaqing that he would adhere to precedent and welcome the tributary mission in order to prevent the foreigners from disdaining China. The crisis over kowtow, however, erupted again between the two sides. Because the dispute remained unsettled by the time the mission arrived in Beijing in late
August, the British did not immediately visit the emperor. The emperor read their absence as a sign of British contempt that “China as the common leader under the Heaven” (Ch., Zhongguo wei tianxia gongzhu) could not tolerate. The emperor also did not trust Staunton, saying that the latter should remember what cere- monies he had performed to Qianlong in 1793. In the end, the emperor refused to accept Amherst’s “humble palace memorial,” returned the British “tributes,” and ordered the envoys to be sent back to their homeland with token gifts from China.⁴⁸ The second British mission had also failed. In 1821 Staunton published a translation of the travelogue of Tulišen, the official who had visited Russia as the Qing envoy in 1712. In the preface, Staunton pointed out that the Chinese government followed an “anti-social system” in their intercourse with other nations and that China would consequently “rank very low indeed in the scale of civilized nations.”⁴⁹ Staunton’s ranking of civilization from his Eurocentric point of view served well the British strategy in China at the time. As the British-dominated opium trade reached new heights, the large inflows of opium and the dramatic outflows of silver were creating a financial crisis in China, forcing Beijing to consider banning the opium trade. In April 1840 Staunton, by then a member of the British Parliament, urged his colleagues to use force against China.⁵⁰ The ensuing Opium War between the two countries ended with the conclusion of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, the twenty-second year of Daoguang, Qianlong’s grandson. According to the Treaty of Nanjing and the Supplementary Treaty of Bogue, which was negotiated according to Western norms and signed in 1843, Britain gained the right of extraterritoriality and “most favored nation” status in China. The treaties thus planted the seeds of European imperi- alism in the Chinese world through the emerging treaty port framework. In 1844 the Qing established the position of superintendent of trade for the five ports (Ch., Wukou tongshang dachen) to manage contacts with Britain, France, the United States, and other Western countries. On the surface, the new post moved these treaty nations out of the orbit of the Ministry of Rites and the scope of the Zongfan framework. But the first official to hold the post was Qiying (1787–1858), a Manchu and a signatory of the Treaty of Nanjing who soon after became governor-general of Liangguang, where he was in charge of China’s contacts not only with Western countries in Guangzhou but also with Annam, Siam, and sev- eral other outer fan. This new post was thus added to the established Zongfan system without changing the nature of the system per se. Likewise, nothing really changed in other parts of the Qing periphery after the war. Keeping the West out of the Ritual: Qing Envoys to Chosŏn After Queen Kim of Chosŏn passed away in late 1843, the Daoguang emperor appointed two Manchu officials, Baijun (?–1859) and Hengxing, as envoys to deliver his condolences to Hansŏng. In February 1844 the two envoys left Beijing for Chosŏn with the imperial book of condolences and other items. After crossing Fenghuang Gate and marching toward the Yalu River, they found that the Koreans had set up several shanties to welcome them. In Ŭiju more Korean officials, in- cluding one with the king’s name card, greeted the envoys. On April 7 the envoys arrived in Hongjewŏn, in the suburbs of Hansŏng, where a high-ranking official with the king’s name card and a minister of the Ŭijŏngbu, the Korean cabinet, welcomed them. The grand ceremony was held the next day. In the morning the envoys were escorted to the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country outside the West Gate of the capital. The king came out through the West Gate to receive the imperial edict and returned to his palace first. The envoys were then escorted through the South Gate and dismounted from their horses near a gate to the palace. Baijun was guided by an usher to the grand hall, where he placed the imperial book of condolences and the condolence money on a desk on the east side of the hall and stood next to the desk. The king, at the foot of the steps to the hall, kowtowed to the imperial items and then proceeded to the mourning hall. There the two envoys in turn made offerings to the spirit of the dead. The king led the royal family members into the hall and knelt down in front of the envoys to receive the emperor’s condolences. Following ritual wailing, the last step of the ceremony, the imperial book of condolences was burned.⁵¹
The king then invited the envoys to the grand hall for a tea ceremony, after which the envoys went to their residence, the South Palace Annex. The next day the king visited the envoys to treat them to a tea banquet, and Korean officials visited the envoys to ask them to write Chinese characters, keeping the guests busy. The envoys also distributed 300 taels of silver and 490 felt caps among local servants. On April 12 the king sent off the envoys, giving each a gift of 2,500 taels of silver. After they returned to Beijing, the envoys reported on their mission to the emperor and suggested that the emperor preserve the 5,000 taels of silver in the Ministry of Rites, which could return the silver to Chosŏn through the country’s next mission to Beijing to show the imperial kindness of cherishing the men from afar.⁵² During their three-day sojourn in Hansŏng, the envoys did not talk with the king about any events in China related to the Opium War, the treaties signed with Western countries, or the changes in China’s foreign policies in South China, nor did the king ask about these matters. Their interactions were confined to the performance of minutely prescribed rituals that undergirded the longstanding mutual dependence of their legitimacy as Zhongguo and its outer fan, respec- tively. This primacy of ritual was demonstrated again soon afterward, in 1845. In April 1845 Emperor Daoguang appointed Huashana (1806–59), a Manchu minister of the Ministry of Revenue, and Deshun, an associate general of the Mon- gol Eight Banners, as envoys to Hansŏng to invest a new queen. The envoys arrived in Hansŏng in late May. The king went outside the city to welcome the envoys and the imperial books of investiture, after which the envoys were taken in sedan chairs to the palace, where they alighted in front of the grand hall and carried in the books of investiture. The king entered the hall to receive the imperial books by performing the kowtow. An usher read the books aloud to Chosŏn’s officials outside the hall, and then the king led his officials in three cheers of “Long live the emperor” (Ch., shanhu wansui). After a stay of three days, the envoys left the capital.⁵³ When the envoys reported to Beijing, the emperor asked them about the distance they had traveled, the king’s clothes, and the gifts sent by the king, but no mention was made of Chosŏn’s politics or other domestic Korean issues. For the emperor, the crises and challenges imposed by the war with Britain and the opening of treaty ports in Southeast China were entirely outside the purview of Qing-Chosŏn relations. At the top of the Qing administration, the Sinocentric cos- mopolitan order and the Qing’s identity as the Heavenly Dynasty remained untouched. Chosŏn, the prototypical outer fan, still maintained its loyalty to the Great Qing. Ministers and Emissaries: The British and Korean Missions to Beijing, 1860 and 1861 The Permanent Residence of Western Representatives in Beijing In 1856 the Second Opium War erupted in Guangzhou. The Chinese governor-general and imperial commissioner, Ye Mingchen (1807–59), who was in charge of foreign affairs, was captured in his office in the city in January 1858 by the Anglo-French forces under the leadership of Lord Elgin (1811–63). Part of a family that had enjoyed close contacts with Korean visitors in Beijing, Ye shared with Koreans the discourse of the civilized–barbarian distinction.⁵⁴ He had served in Guangzhou for more than a decade as one of the strongest opponents of allowing British representatives and merchants to move into the walled city. In his last memorial to the Xianfeng emperor before he was captured, Ye analyzed his negotiations with the British, French, and American ministers in Guangzhou and underlined his strategy of “secretly preparing for crises and publicly cherishing the barbarians.”⁵⁵ The Western colonial states’ expansion to East Asia remained incomprehensible to Ye, who still conceptualized all international contacts, including conflicts, skirmishes, and even the ongoing war, within the Zongfan frame- work. The emperor, with no better understanding than Ye, regarded the behavior of the British and French as “rebellion” and emphasized that China’s first imper- ative was to “cherish” these wayward subordinates to “preserve the national polity and refuse their requests.” The rationale was the same as that behind Qian- long’s instructions regarding the Macartney embassy in 1793. Neither the emperor nor his ministers at court nor his governors at the border realized that they
were dealing with several global powers engaging in gunboat diplomacy from Africa to East Asia. The war situation continued to escalate. In April 1858 the British, French, American, and Russian ministers convened in Tianjin and dispatched an ultimatum to Beijing, demanding negotiations with Chinese “plenipotentiaries” (Ch., bianyi xingshi). Among the requests made by these states, such as expanding trade to the Chinese interior and opening more ports, the most offensive to the Qing was the demand to lodge permanent representatives in Beijing, precisely as Macartney had proposed in 1793. The court instructed the governor-general of Zhili, Tan Tingxiang (?–1870), who was negotiating with the European ministers in Tianjin, to clarify that “all contacts between China and foreign countries have always been conducted at the borders, and only countries among China’s subordinates [Ch., shuguo] can visit Beijing to pay tribute [Ch., chaogong]. No commissioner from those countries has ever been allowed to reside in Beijing permanently.” The court also refused to appoint any plenipotentiaries. The emperor argued that his stance was not xenophobic because “China is not afraid of the visit of the barbarians to Beijing, however many people were to come; the problem is that such a visit does not fit the system.” Along the same lines, he refused to allow the American min- ister, William Reed (1806–76), to visit Beijing because “the United States is a friendly country [Ch., yuguo], but the imperial collection of precedents does not record how we should treat a friendly country, so the practice of entertaining might be inappropriate.”⁵⁶ The emperor asked that the ministers return to Guangzhou and discuss such issues as tariffs with the governor-general there, suggesting that the negotiations should be conducted with the superintendent of trade for the five ports at the border rather than in Beijing. The location of the negotiations was an integral aspect of the Sinocentric world order and thus mattered greatly in the eyes of the Qing rulers. The Anglo-French Alliance ignored the emperor’s instructions and occupied the Dagu Forts on May 20, after which they forwarded Tan Tingxiang a note re- questing that the four nations be allowed entry into Tianjin for negotiations with the Chinese plenipotentiaries as well as entry into Beijing, where they would ei- ther pay a visit to the emperor or meet with grand secretaries. On May 28 the emperor appointed the Manchu grand secretary, Guiliang (1785–62), as minister ex- traordinary and the Manchu minister Huashana as plenipotentiary and sent them to Tianjin for negotiations. Huashana, who had served as the deputy of the Son of Heaven on the mission to Chosŏn in 1845, now became a diplomatic representative of the Chinese sovereign who was equal to the monarchs of Britain and France. The emperor particularly instructed Tan to inform the foreign ministers that there was no need for them to visit Beijing. In the meantime, he ordered Prince Sengge Rinchen (1811–65) of the Korcin Mongols to use his Mongol warriors to reinforce the garrison between Tianjin and Beijing. The Sino-British negotiations reached a deadlock over the issue of a permanent representative in Beijing. At court, many high-ranking officials, such as Prince Yi (Dzai Yūwan, 1816–61), firmly refused the Western request to place representatives in Beijing. They suggested instead that Britain could follow the established practice of the “Russian barbarians” (Ch., E yi) and station students rather than commissioners in Beijing. The students would dress in “the clothes and caps of China” (Ch., Zhongguo yiguan), abide by local rules, and refrain from involvement in official affairs. Britain could negotiate with Chinese governors-general and governors over trade affairs at treaty ports. If the British insisted on visiting Beijing, the emperor said that they would have to travel from Shanghai via the over- land route, escorted by Chinese officials, with all accommodations and meals covered by China. They could visit Beijing once every three or five years, not annually.⁵⁷ Not coincidentally, this proposal fit precisely into the existing tributary ritual codes: Beijing was trying to draw Britain into the established Zongfan sys- tem. From 1761 to 1793, then to 1858, the Qing court’s understanding of Britain remained the same because the Qing’s institutionalized Zongfan norms never changed. This ideal model was soon partly—if opaquely—realized in the treaty with the United States, concluded on June 18, 1858, in Tianjin. Article 5 of the treaty regu- lated the visit of the American minister to Beijing in accordance with the specific ritual codes for the Qing’s outer fan.⁵⁸ The regulations specified the frequency of
the Americans’ visits to Beijing, the overland route they were to take from Tianjin to Beijing, their entertainment by local authorities, the requisite written notice to the Ministry of Rites, and especially the size of the mission—twenty members, which was the maximum head count of tributary missions allowed for Ryukyu, Lan- chang, Burma, and the Netherlands. Although the treaty granted the United States the status of a most favored nation, Beijing saw this status simply as a special favor for foreign barbarians, unrelated to China’s statehood and sovereignty. In this sense, the Qing court treated the United States as a tributary state, which the latter, of course, completely failed to realize. Within the domestic Confucianism-centered intellectual framework, neither the Qing ruling house nor the majority of its officials who had passed the imperial civil-service examinations thought beyond the framework of the civilized–barbarian distinction. The new knowledge imported from the West by American and European missionaries who were active in Southeast Asia and South China had not yet had an impact on the Chinese intellectual forces behind the post-Qianlong institutionalized order. On June 23, 1858, the Chinese minister Zhou Zupei (1793– 1867) and thirty of his colleagues submitted memorials against the permanent residence of “barbarous emissaries” in Beijing. Among the “eight evils” of such residence highlighted in Zhou’s memorial was the preaching of the gospel by the foreigners, which would “turn our manner of clothes, caps, rituals, and music into something fit for beasts” (Ch., yiguan liyue zhi zu, yi yu qinshou). He also warned that “if countries such as Chosŏn and Ryukyu, which have been loyal to China for a long time and sincerely send emissaries and pay tribute to the court, saw the disobedience of these barbarians, they, too, would despise the Heavenly Dynasty.” This argument was further underscored by Chen Rui, who emphasized the “fundamental divide between China and the others” (Ch., Zhong Wai zhi dafang).⁵⁹ In terms of their thinking, these officials were no different from Ye Mingchen, who at the time was detained by the British in Calcutta. Despite such keen resistance, Guiliang and Huashana accepted the British-drafted treaty after they realized the situation was beyond China’s control. The treaty with Britain, signed on June 26, allowed Britain to appoint diplomatic agents to the court in Beijing, where they would not kowtow to the emperor. According to article 3, the British ambassador, minister, or other diplomatic agent “shall not be called upon to perform any ceremony derogatory to him as representing the Sovereign of an independent nation, on a footing of equality with that of China. On the other hand, he shall use the same forms of ceremony and respect to His Majesty the Emperor as are employed by the Ambassadors, Ministers, or Diplomatic Agents of Her Majesty toward the Sovereigns of independent and equal European nations.”⁶⁰ In retrospect, this article opened the gates of Beijing to the representatives of Britain and other treaty nations and marked the beginning of the collapse of the centuries-long ritual system and the erosion of the Zongfan infrastructure. Being forced to fundamentally change its time-honored ritual norms, even if only in part, the Great Qing moved toward its eventual transformation from a cosmopolitan empire to a state equal to Britain according to post- Westphalian political and diplomatic norms. Historic though the change was, the Chinese may not have fully understood the treaty’s importance because of linguistic discrepancies. The Chinese version of the treaty, for instance, states that “Britain is a nation of zizhu on a footing of equality with China” (Ch., Yingguo zizhu zhi bang, yu Zhongguo pingdeng). The term zizhu, which meant self-rule or autonomy, was usually used in a Zongfan context. China regarded its outer fan as possessing this right, so it was different from the British understanding of the term “independence.” This divergence would become apparent in the following years, when China and the Western states as well as Japan tried to define the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship and Chosŏn’s international position. The seeds of further conflicts between the norms of the Chi- nese Zongfan system and those of European international law were thus planted directly in these treaties. What further shook the foundation of the civilized–barbarian discourse was article 51 of the Sino-British treaty of 1858, which decreed that the character yi (“bar- barian”) “shall not be applied to the Government or subjects of Her Britannic Majesty in any Chinese official document issued by the Chinese Authorities either in
the Capital or in the Provinces.”⁶¹ Britain and other Western nations that were eligible to invoke the most-favored-nation clause thus broke away legally and in- stitutionally from the category of barbarians in Chinese diplomatic discourse. From then on, in Chinese official narratives the character yi was increasingly re- placed by yang (“overseas,” “foreign”) and the term “barbarians” (Ch., yiren) by “foreigners” (Ch., yangren). This amendment, however, applied only to Western treaty nations that had never occupied an essential position in the Zongfan system. The Qing still consid- ered its major outer fan, such as Chosŏn, Vietnam, and Ryukyu, countries of barbarians. In this sense, the treaty port system, although it was expanding rapidly at the end of the 1850s, merely complicated the Qing’s view of the countries in the “Western Ocean.” In other words, the disintegration of Sinocentrism as a result of the 1858 treaties occurred on the Qing’s intellectual periphery, not at the core of its intellectual and ideological structure as informed and represented by the Qing’s principal outer fan. The ministers of the treaty nations residing in Beijing would soon be confronted with the complexity and perplexity of this distinction. Who Were the Barbarians Now? The British and Korean Missions to Beijing Treaties in hand, the ministers of Britain, France, Russia, and the United States left Tianjin for Shanghai, where they and Chinese representatives signed additional treaties on tariffs. The war would have been over had the British and French ministers in the summer of 1859 followed the Qing’s designated route to enter Beijing after they landed at Tianjin for the ratification of the treaties. But the ministers refused to follow Qing instructions, and their rash entry into the firth of the Beihe River near the Dagu Forts led to Chinese bombardment. The war resumed less than a year after the British Crown imposed direct control over India by nation- alizing the British East India Company in August 1858. Under the leadership of Lord Elgin, who was determined to employ gunboat diplomacy against Beijing, the Anglo-French alliance returned to China in the summer of 1860 and reoccupied the Dagu Forts. There the alliance almost annihilated the Mongol cavalry of Prince Sengge Rinchen with the Armstrong gun, a weapon created by Britain and employed in combat for the first time. The Qing succumbed not only to the joint colo- nialism of the European states but also to revolutionary post–Crimean War European military technology. The alliance occupied Tianjin and marched toward Beijing in late August. Although the Beijing court sent representatives to Tongzhou, near Beijing, for negoti- ations, on September 18 Prince Sengge Rinchen captured Harry Parkes (1828–85), the British commissioner in Guangzhou, as well as Henry Loch (1827–1900), Elgin’s private secretary, and twenty-four British and thirteen French officers and soldiers. Only half of these prisoners of war—including Parkes and Loch— survived and were eventually released on October 8, when the alliance gained control of Beijing’s suburbs and started looting the imperial palace of Yuan-Ming- Yuan. The frightened Son of Heaven, Emperor Xianfeng, had fled to Rehe on September 22 after appointing his younger brother Prince Gong (a.k.a. Prince Kung, 1833–98) as the envoy extraordinary and plenipotentiary to supervise the uncertain peace negotiations. On October 13 the Western forces took over the Anding Gate of the city. The Qing saw this as a more serious threat than it did the ongoing Taiping Rebellion in South China, as the court in Rehe and the caretaker admi- nistration in Beijing were extremely vulnerable to the aggressive European alliance and their powerful cannons positioned on the city’s old walls. From October 12 to 16, the survivors and bodies of the prisoners of war were returned to the alliance. The evident cruelty inflicted on the corpses, mutilated be- yond recognition, shocked Elgin and his fellow commanders. Elgin “at once notified to Prince Kung that he was too horrified by what had occurred to hold further communication with a government guilty of such deeds of treachery and bloodshed, until by some great punishment inflicted upon the Emperor and the gov- erning classes, he had made apparent … the detestation with which the Allies viewed such conduct.” The “great punishment” turned out to be the immolation of Yuan-Ming-Yuan. On October 18, the second day after the alliance buried the former prisoners, flames engulfed the magnificent imperial garden that had been co- designed by European Jesuit missionaries. Loch recorded that “during the whole of Friday the 19th, Yuen-Ming-Yuen was still burning; the clouds of smoke driven by the wind, hung like a vast black pall over Pekin.”⁶² Numerous buildings in which the Qing emperors had given audience to emissaries of its outer fan—once
including Britain and always including Chosŏn—were burned to the ground. On October 20 Prince Gong offered Elgin China’s submission to the alliance’s de- mands. The capital was fully opened to the alliance. Parkes and Loch entered the city the next day and ironically selected the grand hall of the Ministry of Rites as the site for the signing of the convention. Elgin departed for the grand hall on October 24, carried in a sedan chair by sixteen Chinese footmen—an honor previously reserved for the emperor—and accompanied by an escort of more than six hundred men. When the procession reached the hall, according to Loch, Prince Gong “advanced to receive Lord Elgin with an anxious, hesitating salutation,” while the latter “bowed, and at once walked forward to his seat, motioning Prince Kung to take the one on the right.” After they signed the convention, exchanged treaties, and talked briefly about maintaining friendship, “Lord Elgin rose to take leave; Prince Kung accompanied him a short distance, and then stopped; but on Lord Elgin doing so likewise, the principal mandarins in attendance urgently beckoned Prince Kung to move forward, and after a few moments of hesitation he walked with Lord Elgin to the edge of the steps.” Prince Gong was apparently adjusting to a new etiquette that he had never before performed. Witnessing the entire procedure, Loch enthusiastically claimed, “Thus was happily concluded an event which was the commencement of a new era, not only in the history of the Empire of China, but of the world, by the introduction of four hundred millions of the human race into the family of civi- lized nations.”⁶³ Like George Thomas Staunton’s, Loch’s judgment on civilization was thoroughly Eurocentric. Loch was correct in asserting that China had entered a new era. In January 1861 the Qing court established a temporary “office in charge of affairs concerning all countries” (Ch., Zongli geguo shiwu yamen, hereafter “the Zongli Yamen”) under Prince Gong’s supervision. The Yamen was responsible for China’s foreign rela- tions only with Britain, France, the United States, Russia, and other treaty nations, not with Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Vietnam, and other outer fan, whose contacts with Beijing were still under the auspices of the Ministry of Rites. The new institution was designed with the goal of expediency to meet challenges in a time of crisis, and it was modeled on the Grand Council.⁶⁴ The officials who served in the Yamen did so only on a part-time basis. The official tablet hanging at the main en- trance of the institution read, “Goodness and happiness between the center and the outside” (Ch., Zhong Wai tifu), highlighting the key Confucian doctrine of the mean. More importantly, the Yamen was deemed an imitation of the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations and was consequently categorized as part of the established Zongfan system. According to the court’s plan, once the momentary crisis had passed, foreign affairs would revert to the management of the Min- istry of Rites as usual, for the sake of “cherishing the outer fan .”⁶⁵ Yet like the Grand Council, the Zongli Yamen continued to serve the court after the crisis, and in 1901 it became the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ch., Waiwu bu). The Yamen survived primarily because China’s treaty partners always treated it as a ministry of foreign affairs at which Western diplomats could apply the con- cepts of international law to their negotiations with the Chinese side; still, the diplomats were not blind to the fact that the Yamen was different from a ministry of foreign affairs in the Western sense.⁶⁶ Beijing also realized that it was impossible to disband the Zongli Yamen, in particular after March 1861, when the French, British, Russian, and American ministers arrived in Beijing and established their offices next to the Forbidden City. In response, Beijing quickly organized a diplo- matic network from the top down by appointing superintendents of trade for Tianjin and Shanghai. So began a new era. As noted earlier, these institutional changes to the Zongfan framework affected only those parts that governed relations with treaty nations; beyond those, the Zongfan system stood unchanged. As ever, Chosŏn played an exemplary role in maintaining the Qing’s superiority within this established system. After learning from the 1860 annual tributary mission to Beijing that the emperor had moved to Rehe, the king of Chosŏn immediately sent a special mission to China with the aim of visiting the emperor at Rehe and demonstrating to him Chosŏn’s concern as a loyal subordinate of the imperial dynasty. In early 1861 the Korean emis- saries reached postwar Beijing, bearing various tributes. The Ministry of Rites asked the emperor whether the emissaries should visit Rehe, following the
precedents of Annam’s mission in 1790, Lanchang’s and Burma’s missions in 1795, and Annam’s mission in 1803. The emperor responded that there was no need for the Korean emissaries to travel to Rehe, but he instructed the ministry to follow convention by treating the emissaries to banquets and endowing them and the king with generous gifts in order to show his “ultimate kindness of cherishing the fan in a favored way.”⁶⁷ In fact, between November 1858 and May 1861, Chosŏn dispatched five tributary missions to Beijing in spite of the war in China. In the early 1790s, Chosŏn and British emissaries had convened in Rehe and Beijing as representatives of two outer fan—both of them nations of barbarians in the Qing’s eyes. But whereas the British emissaries had violently changed their status in the Chinese world by the early 1860s by entering Beijing under the cover of cannons, their Korean counter- parts continued to approach the imperial capital with humble palace memorials and tributes. Although the Korean emissaries also pursued the secret mission of obtaining intelligence in China in order to enable the Korean court to assess the situation there, their frequent presence in Beijing provided the Qing with a steady stream of resources to maintain its conventional ritual code, politico-cultural hierarchy, and imperial norms, which were under fire from the British and the French. However, the Korean emissaries never again saw the Xianfeng emperor, who died in Rehe in August and became the last emperor who refused to allow the Western barbarians to stand before him without kowtowing.⁶⁸ It was not until 1873 that Xianfeng’s son, Tongzhi, gave foreign ministers their first imperial audience at which the ministers did not kowtow. The audience took place at the Purple Light Pavilion (Ch., Ziguang ge) in the Forbidden City, the same venue at which the Qing emperor had met with emissaries of China’s outer fan since 1761—the year in which the Qing institutionalized the status of all other countries within its own imperial norms, as described in chapter 2. In 1873 the pavil- ion no longer witnessed the ritual of kowtow, but the politico-cultural significance of the imperial audience in that location remained essentially the same. Inter- estingly, and ironically, since 1949 the state leaders of the People’s Republic of China, who converted part of the Qing imperial palace into their living quarters and political headquarters, have used the pavilion to meet with foreign guests from other, equal states of the world—if no longer in the sense of all-under-Heaven.
3
JUSTIFYING THE CIVILIZED
The Qing’s Contacts with Chosŏn, Annam, and Britain, 1762–1861
As Chosŏn carefully maintained its political subordination to the Qing on the surface, and the Manchu ruling house used this submission to reinforce the Qing’s centrality and Chineseness, Chosŏn simultaneously constructed its own Chineseness within its borders by depicting the Qing as barbarians in particular moments. The civilized–barbarian discourse pervaded Chosŏn, nourishing a strong pro-Ming and anti-Qing attitude among the educated in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century. Chosŏn entered the contest for civilized status in a cultural sense, and its perennial missions to the Qing served this domestic construction of identity. As the Qing was proclaiming Chineseness in the post-Ming era, Chosŏn, too, sought to establish itself as the exclusive legitimate successor to the Ming. In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, a group of Korean scholars who observed the Qing’s prosperity and the economic gap between the Qing and Chosŏn dared to voice their support for the Qing’s claim to civilized status. Their arguments counterbalanced the prevalent anti-Qing attitude among Korean scholars and helped Chosŏn cope with the paradox of the civilized–barbarian discourse in a practical sense.
This chapter examines the interior aspects and function of the Zongfan order by showing how the Qing’s rule of cherishing the men from afar operated in the ritual protocol and presentations of diplomatic missions between the Qing, Chosŏn, and other countries from 1762 to 1861. The chapter discusses several cases of emissary exchanges between the Qing and Chosŏn against the background of the sharp reversal of the civilized–barbarian discourse that both sides exploited intensively for their own domestic politico-cultural legitimacy. It suggests that the Qing eventually prevailed over Chosŏn. By introducing Annam’s and Britain’s missions to China as a point of comparison for those from Chosŏn, the chapter further explores how the Manchu ruling house navigated the balance between the Chinese rhetoric commensurate with China’s claimed preeminence in the cosmopolitan world and the practical consequences of this superiority in bilateral communications. This balance illustrates the Qing state-craft and helps explain why, in the second half of the nineteenth century, both the Qing and Chosŏn, along with Vietnam and Ryukyu, encountered such tremendous difficulty in defining the nature of their relationship in accordance with the newly imported international law, a topic examined in part 2 of this book.
Historical Memory of the Civilized: Chosŏn’s Anti-Manchu Mentality
The Perception of a Barbarous Qing within Little China after 1644
With the irreversible downfall of the Ming in 1644, Chosŏn intensified its efforts to identify itself as the exclusive and genuine heir to Chinese civilization. In their daily training and practices, Korean intellectuals who were followers of Neo-Confucianism shared a consensus that the Manchu conquest of China proper in 1644 marked the fall of the central civilized country (K., Chunghwa hamnak).¹ In Chosŏn, numerous scholars used the regnal title of the last emperor of the Ming, Chongzhen, to date their personal letters and domestic documents. Their attitude was consolidated in the Little China discourse that emphasized the succession of Confucian orthodox legitimacy (K., tot’ong) instead of denying explicitly that the Qing possessed political orthodox legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom. Thus, within its borders Chosŏn presented itself as the successor to Confucius, Mencius, and Zhu Xi after the demise of the Ming.
On the Qing side, Chosŏn’s status as Little China was widely accepted by both ethnic Han and Manchu scholars. The Chinese officials and intelligentsia did not treat their Korean counterparts as barbarians, as they did many Europeans. On occasion, the Qing court explicitly appraised Chosŏn as "a country of rituals
and literature" (Ch., wenwu zhi bang; Ma., doro yoso i gurun), a statement also endorsed by many Chinese scholars of the Qing.² Yet when it came to locating Chosŏn within the multilevel structure of all-under-Heaven in the Qing’s political and cultural discourse, Chosŏn was inevitably designated a country of barbarians on China’s periphery. As this chapter shows, Korean scholars who visited Beijing had to face the challenge of reconciling their country’s putative barbarity with their conviction in its superior cultural pedigree.
In late seventeenth-century Chosŏn, in particular during the reigns of King Hyojong and King Hyŏngjong, anti-Qing sentiment was widespread among intellectuals. Song Si-yŏl (1607–89), a leading scholar and King Hyojong’s mentor, zealously proposed a northern expedition (K., bukpŏl) against the Manchus in order to recover the central plain on behalf of the Ming.³ Song’s plan was never put into practice, but it won strong moral support from the court and from Confucian scholars and contributed to the rise of a Korean national identity in the post-Ming period when the country was struggling for a new episteme.⁴ Another scholar, Sin Yu-han (1681–1752), in a letter to a friend who was about to visit Beijing as a member of a tributary mission, claimed that we are also Chinese (K., uri yŏk Chunggukin) and that Chosŏn was China—a "China with Classic of Poetry and Book of Documents " (K., sisŏ Chungguk) and a China with [Chinese-style] clothes and belts (K., ŭidae Chungguk). Sin went on to claim that since the fall of the Ming in 1644 China had not had a Son of Heaven, implying that political orthodox legitimacy also lay in Chosŏn, the successor to Kija (Jizi).⁵
The cases of Song and Sin reveal a pronounced victim mentality within the Korean ruling house and intellectual stratum after the humiliating Manchu invasions and the fall of the Ming. Highlighting Korea’s filial duty to the deposed Ming became an ideological tool to maintain Chosŏn’s domestic order and raise the morale of the learned class. On the one hand, the king presented himself as a loyal subordinate of the Qing for the sake of the political orthodox legitimacy granted by the Qing; but on the other hand, he was the moral sponsor of the anti-Qing movement inside Chosŏn, seeking to capture the political orthodox legitimacy embedded in the connection between his rulership and his subjects. Like the Qing emperors, the Korean kings had to deal with grave challenges arising from the framework of the civilized–barbarian discourse.
Against the background of this volatile balance, Chosŏn entered a more radical period of actively commemorating the imperial Ming during the reign of King Sukchong, when the Qing’s control over Chosŏn was loosened as the Kangxi emperor was preoccupied with suppressing the revolt of the Three Feudatories in the 1680s. In April 1704, on the sixtieth anniversary of Emperor Chongzhen’s suicide, the king established an altar near the palace in Hansŏng and performed a new ceremony to commemorate Chongzhen. Although it was the forty-third year of Kangxi, the king called the moment the seventy-seventh year of Chongzhen, setting the starting year to 1628, when Chongzhen ascended the throne. The king declared that the imperial Ming was the owner of the civilized and the barbarians (K., Hwa–I ju) but that the northern barbarians—that is, the Manchus—had taken the opportunity to occupy our central plain (K., kŏ a chungwŏn), with the result that the rituals and clothes (K., yeak ŭigwan)—the traditional metaphor for civilization—had become barbarous. Chosŏn, the king claimed, was the only place that still loyally worshipped the old motherland (K., koguk). Reciting these words at the ceremony, the king burst into tears. All of the officials around him wept too.
Soon thereafter, in October of the same year, the king had a long discussion with several ministers about building a temple to Wanli, the Ming emperor who saved Chosŏn from the Japanese invasion in the 1590s. The ministers endorsed the king’s pro-Ming attitude but pointed out that it was inappropriate for a vassal to offer sacrifices to the Son of Heaven, so the king instead constructed a nine-floor altar and named it the Great Altar for Gratitude (K., Taebodan), where a state ceremony would be performed twice a year, in spring and autumn. The altar was completed in January 1705.⁶ Thereafter, Chosŏn continued to commemorate the Ming for another 190 years until 1895, when it declared independence from the Qing. The altar was permanently closed in 1908, three years after Chosŏn
became a protectorate of Japan and two years before it was annexed by Japan.
Korean emissaries to Beijing continuously fed the popular antipathy toward the Qing in Chosŏn by providing firsthand accounts of their dealings with the barbarous usurpers of the Ming. For these emissaries, the trip to Beijing was a journey for mourning the Ming, deprecating the Qing, and strengthening Chosŏn’s identity as Little China. As they reached various landmarks—the Yalu River, Fenghuang Gate, Liaoyang, the Korean compound in Mukden where Crown Prince Sohyŏn had been detained between 1637 and 1644, Shanhai Pass, and the Forbidden City in Beijing, where the Ming emperors had resided for centuries—the emissaries often wrote poems lamenting the fall of the Ming. These poems became part of their journals, which were widely circulated in Chosŏn and were generically known as Yŏnhaengnok (The records of the journey to Beijing).⁷
From the second half of the eighteenth century, however, some Korean intellectuals, having witnessed the Qing’s prosperity on their journeys to Beijing and having engaged in extensive conversations with Han Chinese and Manchu scholars in Beijing, started to reconsider their entrenched view of the barbarous Qing. Disillusioned with Chosŏn’s self-proclaimed cultural superiority, these pundits recognized the Qing as a civilized country and called for Chosŏn to learn from Qing China for its own good, beyond the popular doctrine of revering China and expelling the barbarians. These scholars constituted the School of Northern Learning (K., Pukhak p’ae), focusing on practical knowledge (K., Sirhak). They successfully resumed contacts between the literati of Korea and those of China that had been suspended for more than 120 years since 1644. Among these scholars, three in particular stood out: Hong Tae-yong, Pak Che-ka (1750–1805), and Pak Chi-wŏn (1737–1805).
Honoring the Great Ming: Hong Tae-yong’s Perception of the Qing
Hong Tae-yong was born in Hansŏng in 1731 into Chosŏn’s ruling gentry and the hereditary class of yangban (lit. two branches [of the ruling class]), and he studied with Kim Wŏn-haeng (1702–72), a leading scholar of the time. In late 1765, when his uncle was appointed the secretary of the annual tributary mission to Beijing, Hong became affiliated with the mission as an officer of the emissaries’ junior relatives (K., chaje gungwan).⁸ Although Hong regarded the Qing as a barbarous country, he was excited about the trip and was eager to exchange ideas with his Chinese counterparts. After arriving in Beijing in early 1766, Hong put almost all his time and energy into getting to know Chinese scholars, mainly through written conversations (K., p’iltam, conversing by writing Chinese characters). These dialogues led him to conclude that the Qing, no matter how barbarous in Chosŏn’s eyes, was indeed the civilized Middle Kingdom, whereas Chosŏn, no matter how superior in its own mind, nonetheless fell into the category of barbarians.
Hong, like other Koreans, was extremely proud of Chosŏn’s fashion of Ming-style clothes and hats and disparaged the Manchu hairstyle and robes. His choice of dress signaled that he maintained the true way of Chinese culture. In his conversations with Chinese intellectuals in the first weeks of his stay in Beijing, Hong frequently used his clothing to highlight Chosŏn’s cultural superiority over the Qing.⁹ Shortly thereafter, however, Hong entered into dialogue with other Chinese intellectuals, in particular Yan Cheng and Pan Tingyun (1743–?), and these highly trained scholars dramatically changed his view of the Qing.
Yan and Pan, both Han Chinese, were from Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province, where they had successfully passed the imperial civil-service examinations and won the title of Juren (a qualified graduate at the provincial level). They were determined to pass the last round of imperial exams in Beijing to realize their dream of serving their country as officials. To enhance their communications with Hong, they shared with him their provincial exam essays. In the first conversation among Hong, Yan, Pan, and their Korean and Chinese peers, another Korean, Kim P’yŏng-jung, asked Pan why he had said in his exam essay that people should worship only the Zhou Dynasty—a statement that, Kim felt, could be seen as an expression of nostalgia for the deposed Ming and as an act of defiance against the Manchus. Pan explained that his words referred to the central civilized country, which was the patriarch for myriad countries (Ch., wanguo suozong), and
he emphasized that the current Son of Heaven, the Qianlong emperor, was so great that all subjects should show him obedience and respect. Worshipping the Zhou, Pan concluded, was akin to worshipping the current dynasty. Hong, for the first time in his life, heard the Qing called the central civilized country. Seeing Pan’s response as a consequence of the sensitive Manchu–Han Chinese ethnic relationship, Hong disregarded his claim and instead responded by highlighting Chosŏn’s identity as Little China. But by the end of the conversation, the two sides had found common ground in celebrating the Qing conceit that all-under-Heaven is one unified family (Ch., tianxia yijia).¹⁰
Hong did not reveal his sense of cultural superiority until his second conversation with Yan and Pan at the Korean residence. The conversation included a long discussion about clothes and hats, in which the Korean hosts and the Chinese guests articulated their respective understandings of the Ming-Qing transition and the Qing’s position in Chinese history. Hong emphasized several times that Koreans wore Ming-style garments, which in China by this time were worn only on the opera stage. Hong indicated that the garments served as a visible reminder of the dignified manner of Han Chinese officials (Ch., hanguan weiyi). The Korean hosts asked Pan and Yan critical questions regarding the Manchu hair-style, clothes, and hats, and about the Ming’s stories. Pan, who was in charge of recording the conversation, answered their questions carefully and praised the Qing volubly.¹¹ Pan later became an official in Beijing and never gave Hong the copies of their correspondence that Hong had requested after returning to Hansŏng, although the two maintained a good relationship.¹²
In another long conversation with Yan, Hong again used Chosŏn’s style of dress to criticize the Qing and mourn the Ming. Hong told Yan he felt extremely sad that China had lost itself with its adoption of Manchu fashions in hair and clothes and that China’s situation was in his view even worse than it had been under the Jin and Yuan Dynasties. In comparison, Hong proudly noted Chosŏn’s loyalty to the Ming, which he called the parent nation. Yan, however, argued that in 1644 the Qing had legitimately become the ruler of the country by defeating the rebels and defending and enacting justice. At the end of the conversation, Hong acknowledged that whereas the Ming had exploited his country, the Qing was much more generous toward Chosŏn.¹³ Hong realized that Han Chinese scholars identified the Qing both as a legitimate successor to the Ming in the political sense and as a legitimate heir to Confucianism in the cultural sense. Although the Han Chinese had adopted the Manchu queue and clothes, Hong concluded, they were still the offspring of the old home of the central civilized country (K., Chunghwa koga chi ye). By contrast, Hong conceded that although Koreans took pride in their Ming-style dress, on a fundamental level they still belonged to the barbarians by the sea. By arguing that the civilized and the barbarians are the same, he acknowledged the Qing’s civilized status.¹⁴ Hong returned to Chosŏn with a new perception of Qing China, and he made an immense contribution to the School of Northern Learning.
Learning from the North: The Korean Visitors’ New Tone toward the Qing
Revisiting the Civilized–Barbarian Discourse: Pak Che-ka’s Visit to Beijing
After Hong returned to Hansŏng in 1766, his strong relationships with Pan, Yan, and other Chinese friends, and his continuous correspondence with them, swiftly became legend among his fellow scholars in Chosŏn. One of them was Pak Che-ka, born in 1750 in Hansŏng, where his father served as a minister at the court. Because his mother was a concubine, Pak was not allowed to take the civil-service examinations, but he won fame as a poet when he was young and joined a wide aristocratic and intellectual social network, through which he became acquainted with Hong. Pak was fascinated by the contacts between Hong and Chinese scholars and hoped to visit Beijing himself. His opportunity came in the spring of 1778, when the emissary Ch’ae Che-gong (1720–99) invited Pak and another famous young scholar, Yi Tŏng-mu (1741–93), to join him on a tributary mission to Beijing. This trip helped transform Pak into a leading proponent of Sirhak—practical knowledge.
In Beijing Pak exchanged poems or conducted written conversations with more than fifty famous Han Chinese and Manchu scholars, almost all of them high-ranking officials at court, including Ji Yun (1724–1805), Pan Tingyun, Tiyeboo (1752–1824), and Fengšen Yendehe (1775–1810). He also conversed with a Muslim prince from Central Asia. After returning to Chosŏn, he spent three months composing a treatise entitled Discussions on Northern Learning (K., Pukhak ŭi), in which he discussed what Chosŏn could learn from the Qing in matters ranging from the construction of bridges, roads, ships, and cities to the production of porcelain, paper, bows, and brushes, as well as language and medicine.¹⁵ On each of these matters and many others, Pak described how advanced the Qing was, then compared it to Chosŏn. He suggested that it was Chosŏn’s self-imposed isolation, informed by the civilized–barbarian discourse, that prevented the country from perceiving the Qing’s accomplishments and embracing the Qing’s sophisticated practical skills. For example, he pointed out that Korean emissaries to Beijing did not directly contact local Chinese officials on their journey from Fenghuang Gate to Beijing but rather commissioned Korean interpreters to do so, which caused much inconvenience. Pak passionately urged his fellow scholars to study the Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, and Japanese languages. Proposals such as this one came very close to calling for a comprehensive reform of Chosŏn’s daily practices and statecraft.
At the end of his treatise, Pak wrote a short piece under the title On Worshipping the Zhou (K., Chonju non), addressing Chosŏn’s understanding of the Qing based on the civilized–barbarian discourse. Pak followed the popular anti-Qing trend in acknowledging that the Qing were among the barbarians, but he critically pointed out that Chosŏn could nonetheless learn from the Qing in many aspects. Otherwise, Pak warned, Chosŏn could neither expel China’s barbarians nor transform the eastern country’s barbarians. If we want to expel the barbarians, Pak stated, we had better know who the barbarians are first. Pak stressed that it would not be too late for Chosŏn to seek revenge for the Ming’s demise after first carefully learning from the Qing for twenty years. Pak followed this piece with Debate on Northern Learning (K., Pukhak pyŏl), in which he justified his call to learn from the Qing on the basis of Neo-Confucian principles. He divided those Korean scholars who denigrated the Qing while acclaiming Chosŏn into three groups: the lower savants (K., hasa), focused on grains and foods; the middle savants (K., chongsa), who were concerned with literature; and the upper savants (K., sangsa), who concentrated on Neo-Confucian principles. Pak argued that Chosŏn’s perception of Qing China was based on woefully incomplete knowledge of it and that Chosŏn was in fact underdeveloped compared to the prosperous Qing. Citing Zhu Xi, Pak expressed a wish that Chosŏn had more people who truly understood the principles as he did.¹⁶ Pak’s proposal that Chosŏn learn from the Qing before it fought against the Qing bore a striking resemblance to the strategy of learning the superior techniques of the barbarians to constrain the barbarians (Ch., shiyi changji yi zhiyi) put forward by the Chinese scholar Wei Yuan (1794–1857) in the 1840s, although Wei’s barbarians referred to Europeans.
Pak’s acknowledgment that the Qing was the civilized country disillusioned many of his fellow scholars. For those who had never seen the Qing, Pak described a society prosperous beyond their imaginations. Following Hong, Pak constructed a new image of the Qing, one the upper savants were reluctant to accept. Ch’ae Che-gong, the emissary who had invited Pak to Beijing, was one such upper savant. Ch’ae mourned the fall of the Ming and called the Manchu general of Fenghuang Gate barbarous. When he arrived in Beijing and saw the artificial hill next to the Forbidden City on which Chongzhen had committed suicide in 1644, Ch’ae composed a poem commemorating the Ming. He lamented that Chinese children on the street jeered at his Ming-style clothing. After the summer solstice rituals at the Temple of Earth, the Qianlong emperor praised the Korean mission for the best ritual performance among the outer fan. Ch’ae interpreted this as evidence that the Manchu emperor, whom he sometimes referred to as khan, tacitly approved of the Han Chinese clothes and hats that he and the other Korean visitors wore.¹⁷ When he returned to Chosŏn, Ch’ae collected the poems he had written on the trip into an anthology entitled Records of Enduring Contempt and Insults (K., Ham’in nok). In stark contrast, Korean scholars at the middle and lower levels found Pak’s proposal to use techniques to benefit people’s livelihoods (K., iyong husaeng) very attractive. Seeking to avoid pedanticism, these scholars contributed to the remarkable rise and dissemination of
northern learning. One of them was Pak Chi-wŏn.
Reenvisioning the Barbarous Qing: Pak Chi-wŏn’s Trip to Beijing
Pak Chi-wŏn was also of an aristocratic yangban background. In 1780, his cousin Pak Myŏng-wŏn (1725–90) was appointed the emissary to Beijing for Emperor Qianlong’s seventieth birthday, providing Pak Chi-wŏn an opportunity for tourism in the upper country. Shocked by the Qing’s wealth, evident everywhere from small towns on the Sino-Korean border to the metropolitan areas of Mukden and Beijing, Pak realized that the stereotypical perception of the Qing among the meritocracy of Chosŏn had become an obstacle to progress. Pak found it difficult to overcome the prejudices rooted in the hegemonic assumption of the Qing’s barbarity, although he was deeply influenced by Hong and had an open mind. In his Rehe Diary (K., Yŏlha ilgi), Pak frequently struggled with the moral correctness of the pro-Ming, anti-Qing principles, on the one hand, and his desire to learn from the Qing, on the other. He was uncomfortable, even pained, by any admission of the achievements of the Qing, which implied that the Qing was civilized but Chosŏn was not, just as Pak Che-ka had painfully suggested.
Pak Chi-wŏn’s astonishment began on the first day of his journey, when he reached Fenghuang Gate and saw the small town inside the fence. Pak noticed that the houses, walls, doors, and streets of the town were well designed and maintained, and that the town bore no indication of inferior rural style. He realized that a scene like this at the eastern end of the Qing’s territory could only portend still more prosperous vistas in the inner reaches of the empire. How could the Manchu barbarians manage the land so efficiently, in such an impressive way, and to such a significant degree of control? Pak felt so unsettled that he wanted to return to Hansŏng. He asked his private servant, Chang Bok, How would it be if you were born in China? Chang, an illiterate boy, immediately answered, "China is barbarian [K., Chungguk ho ya], so I would not want to be born in China."¹⁸ The boy’s answer was exactly the reassurance his master needed. It also reflects the prevalence among Koreans of the perception of the Qing as barbarians. Nevertheless, Pak realized that his journey would not be as peaceful as he had wished.
Indeed, after he entered Fenghuang Gate, Pak’s preconceptions about the barbarous Qing crumbled a little more each day. As he passed by Liaoyang, Mukden, and many small towns and villages, Pak was confronted by beautiful buildings, thriving markets, and flourishing urban and rural communities where local civilians and officials treated him in a friendly manner. He enjoyed written conversations with Han Chinese and Manchu scholars and officials and appreciated local scenery and historical sites. In the course of these experiences, the charge that the Qing was barbarous completely vanished from Pak’s diary. Rather, Pak began to discern a gap between himself and his Chinese counterparts in practical terms that had been caused by Chosŏn’s cultural isolation from the Qing after 1644. His experience in two villages illustrates this point vividly.
When Pak visited a pawnshop in a village called Xinmin, he was invited by the owner to write some Chinese characters as an honorable gift. Pak recalled that he had seen four big characters denoting exceeding frost, surpassing snow (Ch., qishuang saixue) on the front doors of some shops in Mukden and Liaoyang, so he wrote these down, assuming that they must mean that a businessman’s heart should be as pure as frost and snow. However, the four characters were actually a metaphor for the high quality of flour. The confused shop owner shook his head and murmured that the characters were not at all related to his business. Pak left the store in anger. The next day, when he camped at Xiaoheishan Village, he wrote the same four characters for a jewelry shop owner. Just as puzzled as the Xinmin merchant had been, the jeweler said, I am selling women’s jewelry, not flour, so why did you write these characters for me? Pak, suddenly aware of the characters’ actual meaning, overcame his embarrassment and calmly wrote other characters that won him high praise from the shop owner.¹⁹
Frustrated by this episode, Pak took a critical look at Chosŏn’s perception of the Qing and put forward the idea of using techniques to benefit people’s livelihoods by comparing different attitudes toward the Qing among his fellow Korean intellectuals. Like Pak Che-ka, he divided Korean scholars into upper savants, middle savants, and lower savants. He began with a scenario in which Korean people who had never visited the Qing would ask those returning from Beijing
about the impressive things they had observed on their journey. According to Pak, whereas many visitors would list without hesitation such things as the White Pagoda in Liaodong, Chinese markets, and Shanhai Pass, the upper savants would instead insist that nothing is impressive because the people in China, from the Son of Heaven to the common subjects, were barbarians as long as they shaved their foreheads. Since barbarians are dogs and sheep, nothing of theirs was worth praising. The middle savants would also argue that the mountains and lands became barbarous and nothing over there is impressive until we lead a hundred thousand troops to cross Shanhai Pass to recover China. Identifying himself as one of the lower savants who shared with the upper and middle savants the belief in revering China and expelling the barbarians, Pak nevertheless passionately called on his colleagues to learn the good ways and useful systems [of the Qing] as long as they benefit our people and country, even if they are created by barbarians. He argued, If we want to expel the barbarians, we should learn all the good Chinese systems to change ours, after which we might be able to say that China has nothing impressive.²⁰ Pak tried to separate recognition of the Qing’s superior practical techniques from the cultural and moral charges against the Qing. Yet this approach, which meant blurring the boundaries between civilized and barbarian, was a double-edged sword not only for himself but also for the general moral foundation of his country.
On August 30, 1780, when Pak arrived in Beijing, he was stunned by the grandness of the splendid metropolis. In his diary, for the first time, he embraced the Qing regnal title to express the date—the first day of the eighth month of the forty-fifth year of Qianlong—thus incorporating himself into the Zongfan mindset by identifying the Qing as the center of the world. On that day, Pak completely overlooked the fact that he was in a country of barbarians.²¹
Identifying Chosŏn as a Loyal Subordinate of the Qing: Pak Chi-wŏn at Rehe
When Pak Chi-wŏn and his fellow Koreans arrived in Beijing, they learned that the emperor had moved to the summer palace at Rehe, where the sixth Panchen Erdeni (1738–80) and Mongol princes would convene to celebrate the imperial birthday on September 11. On September 2, the emperor instructed the Ministry of Rites to ask the Korean emissaries to visit Rehe and ordered a minister of the Grand Council (Ch., Junjichu) to Beijing to welcome them, an act of extraordinary imperial benevolence. The Koreans immediately organized a special ad hoc team to travel to Rehe, to which Pak Chi-wŏn was attached. Five days later, the group arrived at Rehe, where it quickly became involved in subtle conflicts with the Chinese side. The emperor and his officials were keen to showcase Chosŏn’s subservience as a model outer fan, but the Koreans were equally keen to avoid this role, given their ambivalence about the Qing. However, Chosŏn’s subordinate position in the bilateral framework meant that the emissaries had few alternatives.
The first incident that revealed this tension took place upon the emissaries’ arrival, when the emperor informed the emissaries that they would stand at the end of the right wing of China’s second-rank civil officials during the grand ceremony on the celebration day. This was a special and unprecedented grace from the emperor, because the ritual code generally required the emissaries to stand at the end of the left wing of civil officials. The ministers of the Ministry of Rites asked the emissaries to submit a memorial showing their sincere appreciation. The emissaries hesitated, as it would have been inappropriate to do so without the king’s authorization, but the ministers pushed them to draft the memorial. Pak commented that as the aged emperor became more suspicious, the ministers had to work harder to meet his wishes.²²
On a subsequent occasion, the emperor sent a minister of the Grand Council to inquire whether the two emissaries would like to visit the saintly monk from the western area (Ch., xifan shengseng), referring to the Panchen Erdeni. The Koreans replied that they never stopped communicating with people of China (K., Chungguk insa), but that they did not dare to communicate with people of other countries (K., taguk in). Undeterred, the emperor ordered the emissaries to visit the lama at his monastery. At the monastery, the communications between the Korean emissaries and the Panchen Erdeni followed a labyrinthine path: the Erdeni spoke to the Mongol prince next to him, who relayed the message to the minister of the Grand Council, who forwarded it to the Qing interpreter, who passed it to
the interpreter from Chosŏn, who finally translated the words into Korean for the emissaries. The conversation involved Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, Chinese, and Korean, highlighting the multiethnic and multicultural nature of the unified empire, but the extent to which the Panchen Erdeni and the Korean emissaries could actually understand each other and grasp the political meanings behind the words used remains unclear. Acting on the guidance of the minister of the Grand Council, the emissaries, who were as stiff as clay dolls and wooden puppets, presented the Panchen Erdeni with silk handkerchiefs, and the Panchen Erdeni gave the Koreans three small bronze figurines of the Buddha and some Hada, Pulu, and Tibetan incense in return. Since the figurines contravened Confucian beliefs, the emissaries traded them for silver that they then distributed among their servants instead of bringing the figurines back to Chosŏn.²³
Behind the envoys’ reluctance to visit the Panchen Erdeni was the problem of the ritual of kowtow: the Korean emissaries refused to perform the ceremony to the lama. Pak later defended their behavior in a written conversation with a Manchu official: "Our humble country is in the same family with the big country, and there is no difference between inside and outside between us. Yet the lama is a man of the western area, so how could our envoys dare go and visit him? There is a rule that ‘subordinates have no right to conduct diplomacy’ [K., insin mu oegyo]."²⁴ Chosŏn was demonstrating its loyalty as China’s fan and subordinate. The principle that a subordinate country had no right to conduct diplomacy would be emphasized by the king of Chosŏn again and again when Western states tried to open direct lines of contact with Chosŏn between the 1830s and the 1870s. Their overtures created a tremendous and insurmountable dilemma for the scholars of Chosŏn. Although they viewed the Qing as a barbarous place and themselves as the civilized successors of the Ming within a Chosŏn-centric cultural world, as soon as another political entity approached Chosŏn, they would identify the Qing as China and hew to the Qing’s Zongfan line to embrace their unique role as the representatives of the men from afar cherished by China.²⁵
At a banquet held for representatives of the Qing’s subordinates and attended by the Panchen Erdeni, Mongol princes from Mongolia, Muslim princes from Xinjiang, emissaries from Chosŏn, and indigenous chiefs from southwestern China, the emperor lauded Chosŏn’s fealty, declaring to those gathered at the banquet that "Chosŏn has been serving as a fan for generations and has always been loyal. It pays its annual tribute on time, and that is truly worth praising. The emperor added, We, the monarch and the subordinates, trust each other fully and belong to the same family inside and outside China, so we should not bother ourselves with these overelaborate rituals. He then issued an edict according to which Chosŏn needed to present only an annual tribute; all other tributes, along with humble memorials, would be permanently canceled, reflecting the Qing’s policy of cherishing men from afar with substantial measures rather than rhetoric" (Ch., rouhui yuanren, yishi bu yiwen).²⁶ Again, the Korean emissaries served as the typical men from afar for the purposes of imperial discourse extolling the Qing’s civilization and centrality.
After returning home, Pak Chi-wŏn, like Pak Che-ka before him, called on his fellow scholars to learn from the Qing. In 1781 he wrote a foreword to Pak Cheka’s Discussions on Northern Learning, in which he reiterated that Chosŏn should abandon its incorrect assumptions about the Qing.²⁷ As other Korean scholars followed in Pak’s footsteps and made their own visits to Beijing, the Koreans’ perceptions about the Ming and the Qing continued to evolve.
The Way of the Heavenly Dynasty: The Qing and the Tributary Missions of 1790 and 1793
The Imperial Grand Banquet and the Korean Mission of 1790
The Chosŏn meritocracy increasingly realized that it could not restore the Ming in China, and this recognition helped normalize its service to the Qing under the rubric of serving the great. Compared to Pak Che-ka in 1778 and Pak Chi-wŏn in 1780, Sŏ Ho-su (1736–99), who visited Rehe as an associate envoy to celebrate Emperor Qianlong’s eightieth birthday in 1790, described Chosŏn’s Zongfan contacts with the Qing in very moderate terms. The mission, led by envoy Hwang
In-jŏm (?–1802), associate envoy Sŏ, and secretary Yi Paek-hyŏng (1737–?), left Hansŏng on July 9 and two weeks later arrived at Ŭiju, where it could not cross the Yalu River because of flooding. During his sojourn in Ŭiju, Sŏ commented in one of his poems that the Yalu River is the boundary between the civilized and the barbarians (K., Hwa–I bungye), but in his diary he used the Qing’s regnal title for the date.²⁸
The Qianlong emperor was concerned about the time it would take for the Koreans to reach the celebration at Rehe. As the representatives of the Qing’s outer and inner fan convened again at Rehe, the emperor saw the attendance of Chosŏn’s emissaries as an indispensable part of the system, way, or fundamentals (Ch., tizhi) of the big family. On August 1, the Korean emissaries, still in Ŭiju, received an official note from the Ministry of Rites in Beijing via the Manchu general of Mukden. The message had traveled 500 li (about 155 miles) per day, one of the fastest rates possible for the Qing mail system. The ministry instructed the Koreans to head directly to Rehe, as they needed to arrive by August 19, the same deadline that the emperor had set for the king of Annam and the emissaries of Lanchang and Burma. When the mission crossed the river the next day, a second note from Beijing arrived, urging the envoys to meet the deadline because Chosŏn’s presence was particularly crucial to the system (Ch., shu yu tizhi youguan). They subsequently received a third note in a completely different tone, saying that it would be fine if the mission could not reach Rehe in time.
The emissaries, perceiving the reversal as a subtle way of cherishing the men from afar, immediately organized a special team that would head directly for Rehe with humble palace memorials and selected tributes, while the rest of the mission would go to Beijing as planned. Covering more than 260 miles after passing Mukden, the emissaries reached Rehe on August 24 and learned that the emperor had changed the date of the grand banquet to August 25 to accommodate Chosŏn’s mission. The Mongol and Muslim princes, the emissaries of Burma and Lanchang, the indigenous chiefs of Taiwan, and the king of Annam had all arrived several days earlier.²⁹ The emperor’s decision conveyed eloquently that Chosŏn’s position was irreplaceable in the Qing-centric world.
The following day, the Ministry of Rites guided Chosŏn’s emissaries to the imperial palace for an audience with the Qianlong emperor. After asking for the emissaries’ names and ranks, the emperor instructed them to attend the grand banquet and to watch the Peking opera. In further illustration of Chosŏn’s prominent status, the Korean emissaries were arranged in first position in the wing of the emissaries of other countries, while those of Annam were in second position, those of Lanchang in third, those of Burma in fourth, and the indigenous chiefs in fifth. In addition, Chosŏn’s well-written humble palace memorials were considered exemplary. Hešen (1750–99), the most influential Manchu minister in the Grand Council, showed one of the Korean memorials to the king of Annam, Nguyễn Huệ, and commented, "Chosŏn serves the great in such a good manner that it is the model for other fan ." The Vietnamese king inspected the memorial several times and praised it highly.³⁰
With the move of the grand meeting from Rehe to Beijing in early September, the emissaries of Chosŏn retained their prominent role in all ritual performances in the palaces of Yuan-Ming-Yuan and the Forbidden City. The emperor frequently granted the emissaries audiences, invited them to watch operas, treated them to Manchu banquets, and gave them gifts. On October 11 the Korean mission finally left Beijing for their homeland after a successful stay.
Local Banquets and the Vietnamese Mission in 1790
The Qing expected the tributary emissaries from its other fan to accept and follow the imperial etiquette as readily as those from Chosŏn did. Any deviation from the prescribed practices would not only cause conflict between the Qing and the specific fan but also result in internal tension between the Qing monarch and his local officials. Such an instance occurred during the visit to Beijing of the king of Annam, Nguyễn Huệ, in 1790.
Annam experienced a turbulent period toward the end of the eighteenth century, and the Qing was drawn into the turmoil. In 1771, in what was called the Tây-so’n Rebellion, Nguyễn Huệ and his two brothers overthrew the Nguyễn family, which controlled the south of Vietnam, and restored the later Lê Dynasty
(1428–1788). In 1788, worried about Nguyễn’s growing power, the young king, Lê Duy Kỳ (1765–93), fled the capital. At Lê’s request, Emperor Qianlong sent troops to Annam, which had been the Qing’s "outer fan for more than one hundred years. Under the command of the governor-general of Liangguang, Sun Shiyi (1720–96), the Chinese army quickly occupied Hanoi and restored the government of Lê Duy Kỳ. But the Chinese forces were defeated in an unexpected attack by Nguyễn in January 1789, and Lê fled Hanoi again. Emperor Qianlong appointed his favorite Manchu general, Fuk’anggan (1753–96), who had just suppressed a rebellion in Taiwan, to replace Sun and organize a counterattack. However, the emperor was not interested in conquering Vietnam through a large-scale war, and he instructed Fuk’anggan and Sun to be receptive to any attempts by Nguyễn to sue for peace. The emperor reviewed China’s frustrating experience with converting Vietnam into China’s prefectures and counties" (Ch., junxian qi di) in pre-Qing history and stressed that the Qing would not integrate Annam into China’s map and register (Ch., shouru bantu) by imitating the case of Xinjiang, where the court had had to dispatch numerous officials to manage the land after the military conquest, in particular after the war with the Zunghar Mongols.³¹ Qing policymakers thus clearly understood that policies were to be applied flexibly in different parts of the Qing frontier. As it turned out, Nguyễn was not ready for another fight with the Qing either, so in the same month he presented Sun with a humble palace memorial to express his willingness to become a subordinate of the Heavenly Dynasty, marking the end of the conflict on the battlefield.
Recognizing the motivation behind Nguyễn’s act of submission to the Qing, Qianlong issued an edict on May 15, declaring that he would not use force against the country for the sake of the barbarian people of Annam. Believing that Heaven has abandoned the Lê, the emperor settled the Lê family and its loyal followers in the city of Guilin in Guangxi, a Chinese province bordering Vietnam.³² This arrangement signaled that the Qing was preparing to support a new Vietnamese regime. To that end, the emperor indicated that he might invest Nguyễn as king if Nguyễn visited Beijing in person. This, according to the emperor, was precisely how he managed foreign barbarians—with mercy and discipline. The emperor also confirmed that Lê and his followers would not be sent back to Annam for restoration, and to prove his intentions he ordered them to cut their hair according to the Qing style and to wear Qing clothes. In Guilin, Fuk’anggan and Sun Shiyi told the desperate young king, "You are in the land of the central civilized country [Ch., Zhonghua zhi tu], so you should follow China’s system [Ch., Zhongguo zhi zhi] and change your hairstyle and clothes."³³
As the manager of communications at the border, Fuk’anggan understood the mood of his aging and vainglorious master in Beijing, so he impressed on the emperor Nguyễn’s willingness to visit Beijing. In August the emperor quickly invested Nguyễn as the new king in order to provide him with the necessary orthodox legitimacy to govern and stabilize Annam domestically. In the book of investiture, the emperor emphasized the importance of the principle of serving the great on the part of an outer fan and that of cherishing the small on the part of China, highlighting the same ideological reciprocity that existed between Chosŏn and the Qing. The emperor took four steps to welcome the new king to Beijing. First, he instructed the Grand Secretariat and the Ministry of Rites to create new guest-host rituals (Ch., binzhu zhi li) between the king and the Qing’s governors-general and governors. He also endowed the king with a golden belt that was reserved for the Qing’s royal vassals (Ch., Zongfan).³⁴ Second, he moved the dethroned Lê to Beijing and appointed him a hereditary major in the Han Eight Banners. The 376 followers who had accompanied Lê were registered with the banner household system, and many were moved to Jiangnan, Zhejiang, Sichuan, and other provinces. Third, the emperor allowed the new Nguyễn regime to pick up their Chinese calendar books every year from the governor of Guangxi instead of traveling to Beijing for them. And fourth, he promised to open a border market after Nguyễn had visited Beijing, in recognition of the idea that the barbarian people of that country are all loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty. All of these measures were aimed at encouraging Nguyễn’s sincerity in transforming into a subordinate of the civilized (Ch., xianghua zhi cheng).³⁵
On May 26, 1790, the king and his mission of 150 members reached the Qing border, where he performed the highest level of kowtow to the imperial edicts and
gifts.³⁶ Fuk’anggan then accompanied Nguyễn to Rehe, passing through Guangxi, Guangdong, Hunan, Jiangxi, Hubei, Henan, and Zhili Provinces. In early June the mission arrived in the port of Guangzhou, and the Western barbarians of the Cohongs (referring to local factories through which the Western merchants traded with the Chinese side) gathered to witness the homage paid to the Qing by the king of an outer fan.³⁷ Two months later the Qing court invested Nguyễn’s son as crown prince, and the emperor applauded the father-son relationship between the emperor and Nguyễn. Following the precedents set by his reception of the king of Chosŏn and the Mongol khan of Korcin, the emperor dispatched a minister from the Ministry of Rites to welcome the king to a tea ceremony at Liangxiang, a few miles south of Beijing.
The practice of the policy of cherishing the men from afar went smoothly until a report from Rehe in late July made the emperor uncomfortable. The officials there sent word that they had received an unofficial note (Ch., chuandan) saying that the daily cost of entertaining and accommodating the Vietnamese mission in Jiangxi was around four thousand taels of silver—an astounding sum. The officials were worried that it would be inappropriate for them to host the mission with less luxury once it reached Rehe, but they could only work with the funds they had available. The emperor, too, was shocked by the cost, as he had treated Mongol princes and emissaries of other countries to annual banquets for less than one thousand taels. An expense of 4,000 taels per day meant that the total amount spent on the king and his entourage would reach 0.8 million taels during their two-hundred-day sojourn in China.
Believing that this issue deeply concerned the way of the Heavenly Dynasty, the emperor lectured his officials that the great Heavenly Dynasty should not welcome one or two subordinates from the remote lands in a luxurious way. In addition, said the emperor, if the king were entertained too lavishly in the provinces, he would not sufficiently appreciate the imperial grace when treated with less opulence in Rehe. Chosŏn’s missions illustrated the emperor’s point. The Koreans prepared their own meals at each transfer station, but once they arrived in Beijing or Rehe, their daily logistics were entirely taken over by Qing personnel and the emissaries were hosted in a sumptuous manner. This substantial difference in hospitality between the provinces and Beijing created exactly the effect that the emperor sought. The danger posed by the luxurious treatment of Annam’s emissaries along their route lay in its potential to undermine the spectacle of imperial generosity that the emperor, informed by the Chosŏn model, wished to present at the mission’s final destination. Thus, the emperor instructed the provincial authorities in Jiangxi, Hubei, Henan, and Zhili to tone down the extravagance of their receptions, as this was the only way that the mean between abundance and scarcity (Ch., fengjian shizhong) could be realized. It was the first time in the Qianlong period that the emperor gave orders to temper the level of luxury in entertaining foreign dignitaries.³⁸
The event created an opportunity for the emperor to discipline his officials. He listed two possible reasons for the astonishing costs: either local officials deliberately spent too much in order to seek profitable reimbursement from the imperial coffers in the future, or the Chinese escorts extorted too much money from the provinces they passed through. Either possibility could damage the way of the Heavenly Dynasty. The emperor ordered governors in Guangdong, Jiangxi, Hubei, Anhui, and Zhili to investigate how the four-thousand-tael figure had come about. None of the officials claimed responsibility, but the emperor insisted that the origin of the unofficial note be identified and suggested it might have come from Zhili. Liang Kentang (1715–1802), the governor-general of Zhili, immediately reported that the note was wrongly printed in his province. The emperor condemned Liang and closed the case, but he did not punish Liang, who was apparently the scapegoat of the emperor’s face-saving inquiry.³⁹
When the mission from Annam arrived in Rehe on August 20, 1790, Nguyễn was granted an imperial audience together with the indigenous chiefs of southwestern China and Taiwan, the khan of Kazak, the princes of Mongolia and the Muslim tributaries, and the emissaries of Burma and Lanchang. The emperor bestowed official Qing robes on the king and his followers. On August 25, as described in the previous section, Chosŏn’s bedraggled emissaries reached Rehe, and
all the men from afar could finally convene at the imperial hall for the grand banquet. There and later in Beijing, the envoys from the Qing’s periphery kowtowed to their shared Son of Heaven in China. What Qianlong saw and experienced was indeed a harmonious picture of the Heavenly Dynasty.
The Way of the Heavenly Dynasty: The British Mission in 1793
Three years later, the emperor would receive a very different group of men from afar. This mission came from England, known in China as Yingjili. In September 1792 Lord Macartney (1737–1806) left Portsmouth for China to seek greater commercial opportunities in the name of celebrating Qianlong’s birthday. In July 1793 the mission reached Dagu Harbor in Tianjin and was welcomed by Liang Kentang and by Zhengrui, the salt tax commissioner of Changlu. On September 14 Macartney and his assistants, who were called British tributary emissaries (Ch., Yingjili guo gongshi), were granted an audience with Qianlong at Rehe, after which the mission was sent back to Guangzhou via the overland route. Scholars have described the visit as an epoch-making collision of two different cultural, social, and imperial systems and as the beginning of the East-West encounter that eventually led to the Opium War of 1839–42.⁴⁰ Rather than reviewing the entire event, which has been well examined, this section focuses on the connection between the British mission and the legacy of Annam’s mission in 1790 against the historical backdrop of the Qing’s institutional barbarianization of all other countries, including Britain.
Until 1793 the Qing did not have a clear sense of the British presence in India and failed to connect the British activities on the Tibetan frontier with those in India.⁴¹ The Qing court saw the British embassy of 1793 as a tributary mission from an outer fan, so all bilateral contacts had to be conducted in accordance with imperial codes just like those that applied to Chosŏn, Annam, and Ryukyu. This time, the emperor made a point of instructing his local officials to treat the foreign barbarians of the British tributary mission appropriately between abundance and scarcity. Such treatment, said the emperor, would befit the way of the upper country and ensure that the men from afar would not disdain China. Of the officials involved in hosting the mission, Liang Kentang, still smarting from the scandal of the overly extravagant hospitality shown to Annam in 1790, was perhaps the only one who thoroughly understood what the emperor meant. The emperor, too, might have taken the precedent of Annam as a standard for testing his officials. The game between the emperor and his officials was back on. In August, after learning that Zhejiang, Shandong, and Tianjin had lavished food on the British envoys, the emperor admonished his officials on the proper balance to be observed in welcoming the men from afar. Too little generosity, he explained, might prevent them from transforming into the civilized, while too much might result in their contempt for the way and dignity of the Heavenly Dynasty. The point was to show neither inferiority nor superiority in entertaining, but to remain in accord with the way and highlight the act of cherishing. He reminded Liang several times of this proper way.⁴²
When the mission reached Rehe on September 8, Macartney and his assistants refused to prostrate themselves before the emperor. The next day the emperor issued an edict to Liang and his colleagues, expressing his disappointment in the British envoys. The edict attributed the envoys’ shocking lack of respect to the extravagant treatment they had received in the provinces, which must have encouraged the barbarians’ arrogance and overshadowed the impression that Rehe ought to have made on them. To remedy the matter and punish the provinces, the emperor ordered that the mission return to Guangdong by the overland route and along interior rivers, and that all accommodations and meals at transfer stations be provided in strict conformity with tributary precedents for such rude foreign barbarians. The emperor further stressed that the hospitality extended to the envoys in Beijing should be moderated in order to highlight the Chinese system through this punishment and to show the "[appropriate] way to manage an outer fan " (Ch., jiayu waifan zhi dao).⁴³ From the emperor’s perspective, the accommodations and meals were meant to reflect the way of the dynasty, a point the British visitors and many local Chinese officials completely missed. For the emperor, an essential aspect of controlling the envoys of outer fan was the skillful deployment of the bureaucratic apparatus to cherish the men from afar appropriately.
After negotiations concerning the performance of rituals, the British group—consisting of Macartney; his deputy, George Staunton (1737–1801); Staunton’s twelve-year-old son, George Thomas Staunton (1781–1859); and other members of the mission—was granted an imperial audience at the grand tent on September 14. Instead of kowtowing, the members of the mission knelt down on one knee and bowed their heads nine times. The British performed the same compromise ritual again on September 17, the imperial birthday, and days after that both in Rehe and in Beijing.⁴⁴ Simultaneously, the Manchu and Mongol princes and Burmese emissaries performed the rituals in strict observance of the imperial codes. After the ceremony, the emperor endowed the British mission with many gifts, including Korean clothing that had been piling up in Beijing as a result of Chosŏn’s annual tributes.
For their part, the British submitted to the emperor their version of a humble palace memorial, which, among other things, asked him to station a permanent representative in Beijing and to begin trading outside Guangzhou. In reply, the emperor issued a long edict to King George III, refusing all of their requests. He explained that no precedents beyond the established rules existed, so Britain could not hope to change China’s way of cherishing the men from afar and the barbarians in the four directions of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao jiahui yuanren fuyu siyi zhi dao). The emperor explained that he understood that Yingjili was so far from China that it was unfamiliar with the magnificent way of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao tizhi), but he stressed that the British could not live and trade in Beijing because the civilized–barbarian distinction is extremely strict (Ch., Hua–Yi zhi bian shenyan). The Jesuit missionaries in Beijing, the emperor said, were not allowed to contact Chinese people either.⁴⁵ Macartney failed to obtain any trade concessions and thus shared the fate of his predecessors, James Flint in 1759 and Nicholas Skottowe in 1761. Instead the British embassy’s visit to China, which the Qing considered a tributary mission, strengthened the Qing’s position as the civilized center and reinforced its institutionalized norms regarding its foreign relations. After all, it was Qing China that, as Li Chen observes, maintained a dominant position in deciding the terms of the Sino-Western economic, cultural, and political relationships.⁴⁶
The British thus had no effect on the Qing’s worldview. On January 8, 1794, Macartney departed Guangzhou for Calcutta. The next day, three emissaries from Ryukyu were granted an audience with Qianlong in the Forbidden City, where they kowtowed to the emperor as usual. On January 22 the Mongol and Muslim princes and the chieftains of indigenous tribes from southwestern China were granted an imperial audience in which they too kowtowed to the Son of Heaven in the traditional manner. Three days later the Korean emissaries of the annual tributary mission prostrated themselves in front of the emperor. Then came New Year’s Day, and all princes and tributary emissaries convened in the Forbidden City to attend the grand assembly and lavish banquets together with Chinese officials, all performing the highest level of kowtow again.⁴⁷ After the British mission left, then, the Zongfan mechanism between the Qing and its outer fan continued to operate in its accustomed seamless manner.
Rebellious Western and Loyal Eastern Barbarians in the 1840s
The First Opium War and the Diplomatic Paradox of Qing China
Britain did not give up. In 1816 Lord Amherst (1783–1857) visited China as an ambassador. George Thomas Staunton, who had met with Qianlong as part of the Macartney mission and later served as the director of the British East India Company in Guangzhou, acted as Amherst’s deputy. By this time, China was ruled by Qianlong’s son, Jiaqing. When the British mission arrived in Tianjin and contacted local officials, the deputy governor-general of Zhili, Tojin (1755–1835), adopted the tone of the provincial hosts during the Vietnamese mission in 1790 and the British mission in 1793, assuring Jiaqing that he would adhere to precedent and welcome the tributary mission in order to prevent the foreigners from disdaining China.
The crisis over kowtow, however, erupted again between the two sides. Because the dispute remained unsettled by the time the mission arrived in Beijing in late
August, the British did not immediately visit the emperor. The emperor read their absence as a sign of British contempt that China as the common leader under the Heaven (Ch., Zhongguo wei tianxia gongzhu) could not tolerate. The emperor also did not trust Staunton, saying that the latter should remember what ceremonies he had performed to Qianlong in 1793. In the end, the emperor refused to accept Amherst’s humble palace memorial, returned the British tributes, and ordered the envoys to be sent back to their homeland with token gifts from China.⁴⁸ The second British mission had also failed.
In 1821 Staunton published a translation of the travelogue of Tulišen, the official who had visited Russia as the Qing envoy in 1712. In the preface, Staunton pointed out that the Chinese government followed an anti-social system in their intercourse with other nations and that China would consequently rank very low indeed in the scale of civilized nations.⁴⁹ Staunton’s ranking of civilization from his Eurocentric point of view served well the British strategy in China at the time. As the British-dominated opium trade reached new heights, the large inflows of opium and the dramatic outflows of silver were creating a financial crisis in China, forcing Beijing to consider banning the opium trade. In April 1840 Staunton, by then a member of the British Parliament, urged his colleagues to use force against China.⁵⁰ The ensuing Opium War between the two countries ended with the conclusion of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, the twenty-second year of Daoguang, Qianlong’s grandson. According to the Treaty of Nanjing and the Supplementary Treaty of Bogue, which was negotiated according to Western norms and signed in 1843, Britain gained the right of extraterritoriality and most favored nation status in China. The treaties thus planted the seeds of European imperialism in the Chinese world through the emerging treaty port framework.
In 1844 the Qing established the position of superintendent of trade for the five ports (Ch., Wukou tongshang dachen) to manage contacts with Britain, France, the United States, and other Western countries. On the surface, the new post moved these treaty nations out of the orbit of the Ministry of Rites and the scope of the Zongfan framework. But the first official to hold the post was Qiying (1787–1858), a Manchu and a signatory of the Treaty of Nanjing who soon after became governor-general of Liangguang, where he was in charge of China’s contacts not only with Western countries in Guangzhou but also with Annam, Siam, and several other outer fan. This new post was thus added to the established Zongfan system without changing the nature of the system per se. Likewise, nothing really changed in other parts of the Qing periphery after the war.
Keeping the West out of the Ritual: Qing Envoys to Chosŏn
After Queen Kim of Chosŏn passed away in late 1843, the Daoguang emperor appointed two Manchu officials, Baijun (?–1859) and Hengxing, as envoys to deliver his condolences to Hansŏng. In February 1844 the two envoys left Beijing for Chosŏn with the imperial book of condolences and other items. After crossing Fenghuang Gate and marching toward the Yalu River, they found that the Koreans had set up several shanties to welcome them. In Ŭiju more Korean officials, including one with the king’s name card, greeted the envoys. On April 7 the envoys arrived in Hongjewŏn, in the suburbs of Hansŏng, where a high-ranking official with the king’s name card and a minister of the Ŭijŏngbu, the Korean cabinet, welcomed them.
The grand ceremony was held the next day. In the morning the envoys were escorted to the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country outside the West Gate of the capital. The king came out through the West Gate to receive the imperial edict and returned to his palace first. The envoys were then escorted through the South Gate and dismounted from their horses near a gate to the palace. Baijun was guided by an usher to the grand hall, where he placed the imperial book of condolences and the condolence money on a desk on the east side of the hall and stood next to the desk. The king, at the foot of the steps to the hall, kowtowed to the imperial items and then proceeded to the mourning hall. There the two envoys in turn made offerings to the spirit of the dead. The king led the royal family members into the hall and knelt down in front of the envoys to receive the emperor’s condolences. Following ritual wailing, the last step of the ceremony, the imperial book of condolences was burned.⁵¹
The king then invited the envoys to the grand hall for a tea ceremony, after which the envoys went to their residence, the South Palace Annex. The next day the king visited the envoys to treat them to a tea banquet, and Korean officials visited the envoys to ask them to write Chinese characters, keeping the guests busy. The envoys also distributed 300 taels of silver and 490 felt caps among local servants. On April 12 the king sent off the envoys, giving each a gift of 2,500 taels of silver. After they returned to Beijing, the envoys reported on their mission to the emperor and suggested that the emperor preserve the 5,000 taels of silver in the Ministry of Rites, which could return the silver to Chosŏn through the country’s next mission to Beijing to show the imperial kindness of cherishing the men from afar.⁵² During their three-day sojourn in Hansŏng, the envoys did not talk with the king about any events in China related to the Opium War, the treaties signed with Western countries, or the changes in China’s foreign policies in South China, nor did the king ask about these matters. Their interactions were confined to the performance of minutely prescribed rituals that undergirded the longstanding mutual dependence of their legitimacy as Zhongguo and its outer fan, respectively. This primacy of ritual was demonstrated again soon afterward, in 1845.
In April 1845 Emperor Daoguang appointed Huashana (1806–59), a Manchu minister of the Ministry of Revenue, and Deshun, an associate general of the Mongol Eight Banners, as envoys to Hansŏng to invest a new queen. The envoys arrived in Hansŏng in late May. The king went outside the city to welcome the envoys and the imperial books of investiture, after which the envoys were taken in sedan chairs to the palace, where they alighted in front of the grand hall and carried in the books of investiture. The king entered the hall to receive the imperial books by performing the kowtow. An usher read the books aloud to Chosŏn’s officials outside the hall, and then the king led his officials in three cheers of Long live the emperor (Ch., shanhu wansui). After a stay of three days, the envoys left the capital.⁵³ When the envoys reported to Beijing, the emperor asked them about the distance they had traveled, the king’s clothes, and the gifts sent by the king, but no mention was made of Chosŏn’s politics or other domestic Korean issues. For the emperor, the crises and challenges imposed by the war with Britain and the opening of treaty ports in Southeast China were entirely outside the purview of Qing-Chosŏn relations. At the top of the Qing administration, the Sinocentric cosmopolitan order and the Qing’s identity as the Heavenly Dynasty remained untouched. Chosŏn, the prototypical outer fan, still maintained its loyalty to the Great Qing.
Ministers and Emissaries: The British and Korean Missions to Beijing, 1860 and 1861
The Permanent Residence of Western Representatives in Beijing
In 1856 the Second Opium War erupted in Guangzhou. The Chinese governor-general and imperial commissioner, Ye Mingchen (1807–59), who was in charge of foreign affairs, was captured in his office in the city in January 1858 by the Anglo-French forces under the leadership of Lord Elgin (1811–63). Part of a family that had enjoyed close contacts with Korean visitors in Beijing, Ye shared with Koreans the discourse of the civilized–barbarian distinction.⁵⁴ He had served in Guangzhou for more than a decade as one of the strongest opponents of allowing British representatives and merchants to move into the walled city. In his last memorial to the Xianfeng emperor before he was captured, Ye analyzed his negotiations with the British, French, and American ministers in Guangzhou and underlined his strategy of secretly preparing for crises and publicly cherishing the barbarians.⁵⁵ The Western colonial states’ expansion to East Asia remained incomprehensible to Ye, who still conceptualized all international contacts, including conflicts, skirmishes, and even the ongoing war, within the Zongfan framework. The emperor, with no better understanding than Ye, regarded the behavior of the British and French as rebellion and emphasized that China’s first imperative was to cherish these wayward subordinates to preserve the national polity and refuse their requests. The rationale was the same as that behind Qianlong’s instructions regarding the Macartney embassy in 1793. Neither the emperor nor his ministers at court nor his governors at the border realized that they
were dealing with several global powers engaging in gunboat diplomacy from Africa to East Asia.
The war situation continued to escalate. In April 1858 the British, French, American, and Russian ministers convened in Tianjin and dispatched an ultimatum to Beijing, demanding negotiations with Chinese plenipotentiaries (Ch., bianyi xingshi). Among the requests made by these states, such as expanding trade to the Chinese interior and opening more ports, the most offensive to the Qing was the demand to lodge permanent representatives in Beijing, precisely as Macartney had proposed in 1793. The court instructed the governor-general of Zhili, Tan Tingxiang (?–1870), who was negotiating with the European ministers in Tianjin, to clarify that "all contacts between China and foreign countries have always been conducted at the borders, and only countries among China’s subordinates [Ch., shuguo] can visit Beijing to pay tribute [Ch., chaogong]. No commissioner from those countries has ever been allowed to reside in Beijing permanently. The court also refused to appoint any plenipotentiaries. The emperor argued that his stance was not xenophobic because China is not afraid of the visit of the barbarians to Beijing, however many people were to come; the problem is that such a visit does not fit the system. Along the same lines, he refused to allow the American minister, William Reed (1806–76), to visit Beijing because the United States is a friendly country [Ch., yuguo], but the imperial collection of precedents does not record how we should treat a friendly country, so the practice of entertaining might be inappropriate."⁵⁶ The emperor asked that the ministers return to Guangzhou and discuss such issues as tariffs with the governor-general there, suggesting that the negotiations should be conducted with the superintendent of trade for the five ports at the border rather than in Beijing. The location of the negotiations was an integral aspect of the Sinocentric world order and thus mattered greatly in the eyes of the Qing rulers.
The Anglo-French Alliance ignored the emperor’s instructions and occupied the Dagu Forts on May 20, after which they forwarded Tan Tingxiang a note requesting that the four nations be allowed entry into Tianjin for negotiations with the Chinese plenipotentiaries as well as entry into Beijing, where they would either pay a visit to the emperor or meet with grand secretaries. On May 28 the emperor appointed the Manchu grand secretary, Guiliang (1785–62), as minister extraordinary and the Manchu minister Huashana as plenipotentiary and sent them to Tianjin for negotiations. Huashana, who had served as the deputy of the Son of Heaven on the mission to Chosŏn in 1845, now became a diplomatic representative of the Chinese sovereign who was equal to the monarchs of Britain and France. The emperor particularly instructed Tan to inform the foreign ministers that there was no need for them to visit Beijing. In the meantime, he ordered Prince Sengge Rinchen (1811–65) of the Korcin Mongols to use his Mongol warriors to reinforce the garrison between Tianjin and Beijing.
The Sino-British negotiations reached a deadlock over the issue of a permanent representative in Beijing. At court, many high-ranking officials, such as Prince Yi (Dzai Yūwan, 1816–61), firmly refused the Western request to place representatives in Beijing. They suggested instead that Britain could follow the established practice of the Russian barbarians (Ch., E yi) and station students rather than commissioners in Beijing. The students would dress in the clothes and caps of China (Ch., Zhongguo yiguan), abide by local rules, and refrain from involvement in official affairs. Britain could negotiate with Chinese governors-general and governors over trade affairs at treaty ports. If the British insisted on visiting Beijing, the emperor said that they would have to travel from Shanghai via the overland route, escorted by Chinese officials, with all accommodations and meals covered by China. They could visit Beijing once every three or five years, not annually.⁵⁷ Not coincidentally, this proposal fit precisely into the existing tributary ritual codes: Beijing was trying to draw Britain into the established Zongfan system. From 1761 to 1793, then to 1858, the Qing court’s understanding of Britain remained the same because the Qing’s institutionalized Zongfan norms never changed.
This ideal model was soon partly—if opaquely—realized in the treaty with the United States, concluded on June 18, 1858, in Tianjin. Article 5 of the treaty regulated the visit of the American minister to Beijing in accordance with the specific ritual codes for the Qing’s outer fan.⁵⁸ The regulations specified the frequency of
the Americans’ visits to Beijing, the overland route they were to take from Tianjin to Beijing, their entertainment by local authorities, the requisite written notice to the Ministry of Rites, and especially the size of the mission—twenty members, which was the maximum head count of tributary missions allowed for Ryukyu, Lanchang, Burma, and the Netherlands. Although the treaty granted the United States the status of a most favored nation, Beijing saw this status simply as a special favor for foreign barbarians, unrelated to China’s statehood and sovereignty. In this sense, the Qing court treated the United States as a tributary state, which the latter, of course, completely failed to realize.
Within the domestic Confucianism-centered intellectual framework, neither the Qing ruling house nor the majority of its officials who had passed the imperial civil-service examinations thought beyond the framework of the civilized–barbarian distinction. The new knowledge imported from the West by American and European missionaries who were active in Southeast Asia and South China had not yet had an impact on the Chinese intellectual forces behind the post-Qianlong institutionalized order. On June 23, 1858, the Chinese minister Zhou Zupei (1793– 1867) and thirty of his colleagues submitted memorials against the permanent residence of barbarous emissaries in Beijing. Among the eight evils of such residence highlighted in Zhou’s memorial was the preaching of the gospel by the foreigners, which would turn our manner of clothes, caps, rituals, and music into something fit for beasts (Ch., yiguan liyue zhi zu, yi yu qinshou). He also warned that if countries such as Chosŏn and Ryukyu, which have been loyal to China for a long time and sincerely send emissaries and pay tribute to the court, saw the disobedience of these barbarians, they, too, would despise the Heavenly Dynasty. This argument was further underscored by Chen Rui, who emphasized the fundamental divide between China and the others (Ch., Zhong Wai zhi dafang).⁵⁹ In terms of their thinking, these officials were no different from Ye Mingchen, who at the time was detained by the British in Calcutta.
Despite such keen resistance, Guiliang and Huashana accepted the British-drafted treaty after they realized the situation was beyond China’s control. The treaty with Britain, signed on June 26, allowed Britain to appoint diplomatic agents to the court in Beijing, where they would not kowtow to the emperor. According to article 3, the British ambassador, minister, or other diplomatic agent shall not be called upon to perform any ceremony derogatory to him as representing the Sovereign of an independent nation, on a footing of equality with that of China. On the other hand, he shall use the same forms of ceremony and respect to His Majesty the Emperor as are employed by the Ambassadors, Ministers, or Diplomatic Agents of Her Majesty toward the Sovereigns of independent and equal European nations.⁶⁰ In retrospect, this article opened the gates of Beijing to the representatives of Britain and other treaty nations and marked the beginning of the collapse of the centuries-long ritual system and the erosion of the Zongfan infrastructure. Being forced to fundamentally change its time-honored ritual norms, even if only in part, the Great Qing moved toward its eventual transformation from a cosmopolitan empire to a state equal to Britain according to post-Westphalian political and diplomatic norms.
Historic though the change was, the Chinese may not have fully understood the treaty’s importance because of linguistic discrepancies. The Chinese version of the treaty, for instance, states that "Britain is a nation of zizhu on a footing of equality with China" (Ch., Yingguo zizhu zhi bang, yu Zhongguo pingdeng). The term zizhu, which meant self-rule or autonomy, was usually used in a Zongfan context. China regarded its outer fan as possessing this right, so it was different from the British understanding of the term independence. This divergence would become apparent in the following years, when China and the Western states as well as Japan tried to define the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship and Chosŏn’s international position. The seeds of further conflicts between the norms of the Chinese Zongfan system and those of European international law were thus planted directly in these treaties.
What further shook the foundation of the civilized–barbarian discourse was article 51 of the Sino-British treaty of 1858, which decreed that the character yi (barbarian) "shall not be applied to the Government or subjects of Her Britannic Majesty in any Chinese official document issued by the Chinese Authorities either in
the Capital or in the Provinces."⁶¹ Britain and other Western nations that were eligible to invoke the most-favored-nation clause thus broke away legally and institutionally from the category of barbarians in Chinese diplomatic discourse. From then on, in Chinese official narratives the character yi was increasingly replaced by yang (overseas, foreign) and the term barbarians (Ch., yiren) by foreigners (Ch., yangren).
This amendment, however, applied only to Western treaty nations that had never occupied an essential position in the Zongfan system. The Qing still considered its major outer fan, such as Chosŏn, Vietnam, and Ryukyu, countries of barbarians. In this sense, the treaty port system, although it was expanding rapidly at the end of the 1850s, merely complicated the Qing’s view of the countries in the Western Ocean. In other words, the disintegration of Sinocentrism as a result of the 1858 treaties occurred on the Qing’s intellectual periphery, not at the core of its intellectual and ideological structure as informed and represented by the Qing’s principal outer fan. The ministers of the treaty nations residing in Beijing would soon be confronted with the complexity and perplexity of this distinction.
Who Were the Barbarians Now? The British and Korean Missions to Beijing
Treaties in hand, the ministers of Britain, France, Russia, and the United States left Tianjin for Shanghai, where they and Chinese representatives signed additional treaties on tariffs. The war would have been over had the British and French ministers in the summer of 1859 followed the Qing’s designated route to enter Beijing after they landed at Tianjin for the ratification of the treaties. But the ministers refused to follow Qing instructions, and their rash entry into the firth of the Beihe River near the Dagu Forts led to Chinese bombardment. The war resumed less than a year after the British Crown imposed direct control over India by nationalizing the British East India Company in August 1858. Under the leadership of Lord Elgin, who was determined to employ gunboat diplomacy against Beijing, the Anglo-French alliance returned to China in the summer of 1860 and reoccupied the Dagu Forts. There the alliance almost annihilated the Mongol cavalry of Prince Sengge Rinchen with the Armstrong gun, a weapon created by Britain and employed in combat for the first time. The Qing succumbed not only to the joint colonialism of the European states but also to revolutionary post–Crimean War European military technology.
The alliance occupied Tianjin and marched toward Beijing in late August. Although the Beijing court sent representatives to Tongzhou, near Beijing, for negotiations, on September 18 Prince Sengge Rinchen captured Harry Parkes (1828–85), the British commissioner in Guangzhou, as well as Henry Loch (1827–1900), Elgin’s private secretary, and twenty-four British and thirteen French officers and soldiers. Only half of these prisoners of war—including Parkes and Loch—survived and were eventually released on October 8, when the alliance gained control of Beijing’s suburbs and started looting the imperial palace of Yuan-Ming-Yuan. The frightened Son of Heaven, Emperor Xianfeng, had fled to Rehe on September 22 after appointing his younger brother Prince Gong (a.k.a. Prince Kung, 1833–98) as the envoy extraordinary and plenipotentiary to supervise the uncertain peace negotiations. On October 13 the Western forces took over the Anding Gate of the city. The Qing saw this as a more serious threat than it did the ongoing Taiping Rebellion in South China, as the court in Rehe and the caretaker administration in Beijing were extremely vulnerable to the aggressive European alliance and their powerful cannons positioned on the city’s old walls.
From October 12 to 16, the survivors and bodies of the prisoners of war were returned to the alliance. The evident cruelty inflicted on the corpses, mutilated beyond recognition, shocked Elgin and his fellow commanders. Elgin at once notified to Prince Kung that he was too horrified by what had occurred to hold further communication with a government guilty of such deeds of treachery and bloodshed, until by some great punishment inflicted upon the Emperor and the governing classes, he had made apparent … the detestation with which the Allies viewed such conduct. The great punishment turned out to be the immolation of Yuan-Ming-Yuan. On October 18, the second day after the alliance buried the former prisoners, flames engulfed the magnificent imperial garden that had been co-designed by European Jesuit missionaries. Loch recorded that during the whole of Friday the 19th, Yuen-Ming-Yuen was still burning; the clouds of smoke driven by the wind, hung like a vast black pall over Pekin.⁶² Numerous buildings in which the Qing emperors had given audience to emissaries of its outer fan—once
including Britain and always including Chosŏn—were burned to the ground. On October 20 Prince Gong offered Elgin China’s submission to the alliance’s demands. The capital was fully opened to the alliance. Parkes and Loch entered the city the next day and ironically selected the grand hall of the Ministry of Rites as the site for the signing of the convention.
Elgin departed for the grand hall on October 24, carried in a sedan chair by sixteen Chinese footmen—an honor previously reserved for the emperor—and accompanied by an escort of more than six hundred men. When the procession reached the hall, according to Loch, Prince Gong advanced to receive Lord Elgin with an anxious, hesitating salutation, while the latter bowed, and at once walked forward to his seat, motioning Prince Kung to take the one on the right. After they signed the convention, exchanged treaties, and talked briefly about maintaining friendship, Lord Elgin rose to take leave; Prince Kung accompanied him a short distance, and then stopped; but on Lord Elgin doing so likewise, the principal mandarins in attendance urgently beckoned Prince Kung to move forward, and after a few moments of hesitation he walked with Lord Elgin to the edge of the steps. Prince Gong was apparently adjusting to a new etiquette that he had never before performed. Witnessing the entire procedure, Loch enthusiastically claimed, Thus was happily concluded an event which was the commencement of a new era, not only in the history of the Empire of China, but of the world, by the introduction of four hundred millions of the human race into the family of civilized nations.⁶³ Like George Thomas Staunton’s, Loch’s judgment on civilization was thoroughly Eurocentric.
Loch was correct in asserting that China had entered a new era. In January 1861 the Qing court established a temporary office in charge of affairs concerning all countries (Ch., Zongli geguo shiwu yamen, hereafter the Zongli Yamen) under Prince Gong’s supervision. The Yamen was responsible for China’s foreign relations only with Britain, France, the United States, Russia, and other treaty nations, not with Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Vietnam, and other outer fan, whose contacts with Beijing were still under the auspices of the Ministry of Rites. The new institution was designed with the goal of expediency to meet challenges in a time of crisis, and it was modeled on the Grand Council.⁶⁴ The officials who served in the Yamen did so only on a part-time basis. The official tablet hanging at the main entrance of the institution read, Goodness and happiness between the center and the outside (Ch., Zhong Wai tifu), highlighting the key Confucian doctrine of the mean. More importantly, the Yamen was deemed an imitation of the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations and was consequently categorized as part of the established Zongfan system. According to the court’s plan, once the momentary crisis had passed, foreign affairs would revert to the management of the Ministry of Rites as usual, for the sake of "cherishing the outer fan ."⁶⁵
Yet like the Grand Council, the Zongli Yamen continued to serve the court after the crisis, and in 1901 it became the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ch., Waiwu bu). The Yamen survived primarily because China’s treaty partners always treated it as a ministry of foreign affairs at which Western diplomats could apply the concepts of international law to their negotiations with the Chinese side; still, the diplomats were not blind to the fact that the Yamen was different from a ministry of foreign affairs in the Western sense.⁶⁶ Beijing also realized that it was impossible to disband the Zongli Yamen, in particular after March 1861, when the French, British, Russian, and American ministers arrived in Beijing and established their offices next to the Forbidden City. In response, Beijing quickly organized a diplomatic network from the top down by appointing superintendents of trade for Tianjin and Shanghai. So began a new era.
As noted earlier, these institutional changes to the Zongfan framework affected only those parts that governed relations with treaty nations; beyond those, the Zongfan system stood unchanged. As ever, Chosŏn played an exemplary role in maintaining the Qing’s superiority within this established system. After learning from the 1860 annual tributary mission to Beijing that the emperor had moved to Rehe, the king of Chosŏn immediately sent a special mission to China with the aim of visiting the emperor at Rehe and demonstrating to him Chosŏn’s concern as a loyal subordinate of the imperial dynasty. In early 1861 the Korean emissaries reached postwar Beijing, bearing various tributes. The Ministry of Rites asked the emperor whether the emissaries should visit Rehe, following the
precedents of Annam’s mission in 1790, Lanchang’s and Burma’s missions in 1795, and Annam’s mission in 1803. The emperor responded that there was no need for the Korean emissaries to travel to Rehe, but he instructed the ministry to follow convention by treating the emissaries to banquets and endowing them and the king with generous gifts in order to show his "ultimate kindness of cherishing the fan in a favored way."⁶⁷
In fact, between November 1858 and May 1861, Chosŏn dispatched five tributary missions to Beijing in spite of the war in China. In the early 1790s, Chosŏn and British emissaries had convened in Rehe and Beijing as representatives of two outer fan—both of them nations of barbarians in the Qing’s eyes. But whereas the British emissaries had violently changed their status in the Chinese world by the early 1860s by entering Beijing under the cover of cannons, their Korean counterparts continued to approach the imperial capital with humble palace memorials and tributes. Although the Korean emissaries also pursued the secret mission of obtaining intelligence in China in order to enable the Korean court to assess the situation there, their frequent presence in Beijing provided the Qing with a steady stream of resources to maintain its conventional ritual code, politico-cultural hierarchy, and imperial norms, which were under fire from the British and the French. However, the Korean emissaries never again saw the Xianfeng emperor, who died in Rehe in August and became the last emperor who refused to allow the Western barbarians to stand before him without kowtowing.⁶⁸
It was not until 1873 that Xianfeng’s son, Tongzhi, gave foreign ministers their first imperial audience at which the ministers did not kowtow. The audience took place at the Purple Light Pavilion (Ch., Ziguang ge) in the Forbidden City, the same venue at which the Qing emperor had met with emissaries of China’s outer fan since 1761—the year in which the Qing institutionalized the status of all other countries within its own imperial norms, as described in chapter 2. In 1873 the pavilion no longer witnessed the ritual of kowtow, but the politico-cultural significance of the imperial audience in that location remained essentially the same. Interestingly, and ironically, since 1949 the state leaders of the People’s Republic of China, who converted part of the Qing imperial palace into their living quarters and political headquarters, have used the pavilion to meet with foreign guests from other, equal states of the world—if no longer in the sense of all-under-Heaven.
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Part II SAVING OUR CHOSŎN
Part II
SAVING OUR CHOSŎN
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Introduction Day dawned on April 25, 1644, in the seventeenth year of the reign of the Chongzhen emperor of the Ming Dynasty of China. As the first rays of the sun struck the walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing, a large group of rebels stormed the gates. Right before the rebels swarmed the imperial halls, the emperor managed to climb up an artificial hill behind the palace and hang himself from a tree. His loyal servant, a eunuch who had cared for the desperate thirty-three-year-old em- peror since the latter’s birth, hanged himself from another tree. The Ming Dynasty, or the Great Ming, which had governed China for 277 years, came to a sudden end. The Ming’s unexpected demise put one of its generals, Wu Sangui (1612–78), who was fighting on the front lines of an unrelated conflict about 190 miles east of Beijing, in an awkward position. General Wu was defending Shanhai Pass, a strategic military outpost of the Great Wall connecting inner China with Manchuria, in the war with the Qing, a regime founded in 1616 by the nomadic Manchus in Manchuria. The war had lasted for almost three decades, during which the Manchus had decisively defeated the Ming troops in Manchuria, subordinated neighboring Mongol tribes, and conquered the Chosŏn Dynasty of Korea, a loyal tributary state of China. Shanhai Pass became the last fortification preventing the formidable barbarians, as both Ming Chinese and Chosŏn Koreans regarded the Manchus, from entering inner China. As Beijing fell into the rebels’ hands, General Wu lost his country overnight. In Manchuria, the Manchu emperor seized the opportunity to send his troops under the leadership of Prince Dorgon (1612–50) to the outskirts of Shanhai Pass, where the army waited to cross the Great Wall to enter inner China. Meanwhile, the rebels in Beijing began to march toward the pass, with General Wu’s father as a hostage, in order to annihilate Wu. In this life- or-death situation, Wu chose the Manchus as his allies. He opened the giant gate to allow the Manchu forces to pass through the Great Wall and help him defeat the rebels. Among those who entered the pass along with the Manchu forces was the crown prince of Chosŏn Korea. The prince had been living with the Manchus for seven years, since 1637, when the Manchus had conquered Chosŏn and taken him and his younger brother hostage.¹ The guardians of the pass, General Wu’s army, also included people of Korean origin. Among them was a young Korean officer, Ch’oe Hyo-il, who had joined General Wu’s anti-Manchu fight after 1627, when the Manchus first invaded Chosŏn. Ch’oe was not to live long, but he did not die at the hands of the Manchu conquerors. On June 6, 1644, the Manchus took over Beijing without a fight. In a hall standing amid the debris of the Forbidden City, which had been burned by the rebels, Prince Dorgon accepted the ca- pitulation of the Chinese officials of the Ming, witnessed by the Korean crown prince. Ch’oe, however, refused to prostrate himself in front of the Manchu prince, who in his mind was a barbarian. Instead, dressed in a Ming-style robe, he went to Chongzhen’s tomb to mourn for the Ming—the civilized Middle Kingdom, or Zhongguo in Chinese. Ch’oe died near the tomb after a seven-day hunger strike. General Wu buried his body and commemorated him in an elegy.² A Korean subject, Ch’oe died not only for the Chinese emperor but also for a civilization embodied by the Chinese dynasty and his homeland. Yet when he sacrificed himself, he did not realize that the Manchu regime was transforming itself by embracing the ideological, political, and cultural norms of the same civi- lization. More importantly, before it crossed the Great Wall in 1644, the Qing had begun to use its hierarchical relationship with Chosŏn to fashion itself as the civilized center of the world. As history unfolded, this relationship lasted for 258 years until the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, and it continued to exert a strong influence over China and Korea thereafter. From the early seventeenth to the early twentieth century, the Qing used its relationship with Chosŏn as an ideo- logical tool to consolidate its identity as the Middle Kingdom and to manage its relations with other neighboring countries and the newly conquered polities that stretched from Manchuria and the Mongol steppe to Turkestan and the Himalayas. By the time the Eurasian empire fell apart in 1911, Qing China had evolved into a multiethnic and multicultural modern state, providing a solid foundation for state building in the rest of the twentieth century. Among the factors that helped the
Qing remake the Chinese empire, what stood out in particular were the politico-cultural discourse and imperial norms drawn from the Manchu-Korean contacts. These took place within a hierarchical framework I call Zongfan, a term I will explain below. The microhistory of Manchu-Korean relations vividly reflects the macrohistory of China’s transformation during the course of the three centuries, making Sino-Korean relations distinct from China’s relations with other coun- tries. This book reveals the development of China from an empire into a modern state through the lens of the dynamics of Sino-Korean political relations from 1616 to 1911. It incorporates Chosŏn Korea into the historical narrative of Qing China by examining the high politics of the two countries. The book shows that the Manchu regime used its constant relations with Chosŏn to establish, legitimize, consolidate, and present its identity as the civilized center of the known world, as a cosmopolitan empire, and as a modern sovereign state. By employing a long-term historical and cross-border perspective to observe the bilateral relationship, this book casts new light on the rise and inner changes of the Chinese empire during the Qing period, the clashes between the Chinese foreign-relations system and its Western counterpart, and the formation of modern sovereign states in East Asia. Revitalizing the Concept of Zongfan in the Narrative of Late Imperial China I use the Chinese term Zongfan, or in some cases the English phrase “Chinese world order,” rather than the oft-adopted English translation “tributary,” to refer to the nature of the hierarchical relationship between late imperial China and its subordinate countries, which included Korea. I reserve the term “tributary” for re- lated aspects of this system.³ “Late imperial China” in this book refers to China from 1368 to 1911, namely, the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing periods following the collapse of the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) of the Mongol Empire. As I argue below, the Zongfan system was central to establishing the political orthodox legit- imacy of China and its subordinate countries. As a key concept of Confucianism, political orthodox legitimacy (Ch., Zhengtong) refers to the universal ideological, moral, cultural, and social rationale behind the legitimate status of a political entity in the hierarchy of the Chinese world. In late imperial times, this legitimacy en- tailed “name and status” (Ch., mingfen) and “great unification” (Ch., da yitong) and found its dedicated audience in the ruling elites and Confucian scholars of Ming and Qing China, Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910), and Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868).⁴ As a politico-cultural structure, the Zongfan system is believed to have been established in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). It was associated with the kinship-based feudal system (Ch., zongfa fengjian) of the day. This system was practiced between two sides, Zong and fan. Zong refers to the royal lineage of the Chinese monarch, who claimed to be the “Son of Heaven” (Ch., tianzi) residing in the Middle Kingdom with absolute patriarchal authority and exclusive orthodox legitimacy as the human agent of the “Mandate of Heaven” (Ch., tianming). Fan originally meant the clan(s) of the royal family who established outposts on Chi- na’s borders, where the rulers’ legitimacy was dependent on investiture by the Son of Heaven. The two sides of the kinship constituted the familistic hierarchy and the order of “all-under-Heaven” (Ch., tianxia)—the known universe to the people within this political entity.⁵ The connotation of China’s periphery evolved within this feudalistic model by incorporating all countries or polities outside China into the category of fan. Ac- cording to the ideal tenets, on a regular basis the fan dispatched emissaries, “ministers of ministers” (Ch., peichen), bearing taxes or tribute to the central court, where they would offer appropriate obedience to the Son of Heaven and receive largesse or gifts. In return, the court would not only send envoys to the fan to in- vest the rulers with legitimate titles but also protect the fan whenever necessary. This reciprocity was the foundation of the double policy of “serving the great” (Ch., shida) and “cherishing the small” (Ch., zixiao). The exchanges of emissaries following ritual codes dictated by the Middle Kingdom kept the Zongfan system running. This model later evolved into the basic philosophy of the foreign policy of late imperial China.⁶ In addition to being defined by its geographical distance from the central court, the fan could also be characterized in kinship terms as inner fan and outer fan.
The inner fan maintained a strong blood relationship with the emperor, but the outer fan did not. In the case of Korea, the situation was complex. The imperial norms of the successive Chinese dynasties preferred to ascribe the beginning of Sino-Korean kinship to Jizi (K., Kija), a royal member of the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600–1046 BC) who was believed to have been invested by the Western Zhou court with the lands of ancient Chosŏn. This legend produced an assumption of a unique cultural homogeneity that the Chinese side deeply endorsed and that helped unified Chinese dynasties see Korea as belonging within China’s territorial perimeter.⁷ The Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) and the Tang Dynasty (618–907) invaded Korea and integrated parts of the Korean lands into China. In the 1260s the Mongol forces of the Yuan Dynasty gradually came to control the Koryŏ Dynasty of Korea (918–1392), and in the 1270s the Mongol court invested King Ch’ungnyŏl (r. 1274–1308), who married the Princess of Qi of Kublai Khan, as the consort of the imperial princess and the king of Koryŏ (K., Puma Koryŏ kugwang).⁸ After the Ming overthrew the Yuan, it ceased practicing the Yuan’s policy toward Koryŏ, which had been based on strong personal ties between the Mongol and Korean courts through state marriage. After its establishment in 1368, the Ming followed the feudal principles of the Zhou Dynasty and the Zongfan practice of the Yuan in establishing the Zongfan system within its domain, but it had no desire to extend the system to Koryŏ. The founding father of the new dynasty claimed that Ming China would never invade Koryŏ or fourteen other neighboring countries. In 1392 a new Korean regime replaced Koryŏ and immediately sent emissaries to China to pursue imperial investi- ture of the kingship. Although the Ming conferred the title “Chosŏn” on the new regime, after Jizi Chosŏn, it did not endow the Korean king with investiture until 1401, when Emperor Jianwen (r. 1399–1402) invested the third king of Chosŏn (T’aejong, r. 1400–1418), formally extending the Zongfan arrangement to the king- dom. In the imperial mandate, the Ming underlined that the king should serve as a fence of the civilized kingdom and “assist China forever” (Ch., yongfu yu Zhongguo).⁹ In 1403 Emperor Yongle (r. 1402–24) awarded the same king an official robe commensurate with the rank of first-degree prince (Ch., qinwang, a brother of the emperor), further integrating Chosŏn into the Ming Zongfan system.¹⁰ In the transition from the Yuan-Koryŏ relationship to the Ming-Chosŏn one, the Ming made a consequential shift in China’s policy toward Korea: China allowed Korea independence as a foreign country in practice, but it continued to regulate the bilateral relationship with reference to Zongfan norms in the domestic feudal sense and on the ideological level. In the familistic and culturally homogeneous Zongfan context, the Ming depicted Chosŏn as an outer fan descending from Jizi, while Chosŏn identified itself as a “vassal” (K., chehu; Ch., zhuhou) of the Ming court and viewed their relationship in father-son and monarch-subordinate terms.¹¹ Simultaneously, Neo-Confucianism (K., Chŏngju hak), which celebrated Confucian social hierarchy, had become the ruling ideology during the Yuan Dy- nasty, and had lately been introduced to Korea, helping to institutionalize and stabilize this bilateral relationship.¹² After the Ming rescued Chosŏn from a Japa- nese invasion in the 1590s, Chosŏn became even more committed to the Ming, regarding the Ming as its “parent nation” (K., pumo chi pang).¹³ This arrangement seemed similar to the feudalism practiced in medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan, but as a cross-border framework it possessed features unique to the Confu- cianism-sup-port- Chinese world. As part 2 of this book demonstrates, in the nineteenth century the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship built on these features confused European and Japanese diplomats, who could not find historical precedents for it within their own worlds. However, as scholars have pointed out, applying the Ming-Chosŏn hierarchical relationship to Sino-Korean contacts or China’s foreign relations before 1400 would be ahistorical.¹⁴ The Qing inherited the Ming Zongfan mechanism in its contacts with Chosŏn, but the Manchus’ kinship relations with Mongol tribes complicated the outer fan spectrum of the empire. This point is illustrated by the multilayered nature of the outer fan and the varied usage of the term in Qing political discourse, partic- ularly in referring to political entities within the Qing pilgrimage system (Ch., chaojin) and to countries in Southeast Asia, such as Siam (Thailand).¹⁵ The Manchu court nevertheless understood Chosŏn and other subordinate entities as members of the Qing-centric family, in which the position of these entities was similar or
even equal to that of their Mongol counterparts.¹⁶ As the Ministry of Rites (Ch., Libu) described it to the Qianlong emperor in 1768 in the context of investing the Korean king’s grandson as the successor to the throne, “The outer fan are the same as Zongfan in terms of their relations with the central court” (Ch., Waifan zhi yu zongfan, shi shu xiangtong). Similarly, in 1790 the Qianlong emperor awarded the Vietnamese king, Nguyễn Huệ (r. 1788–92), a golden leather belt that only Zongfan of the royal family could use.¹⁷ The term “Zongfan” aptly encapsulates the relationship between the center/patriarch and the periphery/family members during the Qing period, and for this reason I have revitalized it in this book. Reinterpreting the Rise of the Modern Chinese State through the Lens of Qing-Chosŏn Relations The involvement of Chosŏn in the Ming-Qing war led to two fierce Manchu invasions of the country in 1627 and 1636. After conquering Chosŏn in early 1637, the Qing established a Zongfan relationship with it by replacing the Ming in the patriarchal position. Scholars have widely regarded Sino-Korean relations in China’s late imperial period as the quintessential manifestation of the Sinocentric order.¹⁸ Some scholars have tended to attribute the uniqueness of the relationship to the parties’ shared Confucian culture, especially Neo-Confucianism, while others have preferred to emphasize China’s political or military influence or control in the hegemonic sense.¹⁹ This book embraces the cultural perspective, but it simultaneously underlines the significant effect that the Manchu use of violence had on the establishment and maintenance of Qing-Chosŏn ties in the early seventeenth century. More importantly, I avoid enshrining the Qing-Chosŏn relationship in the pantheon of Chinese narratives of Sino-Korean relations since the Western Zhou, and I refrain from conflating the Qing-Chosŏn relationship with that be- tween the Ming and Chosŏn. Rather, I explore the unique and crucial role of these bonds in providing the Qing with the political, intellectual, and ideological sources with which it reconstructed itself and the Chinese empire and eventually gave birth to a modern Chinese state. A key term in analyzing the Sinocentric hierarchical arrangement between Qing China and other countries imagined in Qing imperial discourse is yi. Like so many abstract terms in Chinese (or indeed any language), its meaning varies according to context, but I have generally translated it as “barbarians.” As the fol- lowing chapters show, yi, which was often used to describe outsiders in Sino-foreign contacts, did not necessarily carry a pejorative connotation. I also demon- strate a change in the meaning of yi from the perspective of the Manchu regime. The story of the Qing-Chosŏn relationship unfolds within the broader process of the Qing’s efforts to meet the unprecedented challenge of proving its orthodox legitimacy in the politico-cultural setting of the “civilized vs. barbarian distinction” (Ch., Hua–Yi zhi bian; K., Hwa–I ŭi chai).²⁰ It was against the background of this civilized–barbarian dichotomy that the Korean warrior Ch’oi sacrificed himself in Manchu-occupied Beijing, and it was in light of this distinction that his homeland strengthened its identity as “Little China” (K., So Chunghwa) in the post-Ming era, while the Qing positioned itself within the pedigree of the Middle Kingdom as the civilized center and the “Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao). The establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship in 1637 was a watershed event in the history of the Qing’s prodigious enterprise of redefining itself and remaking the Chinese world. Scholars have commonly dated the Ming-Qing transition to the Manchu occupation of Beijing in 1644, but the Manchu regime in fact had initiated its bid for status as the Middle Kingdom at least a decade earlier, by employing the politico-cultural discourse embedded in the Zongfan struc- ture. After 1637, the Qing progressively converted Chosŏn into a prototypical “outer subordinate,” known as waifan (outer fan) or shuguo (subordinate country) in the Chinese language and tulergi gurun (outer country) or harangga gurun (subordinate country) in the Manchu language. Very significantly, the Qing imperial terms abruptly reversed the Manchu-Korean hierarchical arrangement in the Ming period by portraying Chosŏn as a country of barbarians on the periphery of the Qing. In its frequent contacts with Chosŏn from 1637 to 1643, the Qing strengthened the new bilateral political arrangement and developed a mature model for man- aging its relations with other newly conquered or subordinated entities. I call this model the “Chosŏn model” (Ch., Chaoxian shili, lit. “Korean cases/examples”).
As part 1 explains, the model constituted a pattern by which a country or a political entity could follow Chosŏn into the Qing-centric Zongfan system primarily by receiving imperial investitures from the Qing, adopting the regnal titles and calendar of the Qing, and sending emissaries and tribute to the Qing on a regular basis. The idea behind this model was to encourage outlying regions to embrace the Qing as the civilized center of the world and to affirm its supreme political and cultural position. After 1644, as the Qing continued its conquest of inner China by marching west and southwest, it used the Chosŏn model as a handy soft- power weapon to manage its political relations with other entities and to consolidate its new identification as the center of all-under-Heaven. The Qing-Chosŏn hierarchy was far more than just the final chapter in the long Sino-Korean Zongfan history. Rather, it buttressed the rationale of the entire Zongfan system by keeping the periphery of the Chinese empire informed and regulated while the Manchu regime controlled and remade the empire at the core. The Qing’s dynamic relations with its first Confucian outer fan—Chosŏn—played a vital role in establishing, institutionalizing, and nourishing the entire Qing- centric system of foreign relations. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Qing had constructed a new imperial order within and beyond its Eurasian empire. It had simultaneously labeled Britain and other European states “countries of barbarians” and posited them on the periphery of China. These states, however, changed their status vis-à-vis China through gunboat diplomacy and treaties in the nineteenth century, when they encountered the Chinese world through such outer fan as Annam (Vietnam), Ryukyu, and Chosŏn. The introduction, translation, and dissemination of international law in the Chinese world put China, China’s outer fan, and the European states on an equal footing in terms of their state sovereignty. Nevertheless, the relationship between Qing China and its outer fan re- mained unchanged until the very end of the nineteenth century in that they still needed each other to acquire mutually constitutive and mutually defined orthodox legitimacy in their own world. What confused the Western states in their contacts with the outer fan of China in the late nineteenth century was the nebulous nature of the Zongfan mech- anism that constantly shunted them into perplexing negotiations with Beijing, the only place where diplomacy with outsiders could be conducted in accordance with Zongfan conventions. The disputes emerging at the periphery of China were thus transferred to the center of the empire, where they converged as an ac- cumulative force to trigger certain reforms within China that in turn spread to and deeply influenced the periphery. Although this model may seem similar to con- temporary relationships between European powers and their overseas colonies, it had a fundamentally different structure, as later sections and chapters will elab- orate. The most typical case among the manifold and interwoven disputes regarding this mechanism arose in Chosŏn Korea. The political and diplomatic conundrum of the international status of Chosŏn led the Qing and Chosŏn into legal quagmires and prompted both sides to mod- ify their time-honored relations in the context of both the inner and the outer dual networks, as chapters 5 and 6 explain. But the various adjustments made to the relationship on both sides in the chaotic decade of the 1880s kept the Zongfan fundamentals untouched, as neither side could overcome the ideological dilemma caused by their mutually constitutive legitimacy at the level of high politics in the Confucian world. This double bind meant that colonizing Chosŏn was not an option for China in the turbulent period before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894. The growing controversy between China, Korea, Japan, and Western states finally resulted in the termination of the Sino-Korean Zongfan relationship in 1895. Accordingly, the cosmopolitan Chinese empire withdrew its political and cultural reach from its subordinate countries and became identical with the Chinese state defined by the norms of international law. After the war, China and Korea negotiated a new treaty for an equal state-to-state relationship, but the new arrangement lasted only a few years before both the Chosŏn Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty ceased to exist in 1910 and 1911, respectively. This book describes the trajectory of this varied relationship and shows its significance for the devel- opment of modern China and East Asia. Revisiting the Chinese Empire under the Qing
This book defines the Qing as an empire and as a Chinese empire. As I explain below, this empire included Chosŏn in a politico-cultural sense. The term “empire” as a European concept that was always traced back to the Romans did not exist in the Chinese political lexicon until 1895, when the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Shi- monoseki addressed the Qing as the “Great Qing Empire” in Chinese characters (Da Qing diguo), as a counterpart to the “Great Japanese Empire” (Dai Nippon teikoku).²¹ None of the ruling dynasties before the end of the Qing ever claimed to hold an empire, either in Chinese or, when the ruling house was not Han Chi- nese, in any other language. Even nowadays, describing a Chinese dynasty as an empire remains rare among historians in China. Nevertheless, if we define an em- pire broadly as a political entity in which different peoples are governed differently, Chinese history from 221 BC, when the Qin Dynasty (221–207 BC) unified China as a multiethnic polity, to the present is clearly a history of empires.²² In this book, the Chinese empire (Ch., Zhonghua diguo) refers to a multiethnic and multicultural polity in which the Middle Kingdom represented the political and cultural core against the background of the civilized–barbarian distinction and for which the concepts of “Mandate of Heaven” and “all-under-Heaven” served as constitutional ideologies to establish its political orthodox legitimacy and Confu- cian orthodox legitimacy (Ch., daotong). This definition may not fit all the dynasties that claimed the name of the Middle Kingdom, because, as R. Bin Wong ob- serves, “the ideas and institutions of this empire were neither constant over time nor uniform through space.”²³ But it applies to the dynasties in Chinese history such as the Tang, the Northern and Southern Song (960–1279), the Liao (907–1125), the Xixia (1038–1227), the Jin (1115–1234), the Yuan, the Ming, and the Qing. The Manchu ethnicity of the imperial house was not a barrier to the Qing’s presentation of itself as a Chinese empire, in particular after 1644, when the term “Chinese” (Ch., Zhongguo ren) took on a multiethnic character. The Qing had presented itself as a Chinese empire as early as 1689 in the Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia. The original treaty text, written in Latin by the French Jesuit Jean-François Gerbillon (1654–1707), who was serving the Manchu court, called the Qing Sinicum Imperium (Chinese Empire) as a counterpart to Ruthenicum Imperium (Russian Empire). The French version of the treaty rendered the term as l’Empire de la Chine (Empire of China) as a counterpart to l’Empire de Moscovie (Empire of Muscovy).²⁴ In the Manchu translation of the treaty, the Qing court used the term Dulimbai gurun to define itself as China/Zhongguo; this term is equivalent to “Chinese Empire” in the other versions of the text.²⁵ When “Chinese” became a multiethnic descriptor, the Qing also became the representative of Chinese culture, in particular the Confucianism that lay at the core of imperial political discourse. In 1712 Emperor Kangxi instructed the Manchu official Tulišen (1667–1740), an envoy to the Turgūt Mongols in Russia, that if the “khan of Russia” (Ma., Cagan han) asked what was esteemed in China, Tulišen should respond that “our country takes fidelity, filial piety, benevolence, jus- tice, and sincerity as fundamentals.”²⁶ All of these concepts came from Confucianism, not from Manchu ideologies. After all, it was this Confucian identity and politico-cultural discourse informed by Confucianism, not the Qing’s Manchu characteristics or its realpolitik practiced along the newly conquered frontiers in Inner Asia, that determined the Qing’s political orthodox legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom and enabled it to obtain and justify Confucian orthodox legitimacy. This Confucian identity on the state level later helped the Qing display its Chineseness and win strong support from Han Chinese scholars, who assisted the dy- nasty in weathering the storm of anti-Manchu rebellions in the nineteenth century. This book broadly defines “Chineseness” as the state of being the legitimate Middle Kingdom, thus referring to statecraft, not ethnicity. I interpret the Chinese empire under the Qing in two dimensions: the territorial empire and the politico-cultural empire. The territorial Chinese empire was equal to the Great Qing, composed primarily of the Manchu court, the inner provinces (Ch., zhisheng, “directly controlled provinces”), and the first group of outer fan, which were under the management of the central institution of Lifan yuan. These outer fan included regions and groups such as the Cahar Mongols, Tibet, and Mongol and Muslim tribes in Xinjiang. The Chinese name Lifan yuan means “the ministry of managing the affairs of the fan,” and it differs from the organization’s Manchu name, Tulergi golo be dasara jurgan, which means “the institution in charge of the outer provinces.” Scholars have generally translated it as “Court of
Colonial Affairs” or “Mongolian Superintendency.” This book adopts the latter rendering. The politico-cultural Chinese empire encompassed not only these polit- ical entities but also the second group of outer fan, whose contacts with China took place via the Ministry of Rites and whose shared characteristic was their iden- tification of the Son of Heaven in China as the highest sovereign in the world (see figure I.1).
FIGURE I.1. The structure of the Chinese empire during the Qing. A = the court; B = inner provinces; C = outer fan under the Mongolian Superintendency (MS); D = outer fan under the Ministry of Rites (MOR), primarily Chosŏn, Ryukyu, and Annam; E = Western countries listed by the Qing as outer fan; AB = inner China, or China proper; ABC = the Great Qing, or the territorial Chinese empire; ABCD = the politico-cultural Chinese empire; ABCDE = all-under-Heaven. Three key issues in the relationship between China and its outer fan within the politico-cultural Chinese empire invite elaboration: sovereignty, borders, and subjects. These issues were woven together in imperial times by the cosmopolitan idea of all-under-Heaven and were critically questioned within the context of the nation-state order of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. China, or Zhongguo, had historically always been mutually defined by its relations with the countries on its periphery—that is, by a combination of the country’s own perception of itself and the devotion of its neighbors to Chinese civilization. The nebu- lous dual nature of China’s identity posed a challenge to Chinese scholars who sought to define China anew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by comparing it to European states. These scholars could not find an established and consistent name for their homeland in history. For example, Huang Zunxian (1848–1905), a distinguished diplomat and scholar, reviewed the conventional civilized–barbarian discourse and preferred to call China the “central civilized country” (Ch., Huaxia). In his treatise exploring the reasons for China’s weakness, Liang Qichao (1873–1929), an intellectual leader of China’s modernization, pointed out that for a long time the Chinese had seen no difference between “state” and “all-under-Heaven” or between “state” and “court.”²⁷ Huang’s and Liang’s arguments reflected the cosmopolitan nature of the Chinese world, in which sovereignty, borders, and subjects manifested themselves in ways distinct from those of its Western counterpart. The nature of the sovereignty of an outer fan in the Chinese world was twofold: it was fully independent in terms of the territorial Chinese empire but fully dependent in relation to the politico-cultural Chinese empire. An outer fan enjoyed the right of independence, that is, autonomy or self-rule—zizhu in Chinese— within its boundaries. As Jean-Baptiste Grosier (1743–1823) in the 1780s and George N. Curzon (1859–1925) in the 1890s observed, the king of Chosŏn was an independent and supreme sovereign in his own lands.²⁸ The kings of the Nguyễn Dynasty (1802–1945) of Vietnam went even further, claiming to be “emperors” and calling Vietnam the “Middle Kingdom” in the first half of the nineteenth century.²⁹ The kingship of the fan, however, was ultimately subjugated to the emper- orship of China. As demonstrated by Emperor Qianlong’s deposition of the king of Vietnam, Lê Duy Kỳ (1765–93), and his investment of a new king in 1789, the emperor possessed absolute patriarchal power over the kings. This was particularly true for the Confucian kingship of Chosŏn.³⁰ What determined this rela- tionship was not China’s military power or geopolitical gravity or its “suzerainty,” as Western and Japanese diplomats understood it in the nineteenth century, but the mutually constitutive legitimacy of each side of the bilateral arrangement that was undergirded by Zongfan tenets and Confucian ethos. As a consequence, in the 1830s and the 1870s, the king of Chosŏn refused to negotiate with Western representatives on the grounds that “subordinates of a fan have no right to con- duct diplomacy” (Ch., fanchen wu waijiao).³¹ Vietnam adhered to the same ideology until the early 1880s.³² Within this system, a Korean king did not have his own regnal title during his lifetime but gained a posthumous title or temple name, which is why I tend to refer to Korean kings as, simply, “the king,” or to use their names (“Yi Chong,” for example) rather than their temple names (“Injo,” Yi Chong’s temple name). Although the awarding of temple names to the kings could suggest a portrayal of Korea as independent of China in an abstract sense and in an intellectual sense, in practice China’s patriarchal and divine imperial power was always real and effective.³³ The differences between peoples on either side of the borders that separated Qing China and its outer fan were clear, but these distinctions were not translated into the language of nation-states, as illustrated by the Qing’s cartographic survey in the Kangxi period and the Qing’s juridical negotiations with Annam and Chosŏn over legal cases.³⁴ The territorial border between China and the outer fan could be diluted and blurred by the shared ideology of all-under-Heaven within
the Zongfan framework. In this cultural context, the Qing court treated fan such as Chosŏn as a part—even an indispensable part—of the “imperial dynasty” (Ch., huangchao) or the “Heavenly Dynasty.” For the most part, scholars do not consider countries such as Chosŏn to have been components of the Chinese empire during the Qing. This view results from the dissemination of nationalist historiography in East Asia since the late nineteenth century and cleaves closely to a terri- torial definition of the Chinese empire. The Chinese empire as a politico-cultural unit, however, encompassed its outer fan beyond China’s borders, where China’s centrality was further constructed by local manifestations of the divine authority of the Chinese sovereign. Believing that all lands of the outer fan were under his rule in this sense, Emperor Yongzheng demarcated a new border with Annam in 1727 that allowed Annam to extend its territory 12.45 miles (40 Chinese li) farther into China in order to end the territorial disputes between the two sides. Chosŏn never ceased trying to redraw its borders, as reflected in its prolonged negotiations with China over border demarcation in the Tumen River area from the 1710s to the 1880s, yet the Korean court had endorsed the Chinese imperial discourse of all-under-Heaven since the Ming period.³⁵ In 1593, for example, the king of Chosŏn (Sŏnjo, r. 1567–1608) claimed that Chosŏn was a vassal (K., chehu) of China and had been regarded by the Chinese dynasties as an “inner subor- dinate” (K., naebok; Ch., neifu) since Jizi. The king further emphasized that Chosŏn “is actually China’s land and China lets our country manage it.”³⁶ In the 1730s the Qing historians in History of the Ming commented that “Chosŏn was the Ming’s subordinate country, but it was not different from an inner part of China [Ch., yunei].”³⁷ The position of Chosŏn as part of the Chinese empire remained unchanged during the Qing in terms of imperial norms. In 1784 and 1788, Emperor Qianlong noted that Korea was almost the peer of the Qing’s “inner subordinates.”³⁸ In the rituals that marked imperial edicts, the Qing imperial ritual code made it clear that the local officials of Chosŏn should perform the same rituals as did “those in directly controlled provinces” (Ch., ru zhisheng zhi yi).³⁹ Another indicator of Chosŏn’s position was the annual calendar of the Qing (Ch., Shixian li or Shixian shu; Ma., Erin forgon i ton i bithe), issued every year by the Imperial Astronomical Bureau (Ch., Qintian jian; Ma., Abka be ginggulere yamun), which Korean emissaries had to retrieve from Beijing. The calendar included charts of the sunrise and sunset times and charts of the solar terms in “each province” (Ch., gesheng; Ma., yaya golo) and “each Mongol and Muslim tribe” (Ch., ge menggu huibu; Ma., geren monggo be, hoise i aiman) under Qing jurisdiction. From 1645, when the Qing inaugurated the calendar, Chosŏn was included in the list of inner provinces such as Shanxi and Shandong and later showed up alongside Mukden, Nerchinsk (Ma., Nibcu), Sanxing (Ma., Ilan hala), Bodune (Ma., Bedune), Heilongjiang (Ma., Sahaliyan ula), and Jilin. Following Chosŏn, Annam was added to the lists in 1789 and Ryukyu in 1810.⁴⁰ As Johan Elverskog has pointed out, “A fundamental role of the emperor was to control the flow of time properly by creating the calendar and propitiating its cultural force through ritual and ceremony.”⁴¹ Many maps of the known world produced by the cartographers of the Qing and Chosŏn in the eighteenth century, such as the Huangyu quanlan tu (Map of a complete view of the imperial lands, known as the Kangxi Atlas), also presented and substantiated this cosmopolitan ideology by including Chosŏn as part of the empire.⁴² The Qing thus subtly but unmistakably incorporated the group of outer fan into the Chinese empire. Cosmopolitan ideas strongly shaped the Qing’s understanding of the subjects within and beyond its borders, even after international law reached China in the 1860s. In 1643, for instance, the Qing emphasized to Chosŏn that “the two countries have become one family” (Ch., liangguo yijia) and that “the people of Chosŏn are also ours.”⁴³ In 1882, when the Chinese governors in Manchuria reported to Beijing that many poor Korean peasants had crossed the border to cultivate Chi- nese lands, Emperor Guangxu noted, “In the eyes of the local officials, there is certainly a line between them and us [Ch., bici zhi fen], but in the eyes of the court, there is originally no difference between the inside and the outside [Ch., neiwai zhi bie].”⁴⁴ A group of Korean students learning Western technologies in Tianjin in 1882 were also treated by Chinese officials as “loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao zhi chizi) and were granted free tuition.⁴⁵ In 1886 the Guangxu emperor emphasized that Chosŏn was close to Beijing and had “no particular difference from other provinces in the inner land” (Ch., you yu neidi
xingsheng wuyi).⁴⁶ For Qing China, Chosŏn was equal to a “domestic subordinate” (Ch., neichen), which might have been the impetus behind the proposals made by a large number of Chinese officials in the 1880s to convert Chosŏn into “prefectures and counties” of China—an approach I call “provincialization”—in order to save “our Chosŏn” (Ch., wo Chaoxian). Within the Zongfan framework, these factors—sovereignty, borders, and subjects—were not complex issues between Qing China and its outer fan. But when international law and the norms embedded in it, such as sovereignty and suzerainty, reached East Asia in the 1860s and acted as a catalyst for the independence (Ch., duli; K., t’ŭngnip; J., dokuritsu) of the outer fan, these issues became controversial and began to be reconsidered and redefined in accordance with the im- ported legal terms in both China and its outer fan. Nevertheless, as part 2 of this book shows, the politico-cultural Chinese empire connecting the Middle King- dom and its outer fan remained unchanged at that time, because international law could not endow the two sides with the necessary political orthodox legitimacy. What drew China into the wars with France in Vietnam in 1883 and with Japan in Chosŏn in 1894, therefore, was not the territorial Chinese empire but the politi- co-cul-tural one. Similarly, what Japan defeated in 1895 was the tangible former rather than the invisible latter. In this regard, this book reveals the complexity of the dual presentation of the Chinese empire under the Qing, in particular in the late nineteenth century, when China and Korea tried to deliver a legal definition of their relationship to Japan and Western states. After 1895 the politico-cultural empire began to draw back from its extended frontier in its subordinate countries to China’s geographical borders, eventually becoming identical to the territorial empire. Through the decline of the politico-cultural empire emerged a modern Chi- nese state. In his study of empires and states, Frederick Cooper argued that “France only became a nation-state in 1962, when it gave up the last vital element of its impe- rial structure, Algeria.”⁴⁷ Although China is not France and Korea is not Algeria, Korea had served for centuries as a key part of the politico-cultural Chinese em- pire, and under the Qing it acted as an “outlying province” of the empire in the Qing imperial norms.⁴⁸ It is thus not an exaggeration to say that China became a modern nation-state only once it recognized the absolute independence and sovereignty of the Korean state after World War II, especially after the Korean War in the 1950s. It was also in the 1950s that the People’s Republic of China officially endorsed the independence of the Mongolian People’s Republic, which had been part of the Chinese empire under the Qing, while at the same time integrating the northwestern region of the empire—Xinjiang and Tibet—into the territory of New China. At that point, the Korean side finally accomplished the prolonged process of decentering China and became equal to its Chinese counterpart.⁴⁹ Within this conceptual framework, this book traces the historical process through which both China and Korea detached themselves from the Chinese empire and moved toward modern state building in the postimperial era. Renegotiating Qing Imperialism Scholars of China and East Asia have commonly identified imperialism (Ch., Diguo zhuyi) with the West or Japan. As a concept, imperialism refers to a system that was underpinned by a series of aggressive political, economic, or diplomatic policies carried out by Western and Japanese powers against other states. Through these policies, the imperial powers attempted to reap the highest possible profits from the countries they subjugated via unequal treaties, while com- peting with each other for primacy. Imperialism is thus seen as a holdover of Western capitalism (Ch., Ziben zhuyi) and colonialism (Ch., Zhimin zhuyi) that reached the Chinese world aggressively after 1800.⁵⁰ This interpretation also reflects a phenomenon that scholars have called the “great divergence” between China and the West in world economic history.⁵¹ The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 marks the rise of imperialism in East Asia, a regime under which Qing China, too, suffered heavily. Historical narratives along these lines have promoted a Chinese victim mentality and nourished Chinese nationalism in the twentieth cen- tury, in particular after the Leninist definition of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism became popular in scholarship.⁵²
Since the second half of the twentieth century, two groups of scholars have questioned and complicated this received wisdom. The first group comprises stu- dents of the High Qing (that is, from the Kangxi to the Qianlong period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), who have promulgated the paradigm of “New Qing history” that is characterized by an Inner Asian and ethnic approach to interpreting the multiethnic and multicultural Qing.⁵³ The second group con- sists of students of Sino-Korean relations who have depicted Qing China’s policy toward Chosŏn in the late nineteenth century as imperialism. The approach of the first group might be called “High Qing imperialism,” and that of the second group “Late Qing imperialism.” The High Qing imperialism school describes the High Qing as an institutional agent of imperialism, a system of coercive instruments aimed at extending the core area of the empire and keeping the empire functioning. This Qing imperialism manifested itself in geopolitical and global competitions between the Qing, the Mongol khanates and Muslim tribes in Inner Asia, the indigenous and cross-border tribes in southwestern China, the Russian Empire, and the British Empire.⁵⁴ Chinese and European colonialism and capitalism found their place in these intense competitions.⁵⁵ What fundamentally supports this argument of Qing imperi- alism is the fact of the Qing’s territorial expansion by force, followed by the political and cultural hegemony that it introduced to the newly conquered borderlands. However, if the High Qing was an agent of imperialism, all Chinese regimes that extended China’s borders would fall into the same category, including the Han, the Tang, the Yuan, the Ming, and the People’s Republic of China. In this sense, the thesis of High Qing imperialism risks detaching its interpretations of the Qing Empire from the pre-Qing Chinese historical context and being construed as a complement to Eurocentric narratives of imperialism in the broader context. The argument of Late Qing imperialism, by contrast, distinguishes the Qing from its predecessors in Chinese history by asserting that the Late Qing exercised imperialism through coercive means characterized by power politics and economic expansion in the late nineteenth century. The leading proponents of this ap- proach concede that the Late Qing was a victim of Western and Japanese imperialism but claim that it simultaneously practiced its own imperialism over weaker countries. This overseas imperialism fits the general definition that historians have drawn from the history of the Roman Empire: “an unequal power relationship between two states in which the dominant state exercises various forms of control, often forcibly, over the weaker state.”⁵⁶ Whereas the theory of High Qing im- perialism does not take the Manchu conquest of Chosŏn in 1637 into consideration and leaves Chosŏn largely off the list of victims of that imperialism, Chosŏn is typically the only identified victim of Late Qing imperialism, which was embodied by activities such as sending troops to Chosŏn and obtaining treaty ports and settlements through unequal treaties that granted the Chinese extraterritoriality. The concept of “informal empire,” originally coined to refer to the powerful eco- nomic expansion of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, provides this argument with further intellectual support.⁵⁷ In retrospect, the argument of Late Qing imperialism bears a remarkable resemblance to the interpretation of China’s behavior in Chosŏn put forward by Western diplomats and observers in the nineteenth century. As M. Frederick Nelson has pointed out, “Under the assumption that China had nothing but a religious and ceremonial connection with Korea, Westerners viewed her growing de facto control of Korea as pure and unjustified power politics directed against an independent state.”⁵⁸ By likening the Qing to its Western imperial counterparts, the thesis of Late Qing imperialism homogenizes Qing China as a major participant and a powerful predator in Euro- centric global history, therefore strengthening the approach of interpreting the histories of others with reference to that of the West instead of contextualizing these histories in their local milieus. As this book shows, the Qing activities in Korea in the late nineteenth century were a manifestation not of imperialism, but of Zongfan empiricism. The argument of Qing imperialism, including both High Qing imperialism and Late Qing imperialism, serves as a normative tool for interpreting the constant changes undergone by China in its various forms. In order to explain those changes, this book renegotiates Qing imperialism by presenting the Qing as an empire that used ideological tools—the Chosŏn model and a set of imperial norms embodied by the model—to establish and consolidate its political authority and
cultural superiority in the Chinese world. What I call “Zongfanism” in this book can provide us with a different perspective for observing the rise and fall of the Eurasian Chinese empire under the Qing Dynasty and the rise of modern sovereign states in China and its neighboring countries. Zongfanism refers to a Chinese system of political and diplomatic communication conducted between, on the one hand, a political entity that culturally identified itself as the exclusive civilized center of the world, and, on the other hand, the political entities on its periphery that the center considered less civilized or even barbarian. The sovereign of the center possessed absolute patriarchal authority over the monarchs of the subordinate entities, while the two sides enjoyed mutually constitutive legitimacy in- formed by their shared politico-cultural norms. Zongfanism transcends the entrenched divide between premodern and modern Chinese history. Historians have generally identified the Opium War of 1839–42 as the twilight of premodern China and the dawn of modern China. Along these lines, the mainstream narrative of Qing China holds that the pre-modern system of China’s foreign relations was incompatible with the modern treaty system, with which it was finally replaced. The principal problem with this paradigm lies not in its Eurocentrism per se (indeed, “modern” is a criterion rooted in European history) but rather in its neglect of constant factors within China’s foreign policy that bridged the premodern and modern periods without conspicuous changes. In other words, the factors that historians have widely identified as having led to the “stagnation” of China before it encountered the industrialized West constitute the very key to understanding late imperial China.⁵⁹ The Chinese empire lived with its indigenous norms, not imported ones. The Zongfan perspective does not aim to replace that of Qing imperialism, nor can it completely account for the Qing’s activities during the high tide of the Manchu conquest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from Manchuria to the Korean peninsula and from Xinjiang to Tibet.⁶⁰ It instead aims to reveal the crucial relationships between the construction and dissemination of imperial ideology from the center to the periphery on the one hand, and imperial top-down statecraft in practice on the other. In the early twenty-first century, China has begun to exploit sophisticated ideas drawn from its recent history to preserve the legitimacy and unity of the multiethnic and multicultural Chinese state and to manage its relations with neighboring countries and the world. In this contemporary context, it may be helpful to examine the trajectory of changes in the Chinese world from an inside perspective, and the following chapters seek to do just that.
Introduction
Day dawned on April 25, 1644, in the seventeenth year of the reign of the Chongzhen emperor of the Ming Dynasty of China. As the first rays of the sun struck the walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing, a large group of rebels stormed the gates. Right before the rebels swarmed the imperial halls, the emperor managed to climb up an artificial hill behind the palace and hang himself from a tree. His loyal servant, a eunuch who had cared for the desperate thirty-three-year-old emperor since the latter’s birth, hanged himself from another tree. The Ming Dynasty, or the Great Ming, which had governed China for 277 years, came to a sudden end.
The Ming’s unexpected demise put one of its generals, Wu Sangui (1612–78), who was fighting on the front lines of an unrelated conflict about 190 miles east of Beijing, in an awkward position. General Wu was defending Shanhai Pass, a strategic military outpost of the Great Wall connecting inner China with Manchuria, in the war with the Qing, a regime founded in 1616 by the nomadic Manchus in Manchuria. The war had lasted for almost three decades, during which the Manchus had decisively defeated the Ming troops in Manchuria, subordinated neighboring Mongol tribes, and conquered the Chosŏn Dynasty of Korea, a loyal tributary state of China. Shanhai Pass became the last fortification preventing the formidable barbarians, as both Ming Chinese and Chosŏn Koreans regarded the Manchus, from entering inner China. As Beijing fell into the rebels’ hands, General Wu lost his country overnight. In Manchuria, the Manchu emperor seized the opportunity to send his troops under the leadership of Prince Dorgon (1612–50) to the outskirts of Shanhai Pass, where the army waited to cross the Great Wall to enter inner China. Meanwhile, the rebels in Beijing began to march toward the pass, with General Wu’s father as a hostage, in order to annihilate Wu. In this life-or-death situation, Wu chose the Manchus as his allies. He opened the giant gate to allow the Manchu forces to pass through the Great Wall and help him defeat the rebels.
Among those who entered the pass along with the Manchu forces was the crown prince of Chosŏn Korea. The prince had been living with the Manchus for seven years, since 1637, when the Manchus had conquered Chosŏn and taken him and his younger brother hostage.¹ The guardians of the pass, General Wu’s army, also included people of Korean origin. Among them was a young Korean officer, Ch’oe Hyo-il, who had joined General Wu’s anti-Manchu fight after 1627, when the Manchus first invaded Chosŏn. Ch’oe was not to live long, but he did not die at the hands of the Manchu conquerors. On June 6, 1644, the Manchus took over Beijing without a fight. In a hall standing amid the debris of the Forbidden City, which had been burned by the rebels, Prince Dorgon accepted the capitulation of the Chinese officials of the Ming, witnessed by the Korean crown prince. Ch’oe, however, refused to prostrate himself in front of the Manchu prince, who in his mind was a barbarian. Instead, dressed in a Ming-style robe, he went to Chongzhen’s tomb to mourn for the Ming—the civilized Middle Kingdom, or Zhongguo in Chinese. Ch’oe died near the tomb after a seven-day hunger strike. General Wu buried his body and commemorated him in an elegy.²
A Korean subject, Ch’oe died not only for the Chinese emperor but also for a civilization embodied by the Chinese dynasty and his homeland. Yet when he sacrificed himself, he did not realize that the Manchu regime was transforming itself by embracing the ideological, political, and cultural norms of the same civilization. More importantly, before it crossed the Great Wall in 1644, the Qing had begun to use its hierarchical relationship with Chosŏn to fashion itself as the civilized center of the world. As history unfolded, this relationship lasted for 258 years until the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, and it continued to exert a strong influence over China and Korea thereafter. From the early seventeenth to the early twentieth century, the Qing used its relationship with Chosŏn as an ideological tool to consolidate its identity as the Middle Kingdom and to manage its relations with other neighboring countries and the newly conquered polities that stretched from Manchuria and the Mongol steppe to Turkestan and the Himalayas. By the time the Eurasian empire fell apart in 1911, Qing China had evolved into a multiethnic and multicultural modern state, providing a solid foundation for state building in the rest of the twentieth century. Among the factors that helped the
Qing remake the Chinese empire, what stood out in particular were the politico-cultural discourse and imperial norms drawn from the Manchu-Korean contacts. These took place within a hierarchical framework I call Zongfan, a term I will explain below. The microhistory of Manchu-Korean relations vividly reflects the macrohistory of China’s transformation during the course of the three centuries, making Sino-Korean relations distinct from China’s relations with other countries.
This book reveals the development of China from an empire into a modern state through the lens of the dynamics of Sino-Korean political relations from 1616 to 1911. It incorporates Chosŏn Korea into the historical narrative of Qing China by examining the high politics of the two countries. The book shows that the Manchu regime used its constant relations with Chosŏn to establish, legitimize, consolidate, and present its identity as the civilized center of the known world, as a cosmopolitan empire, and as a modern sovereign state. By employing a long-term historical and cross-border perspective to observe the bilateral relationship, this book casts new light on the rise and inner changes of the Chinese empire during the Qing period, the clashes between the Chinese foreign-relations system and its Western counterpart, and the formation of modern sovereign states in East Asia.
Revitalizing the Concept of Zongfan in the Narrative of Late Imperial China
I use the Chinese term Zongfan, or in some cases the English phrase Chinese world order, rather than the oft-adopted English translation tributary, to refer to the nature of the hierarchical relationship between late imperial China and its subordinate countries, which included Korea. I reserve the term tributary for related aspects of this system.³ Late imperial China in this book refers to China from 1368 to 1911, namely, the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing periods following the collapse of the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) of the Mongol Empire. As I argue below, the Zongfan system was central to establishing the political orthodox legitimacy of China and its subordinate countries. As a key concept of Confucianism, political orthodox legitimacy (Ch., Zhengtong) refers to the universal ideological, moral, cultural, and social rationale behind the legitimate status of a political entity in the hierarchy of the Chinese world. In late imperial times, this legitimacy entailed name and status (Ch., mingfen) and great unification (Ch., da yitong) and found its dedicated audience in the ruling elites and Confucian scholars of Ming and Qing China, Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910), and Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868).⁴
As a politico-cultural structure, the Zongfan system is believed to have been established in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). It was associated with the kinship-based feudal system (Ch., zongfa fengjian) of the day. This system was practiced between two sides, Zong and fan. Zong refers to the royal lineage of the Chinese monarch, who claimed to be the Son of Heaven (Ch., tianzi) residing in the Middle Kingdom with absolute patriarchal authority and exclusive orthodox legitimacy as the human agent of the Mandate of Heaven (Ch., tianming). Fan originally meant the clan(s) of the royal family who established outposts on China’s borders, where the rulers’ legitimacy was dependent on investiture by the Son of Heaven. The two sides of the kinship constituted the familistic hierarchy and the order of all-under-Heaven (Ch., tianxia)—the known universe to the people within this political entity.⁵
The connotation of China’s periphery evolved within this feudalistic model by incorporating all countries or polities outside China into the category of fan. According to the ideal tenets, on a regular basis the fan dispatched emissaries, ministers of ministers (Ch., peichen), bearing taxes or tribute to the central court, where they would offer appropriate obedience to the Son of Heaven and receive largesse or gifts. In return, the court would not only send envoys to the fan to invest the rulers with legitimate titles but also protect the fan whenever necessary. This reciprocity was the foundation of the double policy of serving the great (Ch., shida) and cherishing the small (Ch., zixiao). The exchanges of emissaries following ritual codes dictated by the Middle Kingdom kept the Zongfan system running. This model later evolved into the basic philosophy of the foreign policy of late imperial China.⁶
In addition to being defined by its geographical distance from the central court, the fan could also be characterized in kinship terms as inner fan and outer fan.
The inner fan maintained a strong blood relationship with the emperor, but the outer fan did not. In the case of Korea, the situation was complex. The imperial norms of the successive Chinese dynasties preferred to ascribe the beginning of Sino-Korean kinship to Jizi (K., Kija), a royal member of the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600–1046 BC) who was believed to have been invested by the Western Zhou court with the lands of ancient Chosŏn. This legend produced an assumption of a unique cultural homogeneity that the Chinese side deeply endorsed and that helped unified Chinese dynasties see Korea as belonging within China’s territorial perimeter.⁷ The Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) and the Tang Dynasty (618–907) invaded Korea and integrated parts of the Korean lands into China. In the 1260s the Mongol forces of the Yuan Dynasty gradually came to control the Koryŏ Dynasty of Korea (918–1392), and in the 1270s the Mongol court invested King Ch’ungnyŏl (r. 1274–1308), who married the Princess of Qi of Kublai Khan, as the consort of the imperial princess and the king of Koryŏ (K., Puma Koryŏ kugwang).⁸ After the Ming overthrew the Yuan, it ceased practicing the Yuan’s policy toward Koryŏ, which had been based on strong personal ties between the Mongol and Korean courts through state marriage.
After its establishment in 1368, the Ming followed the feudal principles of the Zhou Dynasty and the Zongfan practice of the Yuan in establishing the Zongfan system within its domain, but it had no desire to extend the system to Koryŏ. The founding father of the new dynasty claimed that Ming China would never invade Koryŏ or fourteen other neighboring countries. In 1392 a new Korean regime replaced Koryŏ and immediately sent emissaries to China to pursue imperial investiture of the kingship. Although the Ming conferred the title Chosŏn on the new regime, after Jizi Chosŏn, it did not endow the Korean king with investiture until 1401, when Emperor Jianwen (r. 1399–1402) invested the third king of Chosŏn (T’aejong, r. 1400–1418), formally extending the Zongfan arrangement to the kingdom. In the imperial mandate, the Ming underlined that the king should serve as a fence of the civilized kingdom and assist China forever (Ch., yongfu yu Zhongguo).⁹ In 1403 Emperor Yongle (r. 1402–24) awarded the same king an official robe commensurate with the rank of first-degree prince (Ch., qinwang, a brother of the emperor), further integrating Chosŏn into the Ming Zongfan system.¹⁰
In the transition from the Yuan-Koryŏ relationship to the Ming-Chosŏn one, the Ming made a consequential shift in China’s policy toward Korea: China allowed Korea independence as a foreign country in practice, but it continued to regulate the bilateral relationship with reference to Zongfan norms in the domestic feudal sense and on the ideological level. In the familistic and culturally homogeneous Zongfan context, the Ming depicted Chosŏn as an outer fan descending from Jizi, while Chosŏn identified itself as a vassal (K., chehu; Ch., zhuhou) of the Ming court and viewed their relationship in father-son and monarch-subordinate terms.¹¹ Simultaneously, Neo-Confucianism (K., Chŏngju hak), which celebrated Confucian social hierarchy, had become the ruling ideology during the Yuan Dynasty, and had lately been introduced to Korea, helping to institutionalize and stabilize this bilateral relationship.¹² After the Ming rescued Chosŏn from a Japanese invasion in the 1590s, Chosŏn became even more committed to the Ming, regarding the Ming as its parent nation (K., pumo chi pang).¹³ This arrangement seemed similar to the feudalism practiced in medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan, but as a cross-border framework it possessed features unique to the Confucianism-supported Chinese world. As part 2 of this book demonstrates, in the nineteenth century the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship built on these features confused European and Japanese diplomats, who could not find historical precedents for it within their own worlds. However, as scholars have pointed out, applying the Ming-Chosŏn hierarchical relationship to Sino-Korean contacts or China’s foreign relations before 1400 would be ahistorical.¹⁴
The Qing inherited the Ming Zongfan mechanism in its contacts with Chosŏn, but the Manchus’ kinship relations with Mongol tribes complicated the outer fan spectrum of the empire. This point is illustrated by the multilayered nature of the outer fan and the varied usage of the term in Qing political discourse, particularly in referring to political entities within the Qing pilgrimage system (Ch., chaojin) and to countries in Southeast Asia, such as Siam (Thailand).¹⁵ The Manchu court nevertheless understood Chosŏn and other subordinate entities as members of the Qing-centric family, in which the position of these entities was similar or
even equal to that of their Mongol counterparts.¹⁶ As the Ministry of Rites (Ch., Libu) described it to the Qianlong emperor in 1768 in the context of investing the Korean king’s grandson as the successor to the throne, "The outer fan are the same as Zongfan in terms of their relations with the central court" (Ch., Waifan zhi yu zongfan, shi shu xiangtong). Similarly, in 1790 the Qianlong emperor awarded the Vietnamese king, Nguyễn Huệ (r. 1788–92), a golden leather belt that only Zongfan of the royal family could use.¹⁷ The term Zongfan aptly encapsulates the relationship between the center/patriarch and the periphery/family members during the Qing period, and for this reason I have revitalized it in this book.
Reinterpreting the Rise of the Modern Chinese State through the Lens of Qing-Chosŏn Relations
The involvement of Chosŏn in the Ming-Qing war led to two fierce Manchu invasions of the country in 1627 and 1636. After conquering Chosŏn in early 1637, the Qing established a Zongfan relationship with it by replacing the Ming in the patriarchal position. Scholars have widely regarded Sino-Korean relations in China’s late imperial period as the quintessential manifestation of the Sinocentric order.¹⁸ Some scholars have tended to attribute the uniqueness of the relationship to the parties’ shared Confucian culture, especially Neo-Confucianism, while others have preferred to emphasize China’s political or military influence or control in the hegemonic sense.¹⁹ This book embraces the cultural perspective, but it simultaneously underlines the significant effect that the Manchu use of violence had on the establishment and maintenance of Qing-Chosŏn ties in the early seventeenth century. More importantly, I avoid enshrining the Qing-Chosŏn relationship in the pantheon of Chinese narratives of Sino-Korean relations since the Western Zhou, and I refrain from conflating the Qing-Chosŏn relationship with that between the Ming and Chosŏn. Rather, I explore the unique and crucial role of these bonds in providing the Qing with the political, intellectual, and ideological sources with which it reconstructed itself and the Chinese empire and eventually gave birth to a modern Chinese state.
A key term in analyzing the Sinocentric hierarchical arrangement between Qing China and other countries imagined in Qing imperial discourse is yi. Like so many abstract terms in Chinese (or indeed any language), its meaning varies according to context, but I have generally translated it as barbarians. As the following chapters show, yi, which was often used to describe outsiders in Sino-foreign contacts, did not necessarily carry a pejorative connotation. I also demonstrate a change in the meaning of yi from the perspective of the Manchu regime. The story of the Qing-Chosŏn relationship unfolds within the broader process of the Qing’s efforts to meet the unprecedented challenge of proving its orthodox legitimacy in the politico-cultural setting of the civilized vs. barbarian distinction (Ch., Hua–Yi zhi bian; K., Hwa–I ŭi chai).²⁰ It was against the background of this civilized–barbarian dichotomy that the Korean warrior Ch’oi sacrificed himself in Manchu-occupied Beijing, and it was in light of this distinction that his homeland strengthened its identity as Little China (K., So Chunghwa) in the post-Ming era, while the Qing positioned itself within the pedigree of the Middle Kingdom as the civilized center and the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao).
The establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship in 1637 was a watershed event in the history of the Qing’s prodigious enterprise of redefining itself and remaking the Chinese world. Scholars have commonly dated the Ming-Qing transition to the Manchu occupation of Beijing in 1644, but the Manchu regime in fact had initiated its bid for status as the Middle Kingdom at least a decade earlier, by employing the politico-cultural discourse embedded in the Zongfan structure. After 1637, the Qing progressively converted Chosŏn into a prototypical outer subordinate, known as waifan (outer fan) or shuguo (subordinate country) in the Chinese language and tulergi gurun (outer country) or harangga gurun (subordinate country) in the Manchu language. Very significantly, the Qing imperial terms abruptly reversed the Manchu-Korean hierarchical arrangement in the Ming period by portraying Chosŏn as a country of barbarians on the periphery of the Qing.
In its frequent contacts with Chosŏn from 1637 to 1643, the Qing strengthened the new bilateral political arrangement and developed a mature model for managing its relations with other newly conquered or subordinated entities. I call this model the Chosŏn model (Ch., Chaoxian shili, lit. Korean cases/examples).
As part 1 explains, the model constituted a pattern by which a country or a political entity could follow Chosŏn into the Qing-centric Zongfan system primarily by receiving imperial investitures from the Qing, adopting the regnal titles and calendar of the Qing, and sending emissaries and tribute to the Qing on a regular basis. The idea behind this model was to encourage outlying regions to embrace the Qing as the civilized center of the world and to affirm its supreme political and cultural position. After 1644, as the Qing continued its conquest of inner China by marching west and southwest, it used the Chosŏn model as a handy soft-power weapon to manage its political relations with other entities and to consolidate its new identification as the center of all-under-Heaven.
The Qing-Chosŏn hierarchy was far more than just the final chapter in the long Sino-Korean Zongfan history. Rather, it buttressed the rationale of the entire Zongfan system by keeping the periphery of the Chinese empire informed and regulated while the Manchu regime controlled and remade the empire at the core. The Qing’s dynamic relations with its first Confucian outer fan—Chosŏn—played a vital role in establishing, institutionalizing, and nourishing the entire Qing-centric system of foreign relations. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Qing had constructed a new imperial order within and beyond its Eurasian empire. It had simultaneously labeled Britain and other European states countries of barbarians and posited them on the periphery of China. These states, however, changed their status vis-à-vis China through gunboat diplomacy and treaties in the nineteenth century, when they encountered the Chinese world through such outer fan as Annam (Vietnam), Ryukyu, and Chosŏn. The introduction, translation, and dissemination of international law in the Chinese world put China, China’s outer fan, and the European states on an equal footing in terms of their state sovereignty. Nevertheless, the relationship between Qing China and its outer fan remained unchanged until the very end of the nineteenth century in that they still needed each other to acquire mutually constitutive and mutually defined orthodox legitimacy in their own world.
What confused the Western states in their contacts with the outer fan of China in the late nineteenth century was the nebulous nature of the Zongfan mechanism that constantly shunted them into perplexing negotiations with Beijing, the only place where diplomacy with outsiders could be conducted in accordance with Zongfan conventions. The disputes emerging at the periphery of China were thus transferred to the center of the empire, where they converged as an accumulative force to trigger certain reforms within China that in turn spread to and deeply influenced the periphery. Although this model may seem similar to contemporary relationships between European powers and their overseas colonies, it had a fundamentally different structure, as later sections and chapters will elaborate. The most typical case among the manifold and interwoven disputes regarding this mechanism arose in Chosŏn Korea.
The political and diplomatic conundrum of the international status of Chosŏn led the Qing and Chosŏn into legal quagmires and prompted both sides to modify their time-honored relations in the context of both the inner and the outer dual networks, as chapters 5 and 6 explain. But the various adjustments made to the relationship on both sides in the chaotic decade of the 1880s kept the Zongfan fundamentals untouched, as neither side could overcome the ideological dilemma caused by their mutually constitutive legitimacy at the level of high politics in the Confucian world. This double bind meant that colonizing Chosŏn was not an option for China in the turbulent period before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894. The growing controversy between China, Korea, Japan, and Western states finally resulted in the termination of the Sino-Korean Zongfan relationship in 1895. Accordingly, the cosmopolitan Chinese empire withdrew its political and cultural reach from its subordinate countries and became identical with the Chinese state defined by the norms of international law. After the war, China and Korea negotiated a new treaty for an equal state-to-state relationship, but the new arrangement lasted only a few years before both the Chosŏn Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty ceased to exist in 1910 and 1911, respectively. This book describes the trajectory of this varied relationship and shows its significance for the development of modern China and East Asia.
Revisiting the Chinese Empire under the Qing
This book defines the Qing as an empire and as a Chinese empire. As I explain below, this empire included Chosŏn in a politico-cultural sense. The term empire as a European concept that was always traced back to the Romans did not exist in the Chinese political lexicon until 1895, when the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Shimonoseki addressed the Qing as the Great Qing Empire in Chinese characters (Da Qing diguo), as a counterpart to the Great Japanese Empire (Dai Nippon teikoku).²¹ None of the ruling dynasties before the end of the Qing ever claimed to hold an empire, either in Chinese or, when the ruling house was not Han Chinese, in any other language. Even nowadays, describing a Chinese dynasty as an empire remains rare among historians in China. Nevertheless, if we define an empire broadly as a political entity in which different peoples are governed differently, Chinese history from 221 BC, when the Qin Dynasty (221–207 BC) unified China as a multiethnic polity, to the present is clearly a history of empires.²² In this book, the Chinese empire (Ch., Zhonghua diguo) refers to a multiethnic and multicultural polity in which the Middle Kingdom represented the political and cultural core against the background of the civilized–barbarian distinction and for which the concepts of Mandate of Heaven and all-under-Heaven served as constitutional ideologies to establish its political orthodox legitimacy and Confucian orthodox legitimacy (Ch., daotong). This definition may not fit all the dynasties that claimed the name of the Middle Kingdom, because, as R. Bin Wong observes, the ideas and institutions of this empire were neither constant over time nor uniform through space.²³ But it applies to the dynasties in Chinese history such as the Tang, the Northern and Southern Song (960–1279), the Liao (907–1125), the Xixia (1038–1227), the Jin (1115–1234), the Yuan, the Ming, and the Qing.
The Manchu ethnicity of the imperial house was not a barrier to the Qing’s presentation of itself as a Chinese empire, in particular after 1644, when the term Chinese (Ch., Zhongguo ren) took on a multiethnic character. The Qing had presented itself as a Chinese empire as early as 1689 in the Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia. The original treaty text, written in Latin by the French Jesuit Jean-François Gerbillon (1654–1707), who was serving the Manchu court, called the Qing Sinicum Imperium (Chinese Empire) as a counterpart to Ruthenicum Imperium (Russian Empire). The French version of the treaty rendered the term as l’Empire de la Chine (Empire of China) as a counterpart to l’Empire de Moscovie (Empire of Muscovy).²⁴ In the Manchu translation of the treaty, the Qing court used the term Dulimbai gurun to define itself as China/Zhongguo; this term is equivalent to Chinese Empire in the other versions of the text.²⁵
When Chinese became a multiethnic descriptor, the Qing also became the representative of Chinese culture, in particular the Confucianism that lay at the core of imperial political discourse. In 1712 Emperor Kangxi instructed the Manchu official Tulišen (1667–1740), an envoy to the Turgūt Mongols in Russia, that if the khan of Russia (Ma., Cagan han) asked what was esteemed in China, Tulišen should respond that our country takes fidelity, filial piety, benevolence, justice, and sincerity as fundamentals.²⁶ All of these concepts came from Confucianism, not from Manchu ideologies. After all, it was this Confucian identity and politico-cultural discourse informed by Confucianism, not the Qing’s Manchu characteristics or its realpolitik practiced along the newly conquered frontiers in Inner Asia, that determined the Qing’s political orthodox legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom and enabled it to obtain and justify Confucian orthodox legitimacy. This Confucian identity on the state level later helped the Qing display its Chineseness and win strong support from Han Chinese scholars, who assisted the dynasty in weathering the storm of anti-Manchu rebellions in the nineteenth century. This book broadly defines Chineseness as the state of being the legitimate Middle Kingdom, thus referring to statecraft, not ethnicity.
I interpret the Chinese empire under the Qing in two dimensions: the territorial empire and the politico-cultural empire. The territorial Chinese empire was equal to the Great Qing, composed primarily of the Manchu court, the inner provinces (Ch., zhisheng, directly controlled provinces), and the first group of outer fan, which were under the management of the central institution of Lifan yuan. These outer fan included regions and groups such as the Cahar Mongols, Tibet, and Mongol and Muslim tribes in Xinjiang. The Chinese name Lifan yuan means "the ministry of managing the affairs of the fan," and it differs from the organization’s Manchu name, Tulergi golo be dasara jurgan, which means the institution in charge of the outer provinces. Scholars have generally translated it as "Court of
Colonial Affairs or Mongolian Superintendency." This book adopts the latter rendering. The politico-cultural Chinese empire encompassed not only these political entities but also the second group of outer fan, whose contacts with China took place via the Ministry of Rites and whose shared characteristic was their identification of the Son of Heaven in China as the highest sovereign in the world (see figure I.1).
FIGURE I.1. The structure of the Chinese empire during the Qing. A = the court; B = inner provinces; C = outer fan under the Mongolian Superintendency (MS); D = outer fan under the Ministry of Rites (MOR), primarily Chosŏn, Ryukyu, and Annam; E = Western countries listed by the Qing as outer fan; AB = inner China, or China proper; ABC = the Great Qing, or the territorial Chinese empire; ABCD = the politico-cultural Chinese empire; ABCDE = all-under-Heaven.
Three key issues in the relationship between China and its outer fan within the politico-cultural Chinese empire invite elaboration: sovereignty, borders, and subjects. These issues were woven together in imperial times by the cosmopolitan idea of all-under-Heaven and were critically questioned within the context of the nation-state order of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. China, or Zhongguo, had historically always been mutually defined by its relations with the countries on its periphery—that is, by a combination of the country’s own perception of itself and the devotion of its neighbors to Chinese civilization. The nebulous dual nature of China’s identity posed a challenge to Chinese scholars who sought to define China anew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by comparing it to European states. These scholars could not find an established and consistent name for their homeland in history. For example, Huang Zunxian (1848–1905), a distinguished diplomat and scholar, reviewed the conventional civilized–barbarian discourse and preferred to call China the central civilized country (Ch., Huaxia). In his treatise exploring the reasons for China’s weakness, Liang Qichao (1873–1929), an intellectual leader of China’s modernization, pointed out that for a long time the Chinese had seen no difference between state and all-under-Heaven or between state and court.²⁷ Huang’s and Liang’s arguments reflected the cosmopolitan nature of the Chinese world, in which sovereignty, borders, and subjects manifested themselves in ways distinct from those of its Western counterpart.
The nature of the sovereignty of an outer fan in the Chinese world was twofold: it was fully independent in terms of the territorial Chinese empire but fully dependent in relation to the politico-cultural Chinese empire. An outer fan enjoyed the right of independence, that is, autonomy or self-rule—zizhu in Chinese—within its boundaries. As Jean-Baptiste Grosier (1743–1823) in the 1780s and George N. Curzon (1859–1925) in the 1890s observed, the king of Chosŏn was an independent and supreme sovereign in his own lands.²⁸ The kings of the Nguyễn Dynasty (1802–1945) of Vietnam went even further, claiming to be emperors and calling Vietnam the Middle Kingdom in the first half of the nineteenth century.²⁹ The kingship of the fan, however, was ultimately subjugated to the emperorship of China. As demonstrated by Emperor Qianlong’s deposition of the king of Vietnam, Lê Duy Kỳ (1765–93), and his investment of a new king in 1789, the emperor possessed absolute patriarchal power over the kings. This was particularly true for the Confucian kingship of Chosŏn.³⁰ What determined this relationship was not China’s military power or geopolitical gravity or its suzerainty, as Western and Japanese diplomats understood it in the nineteenth century, but the mutually constitutive legitimacy of each side of the bilateral arrangement that was undergirded by Zongfan tenets and Confucian ethos. As a consequence, in the 1830s and the 1870s, the king of Chosŏn refused to negotiate with Western representatives on the grounds that "subordinates of a fan have no right to conduct diplomacy" (Ch., fanchen wu waijiao).³¹ Vietnam adhered to the same ideology until the early 1880s.³² Within this system, a Korean king did not have his own regnal title during his lifetime but gained a posthumous title or temple name, which is why I tend to refer to Korean kings as, simply, the king, or to use their names (Yi Chong, for example) rather than their temple names (Injo, Yi Chong’s temple name). Although the awarding of temple names to the kings could suggest a portrayal of Korea as independent of China in an abstract sense and in an intellectual sense, in practice China’s patriarchal and divine imperial power was always real and effective.³³
The differences between peoples on either side of the borders that separated Qing China and its outer fan were clear, but these distinctions were not translated into the language of nation-states, as illustrated by the Qing’s cartographic survey in the Kangxi period and the Qing’s juridical negotiations with Annam and Chosŏn over legal cases.³⁴ The territorial border between China and the outer fan could be diluted and blurred by the shared ideology of all-under-Heaven within
the Zongfan framework. In this cultural context, the Qing court treated fan such as Chosŏn as a part—even an indispensable part—of the imperial dynasty (Ch., huangchao) or the Heavenly Dynasty. For the most part, scholars do not consider countries such as Chosŏn to have been components of the Chinese empire during the Qing. This view results from the dissemination of nationalist historiography in East Asia since the late nineteenth century and cleaves closely to a territorial definition of the Chinese empire. The Chinese empire as a politico-cultural unit, however, encompassed its outer fan beyond China’s borders, where China’s centrality was further constructed by local manifestations of the divine authority of the Chinese sovereign. Believing that all lands of the outer fan were under his rule in this sense, Emperor Yongzheng demarcated a new border with Annam in 1727 that allowed Annam to extend its territory 12.45 miles (40 Chinese li) farther into China in order to end the territorial disputes between the two sides.
Chosŏn never ceased trying to redraw its borders, as reflected in its prolonged negotiations with China over border demarcation in the Tumen River area from the 1710s to the 1880s, yet the Korean court had endorsed the Chinese imperial discourse of all-under-Heaven since the Ming period.³⁵ In 1593, for example, the king of Chosŏn (Sŏnjo, r. 1567–1608) claimed that Chosŏn was a vassal (K., chehu) of China and had been regarded by the Chinese dynasties as an inner subordinate (K., naebok; Ch., neifu) since Jizi. The king further emphasized that Chosŏn is actually China’s land and China lets our country manage it.³⁶ In the 1730s the Qing historians in History of the Ming commented that "Chosŏn was the Ming’s subordinate country, but it was not different from an inner part of China [Ch., yunei]."³⁷ The position of Chosŏn as part of the Chinese empire remained unchanged during the Qing in terms of imperial norms. In 1784 and 1788, Emperor Qianlong noted that Korea was almost the peer of the Qing’s inner subordinates.³⁸ In the rituals that marked imperial edicts, the Qing imperial ritual code made it clear that the local officials of Chosŏn should perform the same rituals as did those in directly controlled provinces (Ch., ru zhisheng zhi yi).³⁹
Another indicator of Chosŏn’s position was the annual calendar of the Qing (Ch., Shixian li or Shixian shu; Ma., Erin forgon i ton i bithe), issued every year by the Imperial Astronomical Bureau (Ch., Qintian jian; Ma., Abka be ginggulere yamun), which Korean emissaries had to retrieve from Beijing. The calendar included charts of the sunrise and sunset times and charts of the solar terms in each province (Ch., gesheng; Ma., yaya golo) and each Mongol and Muslim tribe (Ch., ge menggu huibu; Ma., geren monggo be, hoise i aiman) under Qing jurisdiction. From 1645, when the Qing inaugurated the calendar, Chosŏn was included in the list of inner provinces such as Shanxi and Shandong and later showed up alongside Mukden, Nerchinsk (Ma., Nibcu), Sanxing (Ma., Ilan hala), Bodune (Ma., Bedune), Heilongjiang (Ma., Sahaliyan ula), and Jilin. Following Chosŏn, Annam was added to the lists in 1789 and Ryukyu in 1810.⁴⁰ As Johan Elverskog has pointed out, A fundamental role of the emperor was to control the flow of time properly by creating the calendar and propitiating its cultural force through ritual and ceremony.⁴¹ Many maps of the known world produced by the cartographers of the Qing and Chosŏn in the eighteenth century, such as the Huangyu quanlan tu (Map of a complete view of the imperial lands, known as the Kangxi Atlas), also presented and substantiated this cosmopolitan ideology by including Chosŏn as part of the empire.⁴² The Qing thus subtly but unmistakably incorporated the group of outer fan into the Chinese empire.
Cosmopolitan ideas strongly shaped the Qing’s understanding of the subjects within and beyond its borders, even after international law reached China in the 1860s. In 1643, for instance, the Qing emphasized to Chosŏn that the two countries have become one family (Ch., liangguo yijia) and that the people of Chosŏn are also ours.⁴³ In 1882, when the Chinese governors in Manchuria reported to Beijing that many poor Korean peasants had crossed the border to cultivate Chinese lands, Emperor Guangxu noted, "In the eyes of the local officials, there is certainly a line between them and us [Ch., bici zhi fen], but in the eyes of the court, there is originally no difference between the inside and the outside [Ch., neiwai zhi bie]."⁴⁴ A group of Korean students learning Western technologies in Tianjin in 1882 were also treated by Chinese officials as loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao zhi chizi) and were granted free tuition.⁴⁵ In 1886 the Guangxu emperor emphasized that Chosŏn was close to Beijing and had no particular difference from other provinces in the inner land (Ch., you yu neidi
xingsheng wuyi).⁴⁶ For Qing China, Chosŏn was equal to a domestic subordinate (Ch., neichen), which might have been the impetus behind the proposals made by a large number of Chinese officials in the 1880s to convert Chosŏn into prefectures and counties of China—an approach I call provincialization—in order to save our Chosŏn (Ch., wo Chaoxian).
Within the Zongfan framework, these factors—sovereignty, borders, and subjects—were not complex issues between Qing China and its outer fan. But when international law and the norms embedded in it, such as sovereignty and suzerainty, reached East Asia in the 1860s and acted as a catalyst for the independence (Ch., duli; K., t’ŭngnip; J., dokuritsu) of the outer fan, these issues became controversial and began to be reconsidered and redefined in accordance with the imported legal terms in both China and its outer fan. Nevertheless, as part 2 of this book shows, the politico-cultural Chinese empire connecting the Middle Kingdom and its outer fan remained unchanged at that time, because international law could not endow the two sides with the necessary political orthodox legitimacy.
What drew China into the wars with France in Vietnam in 1883 and with Japan in Chosŏn in 1894, therefore, was not the territorial Chinese empire but the politico-cultural one. Similarly, what Japan defeated in 1895 was the tangible former rather than the invisible latter. In this regard, this book reveals the complexity of the dual presentation of the Chinese empire under the Qing, in particular in the late nineteenth century, when China and Korea tried to deliver a legal definition of their relationship to Japan and Western states. After 1895 the politico-cultural empire began to draw back from its extended frontier in its subordinate countries to China’s geographical borders, eventually becoming identical to the territorial empire. Through the decline of the politico-cultural empire emerged a modern Chinese state.
In his study of empires and states, Frederick Cooper argued that France only became a nation-state in 1962, when it gave up the last vital element of its imperial structure, Algeria.⁴⁷ Although China is not France and Korea is not Algeria, Korea had served for centuries as a key part of the politico-cultural Chinese empire, and under the Qing it acted as an outlying province of the empire in the Qing imperial norms.⁴⁸ It is thus not an exaggeration to say that China became a modern nation-state only once it recognized the absolute independence and sovereignty of the Korean state after World War II, especially after the Korean War in the 1950s. It was also in the 1950s that the People’s Republic of China officially endorsed the independence of the Mongolian People’s Republic, which had been part of the Chinese empire under the Qing, while at the same time integrating the northwestern region of the empire—Xinjiang and Tibet—into the territory of New China. At that point, the Korean side finally accomplished the prolonged process of decentering China and became equal to its Chinese counterpart.⁴⁹ Within this conceptual framework, this book traces the historical process through which both China and Korea detached themselves from the Chinese empire and moved toward modern state building in the postimperial era.
Renegotiating Qing Imperialism
Scholars of China and East Asia have commonly identified imperialism (Ch., Diguo zhuyi) with the West or Japan. As a concept, imperialism refers to a system that was underpinned by a series of aggressive political, economic, or diplomatic policies carried out by Western and Japanese powers against other states. Through these policies, the imperial powers attempted to reap the highest possible profits from the countries they subjugated via unequal treaties, while competing with each other for primacy. Imperialism is thus seen as a holdover of Western capitalism (Ch., Ziben zhuyi) and colonialism (Ch., Zhimin zhuyi) that reached the Chinese world aggressively after 1800.⁵⁰ This interpretation also reflects a phenomenon that scholars have called the great divergence between China and the West in world economic history.⁵¹ The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 marks the rise of imperialism in East Asia, a regime under which Qing China, too, suffered heavily. Historical narratives along these lines have promoted a Chinese victim mentality and nourished Chinese nationalism in the twentieth century, in particular after the Leninist definition of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism became popular in scholarship.⁵²
Since the second half of the twentieth century, two groups of scholars have questioned and complicated this received wisdom. The first group comprises students of the High Qing (that is, from the Kangxi to the Qianlong period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), who have promulgated the paradigm of New Qing history that is characterized by an Inner Asian and ethnic approach to interpreting the multiethnic and multicultural Qing.⁵³ The second group consists of students of Sino-Korean relations who have depicted Qing China’s policy toward Chosŏn in the late nineteenth century as imperialism. The approach of the first group might be called High Qing imperialism, and that of the second group Late Qing imperialism.
The High Qing imperialism school describes the High Qing as an institutional agent of imperialism, a system of coercive instruments aimed at extending the core area of the empire and keeping the empire functioning. This Qing imperialism manifested itself in geopolitical and global competitions between the Qing, the Mongol khanates and Muslim tribes in Inner Asia, the indigenous and cross-border tribes in southwestern China, the Russian Empire, and the British Empire.⁵⁴ Chinese and European colonialism and capitalism found their place in these intense competitions.⁵⁵ What fundamentally supports this argument of Qing imperialism is the fact of the Qing’s territorial expansion by force, followed by the political and cultural hegemony that it introduced to the newly conquered borderlands. However, if the High Qing was an agent of imperialism, all Chinese regimes that extended China’s borders would fall into the same category, including the Han, the Tang, the Yuan, the Ming, and the People’s Republic of China. In this sense, the thesis of High Qing imperialism risks detaching its interpretations of the Qing Empire from the pre-Qing Chinese historical context and being construed as a complement to Eurocentric narratives of imperialism in the broader context.
The argument of Late Qing imperialism, by contrast, distinguishes the Qing from its predecessors in Chinese history by asserting that the Late Qing exercised imperialism through coercive means characterized by power politics and economic expansion in the late nineteenth century. The leading proponents of this approach concede that the Late Qing was a victim of Western and Japanese imperialism but claim that it simultaneously practiced its own imperialism over weaker countries. This overseas imperialism fits the general definition that historians have drawn from the history of the Roman Empire: an unequal power relationship between two states in which the dominant state exercises various forms of control, often forcibly, over the weaker state.⁵⁶ Whereas the theory of High Qing imperialism does not take the Manchu conquest of Chosŏn in 1637 into consideration and leaves Chosŏn largely off the list of victims of that imperialism, Chosŏn is typically the only identified victim of Late Qing imperialism, which was embodied by activities such as sending troops to Chosŏn and obtaining treaty ports and settlements through unequal treaties that granted the Chinese extraterritoriality. The concept of informal empire, originally coined to refer to the powerful economic expansion of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, provides this argument with further intellectual support.⁵⁷ In retrospect, the argument of Late Qing imperialism bears a remarkable resemblance to the interpretation of China’s behavior in Chosŏn put forward by Western diplomats and observers in the nineteenth century. As M. Frederick Nelson has pointed out, "Under the assumption that China had nothing but a religious and ceremonial connection with Korea, Westerners viewed her growing de facto control of Korea as pure and unjustified power politics directed against an independent state."⁵⁸ By likening the Qing to its Western imperial counterparts, the thesis of Late Qing imperialism homogenizes Qing China as a major participant and a powerful predator in Eurocentric global history, therefore strengthening the approach of interpreting the histories of others with reference to that of the West instead of contextualizing these histories in their local milieus. As this book shows, the Qing activities in Korea in the late nineteenth century were a manifestation not of imperialism, but of Zongfan empiricism.
The argument of Qing imperialism, including both High Qing imperialism and Late Qing imperialism, serves as a normative tool for interpreting the constant changes undergone by China in its various forms. In order to explain those changes, this book renegotiates Qing imperialism by presenting the Qing as an empire that used ideological tools—the Chosŏn model and a set of imperial norms embodied by the model—to establish and consolidate its political authority and
cultural superiority in the Chinese world. What I call Zongfanism in this book can provide us with a different perspective for observing the rise and fall of the Eurasian Chinese empire under the Qing Dynasty and the rise of modern sovereign states in China and its neighboring countries. Zongfanism refers to a Chinese system of political and diplomatic communication conducted between, on the one hand, a political entity that culturally identified itself as the exclusive civilized center of the world, and, on the other hand, the political entities on its periphery that the center considered less civilized or even barbarian. The sovereign of the center possessed absolute patriarchal authority over the monarchs of the subordinate entities, while the two sides enjoyed mutually constitutive legitimacy informed by their shared politico-cultural norms.
Zongfanism transcends the entrenched divide between premodern and modern Chinese history. Historians have generally identified the Opium War of 1839–42 as the twilight of premodern China and the dawn of modern China. Along these lines, the mainstream narrative of Qing China holds that the pre-modern system of China’s foreign relations was incompatible with the modern treaty system, with which it was finally replaced. The principal problem with this paradigm lies not in its Eurocentrism per se (indeed, modern is a criterion rooted in European history) but rather in its neglect of constant factors within China’s foreign policy that bridged the premodern and modern periods without conspicuous changes. In other words, the factors that historians have widely identified as having led to the stagnation of China before it encountered the industrialized West constitute the very key to understanding late imperial China.⁵⁹ The Chinese empire lived with its indigenous norms, not imported ones.
The Zongfan perspective does not aim to replace that of Qing imperialism, nor can it completely account for the Qing’s activities during the high tide of the Manchu conquest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from Manchuria to the Korean peninsula and from Xinjiang to Tibet.⁶⁰ It instead aims to reveal the crucial relationships between the construction and dissemination of imperial ideology from the center to the periphery on the one hand, and imperial top-down statecraft in practice on the other. In the early twenty-first century, China has begun to exploit sophisticated ideas drawn from its recent history to preserve the legitimacy and unity of the multiethnic and multicultural Chinese state and to manage its relations with neighboring countries and the world. In this contemporary context, it may be helpful to examine the trajectory of changes in the Chinese world from an inside perspective, and the following chapters seek to do just that.
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Introduction Day dawned on April 25, 1644, in the seventeenth year of the reign of the Chongzhen emperor of the Ming Dynasty of China. As the first rays of the sun struck the walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing, a large group of rebels stormed the gates. Right before the rebels swarmed the imperial halls, the emperor managed to climb up an artificial hill behind the palace and hang himself from a tree. His loyal servant, a eunuch who had cared for the desperate thirty-three-year-old em- peror since the latter’s birth, hanged himself from another tree. The Ming Dynasty, or the Great Ming, which had governed China for 277 years, came to a sudden end. The Ming’s unexpected demise put one of its generals, Wu Sangui (1612–78), who was fighting on the front lines of an unrelated conflict about 190 miles east of Beijing, in an awkward position. General Wu was defending Shanhai Pass, a strategic military outpost of the Great Wall connecting inner China with Manchuria, in the war with the Qing, a regime founded in 1616 by the nomadic Manchus in Manchuria. The war had lasted for almost three decades, during which the Manchus had decisively defeated the Ming troops in Manchuria, subordinated neighboring Mongol tribes, and conquered the Chosŏn Dynasty of Korea, a loyal tributary state of China. Shanhai Pass became the last fortification preventing the formidable barbarians, as both Ming Chinese and Chosŏn Koreans regarded the Manchus, from entering inner China. As Beijing fell into the rebels’ hands, General Wu lost his country overnight. In Manchuria, the Manchu emperor seized the opportunity to send his troops under the leadership of Prince Dorgon (1612–50) to the outskirts of Shanhai Pass, where the army waited to cross the Great Wall to enter inner China. Meanwhile, the rebels in Beijing began to march toward the pass, with General Wu’s father as a hostage, in order to annihilate Wu. In this life- or-death situation, Wu chose the Manchus as his allies. He opened the giant gate to allow the Manchu forces to pass through the Great Wall and help him defeat the rebels. Among those who entered the pass along with the Manchu forces was the crown prince of Chosŏn Korea. The prince had been living with the Manchus for seven years, since 1637, when the Manchus had conquered Chosŏn and taken him and his younger brother hostage.¹ The guardians of the pass, General Wu’s army, also included people of Korean origin. Among them was a young Korean officer, Ch’oe Hyo-il, who had joined General Wu’s anti-Manchu fight after 1627, when the Manchus first invaded Chosŏn. Ch’oe was not to live long, but he did not die at the hands of the Manchu conquerors. On June 6, 1644, the Manchus took over Beijing without a fight. In a hall standing amid the debris of the Forbidden City, which had been burned by the rebels, Prince Dorgon accepted the ca- pitulation of the Chinese officials of the Ming, witnessed by the Korean crown prince. Ch’oe, however, refused to prostrate himself in front of the Manchu prince, who in his mind was a barbarian. Instead, dressed in a Ming-style robe, he went to Chongzhen’s tomb to mourn for the Ming—the civilized Middle Kingdom, or Zhongguo in Chinese. Ch’oe died near the tomb after a seven-day hunger strike. General Wu buried his body and commemorated him in an elegy.² A Korean subject, Ch’oe died not only for the Chinese emperor but also for a civilization embodied by the Chinese dynasty and his homeland. Yet when he sacrificed himself, he did not realize that the Manchu regime was transforming itself by embracing the ideological, political, and cultural norms of the same civi- lization. More importantly, before it crossed the Great Wall in 1644, the Qing had begun to use its hierarchical relationship with Chosŏn to fashion itself as the civilized center of the world. As history unfolded, this relationship lasted for 258 years until the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, and it continued to exert a strong influence over China and Korea thereafter. From the early seventeenth to the early twentieth century, the Qing used its relationship with Chosŏn as an ideo- logical tool to consolidate its identity as the Middle Kingdom and to manage its relations with other neighboring countries and the newly conquered polities that stretched from Manchuria and the Mongol steppe to Turkestan and the Himalayas. By the time the Eurasian empire fell apart in 1911, Qing China had evolved into a multiethnic and multicultural modern state, providing a solid foundation for state building in the rest of the twentieth century. Among the factors that helped the
Qing remake the Chinese empire, what stood out in particular were the politico-cultural discourse and imperial norms drawn from the Manchu-Korean contacts. These took place within a hierarchical framework I call Zongfan, a term I will explain below. The microhistory of Manchu-Korean relations vividly reflects the macrohistory of China’s transformation during the course of the three centuries, making Sino-Korean relations distinct from China’s relations with other coun- tries. This book reveals the development of China from an empire into a modern state through the lens of the dynamics of Sino-Korean political relations from 1616 to 1911. It incorporates Chosŏn Korea into the historical narrative of Qing China by examining the high politics of the two countries. The book shows that the Manchu regime used its constant relations with Chosŏn to establish, legitimize, consolidate, and present its identity as the civilized center of the known world, as a cosmopolitan empire, and as a modern sovereign state. By employing a long-term historical and cross-border perspective to observe the bilateral relationship, this book casts new light on the rise and inner changes of the Chinese empire during the Qing period, the clashes between the Chinese foreign-relations system and its Western counterpart, and the formation of modern sovereign states in East Asia. Revitalizing the Concept of Zongfan in the Narrative of Late Imperial China I use the Chinese term Zongfan, or in some cases the English phrase “Chinese world order,” rather than the oft-adopted English translation “tributary,” to refer to the nature of the hierarchical relationship between late imperial China and its subordinate countries, which included Korea. I reserve the term “tributary” for re- lated aspects of this system.³ “Late imperial China” in this book refers to China from 1368 to 1911, namely, the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing periods following the collapse of the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) of the Mongol Empire. As I argue below, the Zongfan system was central to establishing the political orthodox legit- imacy of China and its subordinate countries. As a key concept of Confucianism, political orthodox legitimacy (Ch., Zhengtong) refers to the universal ideological, moral, cultural, and social rationale behind the legitimate status of a political entity in the hierarchy of the Chinese world. In late imperial times, this legitimacy en- tailed “name and status” (Ch., mingfen) and “great unification” (Ch., da yitong) and found its dedicated audience in the ruling elites and Confucian scholars of Ming and Qing China, Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910), and Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868).⁴ As a politico-cultural structure, the Zongfan system is believed to have been established in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). It was associated with the kinship-based feudal system (Ch., zongfa fengjian) of the day. This system was practiced between two sides, Zong and fan. Zong refers to the royal lineage of the Chinese monarch, who claimed to be the “Son of Heaven” (Ch., tianzi) residing in the Middle Kingdom with absolute patriarchal authority and exclusive orthodox legitimacy as the human agent of the “Mandate of Heaven” (Ch., tianming). Fan originally meant the clan(s) of the royal family who established outposts on Chi- na’s borders, where the rulers’ legitimacy was dependent on investiture by the Son of Heaven. The two sides of the kinship constituted the familistic hierarchy and the order of “all-under-Heaven” (Ch., tianxia)—the known universe to the people within this political entity.⁵ The connotation of China’s periphery evolved within this feudalistic model by incorporating all countries or polities outside China into the category of fan. Ac- cording to the ideal tenets, on a regular basis the fan dispatched emissaries, “ministers of ministers” (Ch., peichen), bearing taxes or tribute to the central court, where they would offer appropriate obedience to the Son of Heaven and receive largesse or gifts. In return, the court would not only send envoys to the fan to in- vest the rulers with legitimate titles but also protect the fan whenever necessary. This reciprocity was the foundation of the double policy of “serving the great” (Ch., shida) and “cherishing the small” (Ch., zixiao). The exchanges of emissaries following ritual codes dictated by the Middle Kingdom kept the Zongfan system running. This model later evolved into the basic philosophy of the foreign policy of late imperial China.⁶ In addition to being defined by its geographical distance from the central court, the fan could also be characterized in kinship terms as inner fan and outer fan.
The inner fan maintained a strong blood relationship with the emperor, but the outer fan did not. In the case of Korea, the situation was complex. The imperial norms of the successive Chinese dynasties preferred to ascribe the beginning of Sino-Korean kinship to Jizi (K., Kija), a royal member of the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600–1046 BC) who was believed to have been invested by the Western Zhou court with the lands of ancient Chosŏn. This legend produced an assumption of a unique cultural homogeneity that the Chinese side deeply endorsed and that helped unified Chinese dynasties see Korea as belonging within China’s territorial perimeter.⁷ The Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) and the Tang Dynasty (618–907) invaded Korea and integrated parts of the Korean lands into China. In the 1260s the Mongol forces of the Yuan Dynasty gradually came to control the Koryŏ Dynasty of Korea (918–1392), and in the 1270s the Mongol court invested King Ch’ungnyŏl (r. 1274–1308), who married the Princess of Qi of Kublai Khan, as the consort of the imperial princess and the king of Koryŏ (K., Puma Koryŏ kugwang).⁸ After the Ming overthrew the Yuan, it ceased practicing the Yuan’s policy toward Koryŏ, which had been based on strong personal ties between the Mongol and Korean courts through state marriage. After its establishment in 1368, the Ming followed the feudal principles of the Zhou Dynasty and the Zongfan practice of the Yuan in establishing the Zongfan system within its domain, but it had no desire to extend the system to Koryŏ. The founding father of the new dynasty claimed that Ming China would never invade Koryŏ or fourteen other neighboring countries. In 1392 a new Korean regime replaced Koryŏ and immediately sent emissaries to China to pursue imperial investi- ture of the kingship. Although the Ming conferred the title “Chosŏn” on the new regime, after Jizi Chosŏn, it did not endow the Korean king with investiture until 1401, when Emperor Jianwen (r. 1399–1402) invested the third king of Chosŏn (T’aejong, r. 1400–1418), formally extending the Zongfan arrangement to the king- dom. In the imperial mandate, the Ming underlined that the king should serve as a fence of the civilized kingdom and “assist China forever” (Ch., yongfu yu Zhongguo).⁹ In 1403 Emperor Yongle (r. 1402–24) awarded the same king an official robe commensurate with the rank of first-degree prince (Ch., qinwang, a brother of the emperor), further integrating Chosŏn into the Ming Zongfan system.¹⁰ In the transition from the Yuan-Koryŏ relationship to the Ming-Chosŏn one, the Ming made a consequential shift in China’s policy toward Korea: China allowed Korea independence as a foreign country in practice, but it continued to regulate the bilateral relationship with reference to Zongfan norms in the domestic feudal sense and on the ideological level. In the familistic and culturally homogeneous Zongfan context, the Ming depicted Chosŏn as an outer fan descending from Jizi, while Chosŏn identified itself as a “vassal” (K., chehu; Ch., zhuhou) of the Ming court and viewed their relationship in father-son and monarch-subordinate terms.¹¹ Simultaneously, Neo-Confucianism (K., Chŏngju hak), which celebrated Confucian social hierarchy, had become the ruling ideology during the Yuan Dy- nasty, and had lately been introduced to Korea, helping to institutionalize and stabilize this bilateral relationship.¹² After the Ming rescued Chosŏn from a Japa- nese invasion in the 1590s, Chosŏn became even more committed to the Ming, regarding the Ming as its “parent nation” (K., pumo chi pang).¹³ This arrangement seemed similar to the feudalism practiced in medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan, but as a cross-border framework it possessed features unique to the Confu- cianism-sup-port- Chinese world. As part 2 of this book demonstrates, in the nineteenth century the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship built on these features confused European and Japanese diplomats, who could not find historical precedents for it within their own worlds. However, as scholars have pointed out, applying the Ming-Chosŏn hierarchical relationship to Sino-Korean contacts or China’s foreign relations before 1400 would be ahistorical.¹⁴ The Qing inherited the Ming Zongfan mechanism in its contacts with Chosŏn, but the Manchus’ kinship relations with Mongol tribes complicated the outer fan spectrum of the empire. This point is illustrated by the multilayered nature of the outer fan and the varied usage of the term in Qing political discourse, partic- ularly in referring to political entities within the Qing pilgrimage system (Ch., chaojin) and to countries in Southeast Asia, such as Siam (Thailand).¹⁵ The Manchu court nevertheless understood Chosŏn and other subordinate entities as members of the Qing-centric family, in which the position of these entities was similar or
even equal to that of their Mongol counterparts.¹⁶ As the Ministry of Rites (Ch., Libu) described it to the Qianlong emperor in 1768 in the context of investing the Korean king’s grandson as the successor to the throne, “The outer fan are the same as Zongfan in terms of their relations with the central court” (Ch., Waifan zhi yu zongfan, shi shu xiangtong). Similarly, in 1790 the Qianlong emperor awarded the Vietnamese king, Nguyễn Huệ (r. 1788–92), a golden leather belt that only Zongfan of the royal family could use.¹⁷ The term “Zongfan” aptly encapsulates the relationship between the center/patriarch and the periphery/family members during the Qing period, and for this reason I have revitalized it in this book. Reinterpreting the Rise of the Modern Chinese State through the Lens of Qing-Chosŏn Relations The involvement of Chosŏn in the Ming-Qing war led to two fierce Manchu invasions of the country in 1627 and 1636. After conquering Chosŏn in early 1637, the Qing established a Zongfan relationship with it by replacing the Ming in the patriarchal position. Scholars have widely regarded Sino-Korean relations in China’s late imperial period as the quintessential manifestation of the Sinocentric order.¹⁸ Some scholars have tended to attribute the uniqueness of the relationship to the parties’ shared Confucian culture, especially Neo-Confucianism, while others have preferred to emphasize China’s political or military influence or control in the hegemonic sense.¹⁹ This book embraces the cultural perspective, but it simultaneously underlines the significant effect that the Manchu use of violence had on the establishment and maintenance of Qing-Chosŏn ties in the early seventeenth century. More importantly, I avoid enshrining the Qing-Chosŏn relationship in the pantheon of Chinese narratives of Sino-Korean relations since the Western Zhou, and I refrain from conflating the Qing-Chosŏn relationship with that be- tween the Ming and Chosŏn. Rather, I explore the unique and crucial role of these bonds in providing the Qing with the political, intellectual, and ideological sources with which it reconstructed itself and the Chinese empire and eventually gave birth to a modern Chinese state. A key term in analyzing the Sinocentric hierarchical arrangement between Qing China and other countries imagined in Qing imperial discourse is yi. Like so many abstract terms in Chinese (or indeed any language), its meaning varies according to context, but I have generally translated it as “barbarians.” As the fol- lowing chapters show, yi, which was often used to describe outsiders in Sino-foreign contacts, did not necessarily carry a pejorative connotation. I also demon- strate a change in the meaning of yi from the perspective of the Manchu regime. The story of the Qing-Chosŏn relationship unfolds within the broader process of the Qing’s efforts to meet the unprecedented challenge of proving its orthodox legitimacy in the politico-cultural setting of the “civilized vs. barbarian distinction” (Ch., Hua–Yi zhi bian; K., Hwa–I ŭi chai).²⁰ It was against the background of this civilized–barbarian dichotomy that the Korean warrior Ch’oi sacrificed himself in Manchu-occupied Beijing, and it was in light of this distinction that his homeland strengthened its identity as “Little China” (K., So Chunghwa) in the post-Ming era, while the Qing positioned itself within the pedigree of the Middle Kingdom as the civilized center and the “Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao). The establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship in 1637 was a watershed event in the history of the Qing’s prodigious enterprise of redefining itself and remaking the Chinese world. Scholars have commonly dated the Ming-Qing transition to the Manchu occupation of Beijing in 1644, but the Manchu regime in fact had initiated its bid for status as the Middle Kingdom at least a decade earlier, by employing the politico-cultural discourse embedded in the Zongfan struc- ture. After 1637, the Qing progressively converted Chosŏn into a prototypical “outer subordinate,” known as waifan (outer fan) or shuguo (subordinate country) in the Chinese language and tulergi gurun (outer country) or harangga gurun (subordinate country) in the Manchu language. Very significantly, the Qing imperial terms abruptly reversed the Manchu-Korean hierarchical arrangement in the Ming period by portraying Chosŏn as a country of barbarians on the periphery of the Qing. In its frequent contacts with Chosŏn from 1637 to 1643, the Qing strengthened the new bilateral political arrangement and developed a mature model for man- aging its relations with other newly conquered or subordinated entities. I call this model the “Chosŏn model” (Ch., Chaoxian shili, lit. “Korean cases/examples”).
As part 1 explains, the model constituted a pattern by which a country or a political entity could follow Chosŏn into the Qing-centric Zongfan system primarily by receiving imperial investitures from the Qing, adopting the regnal titles and calendar of the Qing, and sending emissaries and tribute to the Qing on a regular basis. The idea behind this model was to encourage outlying regions to embrace the Qing as the civilized center of the world and to affirm its supreme political and cultural position. After 1644, as the Qing continued its conquest of inner China by marching west and southwest, it used the Chosŏn model as a handy soft- power weapon to manage its political relations with other entities and to consolidate its new identification as the center of all-under-Heaven. The Qing-Chosŏn hierarchy was far more than just the final chapter in the long Sino-Korean Zongfan history. Rather, it buttressed the rationale of the entire Zongfan system by keeping the periphery of the Chinese empire informed and regulated while the Manchu regime controlled and remade the empire at the core. The Qing’s dynamic relations with its first Confucian outer fan—Chosŏn—played a vital role in establishing, institutionalizing, and nourishing the entire Qing- centric system of foreign relations. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Qing had constructed a new imperial order within and beyond its Eurasian empire. It had simultaneously labeled Britain and other European states “countries of barbarians” and posited them on the periphery of China. These states, however, changed their status vis-à-vis China through gunboat diplomacy and treaties in the nineteenth century, when they encountered the Chinese world through such outer fan as Annam (Vietnam), Ryukyu, and Chosŏn. The introduction, translation, and dissemination of international law in the Chinese world put China, China’s outer fan, and the European states on an equal footing in terms of their state sovereignty. Nevertheless, the relationship between Qing China and its outer fan re- mained unchanged until the very end of the nineteenth century in that they still needed each other to acquire mutually constitutive and mutually defined orthodox legitimacy in their own world. What confused the Western states in their contacts with the outer fan of China in the late nineteenth century was the nebulous nature of the Zongfan mech- anism that constantly shunted them into perplexing negotiations with Beijing, the only place where diplomacy with outsiders could be conducted in accordance with Zongfan conventions. The disputes emerging at the periphery of China were thus transferred to the center of the empire, where they converged as an ac- cumulative force to trigger certain reforms within China that in turn spread to and deeply influenced the periphery. Although this model may seem similar to con- temporary relationships between European powers and their overseas colonies, it had a fundamentally different structure, as later sections and chapters will elab- orate. The most typical case among the manifold and interwoven disputes regarding this mechanism arose in Chosŏn Korea. The political and diplomatic conundrum of the international status of Chosŏn led the Qing and Chosŏn into legal quagmires and prompted both sides to mod- ify their time-honored relations in the context of both the inner and the outer dual networks, as chapters 5 and 6 explain. But the various adjustments made to the relationship on both sides in the chaotic decade of the 1880s kept the Zongfan fundamentals untouched, as neither side could overcome the ideological dilemma caused by their mutually constitutive legitimacy at the level of high politics in the Confucian world. This double bind meant that colonizing Chosŏn was not an option for China in the turbulent period before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894. The growing controversy between China, Korea, Japan, and Western states finally resulted in the termination of the Sino-Korean Zongfan relationship in 1895. Accordingly, the cosmopolitan Chinese empire withdrew its political and cultural reach from its subordinate countries and became identical with the Chinese state defined by the norms of international law. After the war, China and Korea negotiated a new treaty for an equal state-to-state relationship, but the new arrangement lasted only a few years before both the Chosŏn Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty ceased to exist in 1910 and 1911, respectively. This book describes the trajectory of this varied relationship and shows its significance for the devel- opment of modern China and East Asia. Revisiting the Chinese Empire under the Qing
This book defines the Qing as an empire and as a Chinese empire. As I explain below, this empire included Chosŏn in a politico-cultural sense. The term “empire” as a European concept that was always traced back to the Romans did not exist in the Chinese political lexicon until 1895, when the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Shi- monoseki addressed the Qing as the “Great Qing Empire” in Chinese characters (Da Qing diguo), as a counterpart to the “Great Japanese Empire” (Dai Nippon teikoku).²¹ None of the ruling dynasties before the end of the Qing ever claimed to hold an empire, either in Chinese or, when the ruling house was not Han Chi- nese, in any other language. Even nowadays, describing a Chinese dynasty as an empire remains rare among historians in China. Nevertheless, if we define an em- pire broadly as a political entity in which different peoples are governed differently, Chinese history from 221 BC, when the Qin Dynasty (221–207 BC) unified China as a multiethnic polity, to the present is clearly a history of empires.²² In this book, the Chinese empire (Ch., Zhonghua diguo) refers to a multiethnic and multicultural polity in which the Middle Kingdom represented the political and cultural core against the background of the civilized–barbarian distinction and for which the concepts of “Mandate of Heaven” and “all-under-Heaven” served as constitutional ideologies to establish its political orthodox legitimacy and Confu- cian orthodox legitimacy (Ch., daotong). This definition may not fit all the dynasties that claimed the name of the Middle Kingdom, because, as R. Bin Wong ob- serves, “the ideas and institutions of this empire were neither constant over time nor uniform through space.”²³ But it applies to the dynasties in Chinese history such as the Tang, the Northern and Southern Song (960–1279), the Liao (907–1125), the Xixia (1038–1227), the Jin (1115–1234), the Yuan, the Ming, and the Qing. The Manchu ethnicity of the imperial house was not a barrier to the Qing’s presentation of itself as a Chinese empire, in particular after 1644, when the term “Chinese” (Ch., Zhongguo ren) took on a multiethnic character. The Qing had presented itself as a Chinese empire as early as 1689 in the Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia. The original treaty text, written in Latin by the French Jesuit Jean-François Gerbillon (1654–1707), who was serving the Manchu court, called the Qing Sinicum Imperium (Chinese Empire) as a counterpart to Ruthenicum Imperium (Russian Empire). The French version of the treaty rendered the term as l’Empire de la Chine (Empire of China) as a counterpart to l’Empire de Moscovie (Empire of Muscovy).²⁴ In the Manchu translation of the treaty, the Qing court used the term Dulimbai gurun to define itself as China/Zhongguo; this term is equivalent to “Chinese Empire” in the other versions of the text.²⁵ When “Chinese” became a multiethnic descriptor, the Qing also became the representative of Chinese culture, in particular the Confucianism that lay at the core of imperial political discourse. In 1712 Emperor Kangxi instructed the Manchu official Tulišen (1667–1740), an envoy to the Turgūt Mongols in Russia, that if the “khan of Russia” (Ma., Cagan han) asked what was esteemed in China, Tulišen should respond that “our country takes fidelity, filial piety, benevolence, jus- tice, and sincerity as fundamentals.”²⁶ All of these concepts came from Confucianism, not from Manchu ideologies. After all, it was this Confucian identity and politico-cultural discourse informed by Confucianism, not the Qing’s Manchu characteristics or its realpolitik practiced along the newly conquered frontiers in Inner Asia, that determined the Qing’s political orthodox legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom and enabled it to obtain and justify Confucian orthodox legitimacy. This Confucian identity on the state level later helped the Qing display its Chineseness and win strong support from Han Chinese scholars, who assisted the dy- nasty in weathering the storm of anti-Manchu rebellions in the nineteenth century. This book broadly defines “Chineseness” as the state of being the legitimate Middle Kingdom, thus referring to statecraft, not ethnicity. I interpret the Chinese empire under the Qing in two dimensions: the territorial empire and the politico-cultural empire. The territorial Chinese empire was equal to the Great Qing, composed primarily of the Manchu court, the inner provinces (Ch., zhisheng, “directly controlled provinces”), and the first group of outer fan, which were under the management of the central institution of Lifan yuan. These outer fan included regions and groups such as the Cahar Mongols, Tibet, and Mongol and Muslim tribes in Xinjiang. The Chinese name Lifan yuan means “the ministry of managing the affairs of the fan,” and it differs from the organization’s Manchu name, Tulergi golo be dasara jurgan, which means “the institution in charge of the outer provinces.” Scholars have generally translated it as “Court of
Colonial Affairs” or “Mongolian Superintendency.” This book adopts the latter rendering. The politico-cultural Chinese empire encompassed not only these polit- ical entities but also the second group of outer fan, whose contacts with China took place via the Ministry of Rites and whose shared characteristic was their iden- tification of the Son of Heaven in China as the highest sovereign in the world (see figure I.1).
FIGURE I.1. The structure of the Chinese empire during the Qing. A = the court; B = inner provinces; C = outer fan under the Mongolian Superintendency (MS); D = outer fan under the Ministry of Rites (MOR), primarily Chosŏn, Ryukyu, and Annam; E = Western countries listed by the Qing as outer fan; AB = inner China, or China proper; ABC = the Great Qing, or the territorial Chinese empire; ABCD = the politico-cultural Chinese empire; ABCDE = all-under-Heaven. Three key issues in the relationship between China and its outer fan within the politico-cultural Chinese empire invite elaboration: sovereignty, borders, and subjects. These issues were woven together in imperial times by the cosmopolitan idea of all-under-Heaven and were critically questioned within the context of the nation-state order of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. China, or Zhongguo, had historically always been mutually defined by its relations with the countries on its periphery—that is, by a combination of the country’s own perception of itself and the devotion of its neighbors to Chinese civilization. The nebu- lous dual nature of China’s identity posed a challenge to Chinese scholars who sought to define China anew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by comparing it to European states. These scholars could not find an established and consistent name for their homeland in history. For example, Huang Zunxian (1848–1905), a distinguished diplomat and scholar, reviewed the conventional civilized–barbarian discourse and preferred to call China the “central civilized country” (Ch., Huaxia). In his treatise exploring the reasons for China’s weakness, Liang Qichao (1873–1929), an intellectual leader of China’s modernization, pointed out that for a long time the Chinese had seen no difference between “state” and “all-under-Heaven” or between “state” and “court.”²⁷ Huang’s and Liang’s arguments reflected the cosmopolitan nature of the Chinese world, in which sovereignty, borders, and subjects manifested themselves in ways distinct from those of its Western counterpart. The nature of the sovereignty of an outer fan in the Chinese world was twofold: it was fully independent in terms of the territorial Chinese empire but fully dependent in relation to the politico-cultural Chinese empire. An outer fan enjoyed the right of independence, that is, autonomy or self-rule—zizhu in Chinese— within its boundaries. As Jean-Baptiste Grosier (1743–1823) in the 1780s and George N. Curzon (1859–1925) in the 1890s observed, the king of Chosŏn was an independent and supreme sovereign in his own lands.²⁸ The kings of the Nguyễn Dynasty (1802–1945) of Vietnam went even further, claiming to be “emperors” and calling Vietnam the “Middle Kingdom” in the first half of the nineteenth century.²⁹ The kingship of the fan, however, was ultimately subjugated to the emper- orship of China. As demonstrated by Emperor Qianlong’s deposition of the king of Vietnam, Lê Duy Kỳ (1765–93), and his investment of a new king in 1789, the emperor possessed absolute patriarchal power over the kings. This was particularly true for the Confucian kingship of Chosŏn.³⁰ What determined this rela- tionship was not China’s military power or geopolitical gravity or its “suzerainty,” as Western and Japanese diplomats understood it in the nineteenth century, but the mutually constitutive legitimacy of each side of the bilateral arrangement that was undergirded by Zongfan tenets and Confucian ethos. As a consequence, in the 1830s and the 1870s, the king of Chosŏn refused to negotiate with Western representatives on the grounds that “subordinates of a fan have no right to con- duct diplomacy” (Ch., fanchen wu waijiao).³¹ Vietnam adhered to the same ideology until the early 1880s.³² Within this system, a Korean king did not have his own regnal title during his lifetime but gained a posthumous title or temple name, which is why I tend to refer to Korean kings as, simply, “the king,” or to use their names (“Yi Chong,” for example) rather than their temple names (“Injo,” Yi Chong’s temple name). Although the awarding of temple names to the kings could suggest a portrayal of Korea as independent of China in an abstract sense and in an intellectual sense, in practice China’s patriarchal and divine imperial power was always real and effective.³³ The differences between peoples on either side of the borders that separated Qing China and its outer fan were clear, but these distinctions were not translated into the language of nation-states, as illustrated by the Qing’s cartographic survey in the Kangxi period and the Qing’s juridical negotiations with Annam and Chosŏn over legal cases.³⁴ The territorial border between China and the outer fan could be diluted and blurred by the shared ideology of all-under-Heaven within
the Zongfan framework. In this cultural context, the Qing court treated fan such as Chosŏn as a part—even an indispensable part—of the “imperial dynasty” (Ch., huangchao) or the “Heavenly Dynasty.” For the most part, scholars do not consider countries such as Chosŏn to have been components of the Chinese empire during the Qing. This view results from the dissemination of nationalist historiography in East Asia since the late nineteenth century and cleaves closely to a terri- torial definition of the Chinese empire. The Chinese empire as a politico-cultural unit, however, encompassed its outer fan beyond China’s borders, where China’s centrality was further constructed by local manifestations of the divine authority of the Chinese sovereign. Believing that all lands of the outer fan were under his rule in this sense, Emperor Yongzheng demarcated a new border with Annam in 1727 that allowed Annam to extend its territory 12.45 miles (40 Chinese li) farther into China in order to end the territorial disputes between the two sides. Chosŏn never ceased trying to redraw its borders, as reflected in its prolonged negotiations with China over border demarcation in the Tumen River area from the 1710s to the 1880s, yet the Korean court had endorsed the Chinese imperial discourse of all-under-Heaven since the Ming period.³⁵ In 1593, for example, the king of Chosŏn (Sŏnjo, r. 1567–1608) claimed that Chosŏn was a vassal (K., chehu) of China and had been regarded by the Chinese dynasties as an “inner subor- dinate” (K., naebok; Ch., neifu) since Jizi. The king further emphasized that Chosŏn “is actually China’s land and China lets our country manage it.”³⁶ In the 1730s the Qing historians in History of the Ming commented that “Chosŏn was the Ming’s subordinate country, but it was not different from an inner part of China [Ch., yunei].”³⁷ The position of Chosŏn as part of the Chinese empire remained unchanged during the Qing in terms of imperial norms. In 1784 and 1788, Emperor Qianlong noted that Korea was almost the peer of the Qing’s “inner subordinates.”³⁸ In the rituals that marked imperial edicts, the Qing imperial ritual code made it clear that the local officials of Chosŏn should perform the same rituals as did “those in directly controlled provinces” (Ch., ru zhisheng zhi yi).³⁹ Another indicator of Chosŏn’s position was the annual calendar of the Qing (Ch., Shixian li or Shixian shu; Ma., Erin forgon i ton i bithe), issued every year by the Imperial Astronomical Bureau (Ch., Qintian jian; Ma., Abka be ginggulere yamun), which Korean emissaries had to retrieve from Beijing. The calendar included charts of the sunrise and sunset times and charts of the solar terms in “each province” (Ch., gesheng; Ma., yaya golo) and “each Mongol and Muslim tribe” (Ch., ge menggu huibu; Ma., geren monggo be, hoise i aiman) under Qing jurisdiction. From 1645, when the Qing inaugurated the calendar, Chosŏn was included in the list of inner provinces such as Shanxi and Shandong and later showed up alongside Mukden, Nerchinsk (Ma., Nibcu), Sanxing (Ma., Ilan hala), Bodune (Ma., Bedune), Heilongjiang (Ma., Sahaliyan ula), and Jilin. Following Chosŏn, Annam was added to the lists in 1789 and Ryukyu in 1810.⁴⁰ As Johan Elverskog has pointed out, “A fundamental role of the emperor was to control the flow of time properly by creating the calendar and propitiating its cultural force through ritual and ceremony.”⁴¹ Many maps of the known world produced by the cartographers of the Qing and Chosŏn in the eighteenth century, such as the Huangyu quanlan tu (Map of a complete view of the imperial lands, known as the Kangxi Atlas), also presented and substantiated this cosmopolitan ideology by including Chosŏn as part of the empire.⁴² The Qing thus subtly but unmistakably incorporated the group of outer fan into the Chinese empire. Cosmopolitan ideas strongly shaped the Qing’s understanding of the subjects within and beyond its borders, even after international law reached China in the 1860s. In 1643, for instance, the Qing emphasized to Chosŏn that “the two countries have become one family” (Ch., liangguo yijia) and that “the people of Chosŏn are also ours.”⁴³ In 1882, when the Chinese governors in Manchuria reported to Beijing that many poor Korean peasants had crossed the border to cultivate Chi- nese lands, Emperor Guangxu noted, “In the eyes of the local officials, there is certainly a line between them and us [Ch., bici zhi fen], but in the eyes of the court, there is originally no difference between the inside and the outside [Ch., neiwai zhi bie].”⁴⁴ A group of Korean students learning Western technologies in Tianjin in 1882 were also treated by Chinese officials as “loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao zhi chizi) and were granted free tuition.⁴⁵ In 1886 the Guangxu emperor emphasized that Chosŏn was close to Beijing and had “no particular difference from other provinces in the inner land” (Ch., you yu neidi
xingsheng wuyi).⁴⁶ For Qing China, Chosŏn was equal to a “domestic subordinate” (Ch., neichen), which might have been the impetus behind the proposals made by a large number of Chinese officials in the 1880s to convert Chosŏn into “prefectures and counties” of China—an approach I call “provincialization”—in order to save “our Chosŏn” (Ch., wo Chaoxian). Within the Zongfan framework, these factors—sovereignty, borders, and subjects—were not complex issues between Qing China and its outer fan. But when international law and the norms embedded in it, such as sovereignty and suzerainty, reached East Asia in the 1860s and acted as a catalyst for the independence (Ch., duli; K., t’ŭngnip; J., dokuritsu) of the outer fan, these issues became controversial and began to be reconsidered and redefined in accordance with the im- ported legal terms in both China and its outer fan. Nevertheless, as part 2 of this book shows, the politico-cultural Chinese empire connecting the Middle King- dom and its outer fan remained unchanged at that time, because international law could not endow the two sides with the necessary political orthodox legitimacy. What drew China into the wars with France in Vietnam in 1883 and with Japan in Chosŏn in 1894, therefore, was not the territorial Chinese empire but the politi- co-cul-tural one. Similarly, what Japan defeated in 1895 was the tangible former rather than the invisible latter. In this regard, this book reveals the complexity of the dual presentation of the Chinese empire under the Qing, in particular in the late nineteenth century, when China and Korea tried to deliver a legal definition of their relationship to Japan and Western states. After 1895 the politico-cultural empire began to draw back from its extended frontier in its subordinate countries to China’s geographical borders, eventually becoming identical to the territorial empire. Through the decline of the politico-cultural empire emerged a modern Chi- nese state. In his study of empires and states, Frederick Cooper argued that “France only became a nation-state in 1962, when it gave up the last vital element of its impe- rial structure, Algeria.”⁴⁷ Although China is not France and Korea is not Algeria, Korea had served for centuries as a key part of the politico-cultural Chinese em- pire, and under the Qing it acted as an “outlying province” of the empire in the Qing imperial norms.⁴⁸ It is thus not an exaggeration to say that China became a modern nation-state only once it recognized the absolute independence and sovereignty of the Korean state after World War II, especially after the Korean War in the 1950s. It was also in the 1950s that the People’s Republic of China officially endorsed the independence of the Mongolian People’s Republic, which had been part of the Chinese empire under the Qing, while at the same time integrating the northwestern region of the empire—Xinjiang and Tibet—into the territory of New China. At that point, the Korean side finally accomplished the prolonged process of decentering China and became equal to its Chinese counterpart.⁴⁹ Within this conceptual framework, this book traces the historical process through which both China and Korea detached themselves from the Chinese empire and moved toward modern state building in the postimperial era. Renegotiating Qing Imperialism Scholars of China and East Asia have commonly identified imperialism (Ch., Diguo zhuyi) with the West or Japan. As a concept, imperialism refers to a system that was underpinned by a series of aggressive political, economic, or diplomatic policies carried out by Western and Japanese powers against other states. Through these policies, the imperial powers attempted to reap the highest possible profits from the countries they subjugated via unequal treaties, while com- peting with each other for primacy. Imperialism is thus seen as a holdover of Western capitalism (Ch., Ziben zhuyi) and colonialism (Ch., Zhimin zhuyi) that reached the Chinese world aggressively after 1800.⁵⁰ This interpretation also reflects a phenomenon that scholars have called the “great divergence” between China and the West in world economic history.⁵¹ The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 marks the rise of imperialism in East Asia, a regime under which Qing China, too, suffered heavily. Historical narratives along these lines have promoted a Chinese victim mentality and nourished Chinese nationalism in the twentieth cen- tury, in particular after the Leninist definition of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism became popular in scholarship.⁵²
Since the second half of the twentieth century, two groups of scholars have questioned and complicated this received wisdom. The first group comprises stu- dents of the High Qing (that is, from the Kangxi to the Qianlong period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), who have promulgated the paradigm of “New Qing history” that is characterized by an Inner Asian and ethnic approach to interpreting the multiethnic and multicultural Qing.⁵³ The second group con- sists of students of Sino-Korean relations who have depicted Qing China’s policy toward Chosŏn in the late nineteenth century as imperialism. The approach of the first group might be called “High Qing imperialism,” and that of the second group “Late Qing imperialism.” The High Qing imperialism school describes the High Qing as an institutional agent of imperialism, a system of coercive instruments aimed at extending the core area of the empire and keeping the empire functioning. This Qing imperialism manifested itself in geopolitical and global competitions between the Qing, the Mongol khanates and Muslim tribes in Inner Asia, the indigenous and cross-border tribes in southwestern China, the Russian Empire, and the British Empire.⁵⁴ Chinese and European colonialism and capitalism found their place in these intense competitions.⁵⁵ What fundamentally supports this argument of Qing imperi- alism is the fact of the Qing’s territorial expansion by force, followed by the political and cultural hegemony that it introduced to the newly conquered borderlands. However, if the High Qing was an agent of imperialism, all Chinese regimes that extended China’s borders would fall into the same category, including the Han, the Tang, the Yuan, the Ming, and the People’s Republic of China. In this sense, the thesis of High Qing imperialism risks detaching its interpretations of the Qing Empire from the pre-Qing Chinese historical context and being construed as a complement to Eurocentric narratives of imperialism in the broader context. The argument of Late Qing imperialism, by contrast, distinguishes the Qing from its predecessors in Chinese history by asserting that the Late Qing exercised imperialism through coercive means characterized by power politics and economic expansion in the late nineteenth century. The leading proponents of this ap- proach concede that the Late Qing was a victim of Western and Japanese imperialism but claim that it simultaneously practiced its own imperialism over weaker countries. This overseas imperialism fits the general definition that historians have drawn from the history of the Roman Empire: “an unequal power relationship between two states in which the dominant state exercises various forms of control, often forcibly, over the weaker state.”⁵⁶ Whereas the theory of High Qing im- perialism does not take the Manchu conquest of Chosŏn in 1637 into consideration and leaves Chosŏn largely off the list of victims of that imperialism, Chosŏn is typically the only identified victim of Late Qing imperialism, which was embodied by activities such as sending troops to Chosŏn and obtaining treaty ports and settlements through unequal treaties that granted the Chinese extraterritoriality. The concept of “informal empire,” originally coined to refer to the powerful eco- nomic expansion of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, provides this argument with further intellectual support.⁵⁷ In retrospect, the argument of Late Qing imperialism bears a remarkable resemblance to the interpretation of China’s behavior in Chosŏn put forward by Western diplomats and observers in the nineteenth century. As M. Frederick Nelson has pointed out, “Under the assumption that China had nothing but a religious and ceremonial connection with Korea, Westerners viewed her growing de facto control of Korea as pure and unjustified power politics directed against an independent state.”⁵⁸ By likening the Qing to its Western imperial counterparts, the thesis of Late Qing imperialism homogenizes Qing China as a major participant and a powerful predator in Euro- centric global history, therefore strengthening the approach of interpreting the histories of others with reference to that of the West instead of contextualizing these histories in their local milieus. As this book shows, the Qing activities in Korea in the late nineteenth century were a manifestation not of imperialism, but of Zongfan empiricism. The argument of Qing imperialism, including both High Qing imperialism and Late Qing imperialism, serves as a normative tool for interpreting the constant changes undergone by China in its various forms. In order to explain those changes, this book renegotiates Qing imperialism by presenting the Qing as an empire that used ideological tools—the Chosŏn model and a set of imperial norms embodied by the model—to establish and consolidate its political authority and
cultural superiority in the Chinese world. What I call “Zongfanism” in this book can provide us with a different perspective for observing the rise and fall of the Eurasian Chinese empire under the Qing Dynasty and the rise of modern sovereign states in China and its neighboring countries. Zongfanism refers to a Chinese system of political and diplomatic communication conducted between, on the one hand, a political entity that culturally identified itself as the exclusive civilized center of the world, and, on the other hand, the political entities on its periphery that the center considered less civilized or even barbarian. The sovereign of the center possessed absolute patriarchal authority over the monarchs of the subordinate entities, while the two sides enjoyed mutually constitutive legitimacy in- formed by their shared politico-cultural norms. Zongfanism transcends the entrenched divide between premodern and modern Chinese history. Historians have generally identified the Opium War of 1839–42 as the twilight of premodern China and the dawn of modern China. Along these lines, the mainstream narrative of Qing China holds that the pre-modern system of China’s foreign relations was incompatible with the modern treaty system, with which it was finally replaced. The principal problem with this paradigm lies not in its Eurocentrism per se (indeed, “modern” is a criterion rooted in European history) but rather in its neglect of constant factors within China’s foreign policy that bridged the premodern and modern periods without conspicuous changes. In other words, the factors that historians have widely identified as having led to the “stagnation” of China before it encountered the industrialized West constitute the very key to understanding late imperial China.⁵⁹ The Chinese empire lived with its indigenous norms, not imported ones. The Zongfan perspective does not aim to replace that of Qing imperialism, nor can it completely account for the Qing’s activities during the high tide of the Manchu conquest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from Manchuria to the Korean peninsula and from Xinjiang to Tibet.⁶⁰ It instead aims to reveal the crucial relationships between the construction and dissemination of imperial ideology from the center to the periphery on the one hand, and imperial top-down statecraft in practice on the other. In the early twenty-first century, China has begun to exploit sophisticated ideas drawn from its recent history to preserve the legitimacy and unity of the multiethnic and multicultural Chinese state and to manage its relations with neighboring countries and the world. In this contemporary context, it may be helpful to examine the trajectory of changes in the Chinese world from an inside perspective, and the following chapters seek to do just that.
Introduction
Day dawned on April 25, 1644, in the seventeenth year of the reign of the Chongzhen emperor of the Ming Dynasty of China. As the first rays of the sun struck the walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing, a large group of rebels stormed the gates. Right before the rebels swarmed the imperial halls, the emperor managed to climb up an artificial hill behind the palace and hang himself from a tree. His loyal servant, a eunuch who had cared for the desperate thirty-three-year-old emperor since the latter’s birth, hanged himself from another tree. The Ming Dynasty, or the Great Ming, which had governed China for 277 years, came to a sudden end.
The Ming’s unexpected demise put one of its generals, Wu Sangui (1612–78), who was fighting on the front lines of an unrelated conflict about 190 miles east of Beijing, in an awkward position. General Wu was defending Shanhai Pass, a strategic military outpost of the Great Wall connecting inner China with Manchuria, in the war with the Qing, a regime founded in 1616 by the nomadic Manchus in Manchuria. The war had lasted for almost three decades, during which the Manchus had decisively defeated the Ming troops in Manchuria, subordinated neighboring Mongol tribes, and conquered the Chosŏn Dynasty of Korea, a loyal tributary state of China. Shanhai Pass became the last fortification preventing the formidable barbarians, as both Ming Chinese and Chosŏn Koreans regarded the Manchus, from entering inner China. As Beijing fell into the rebels’ hands, General Wu lost his country overnight. In Manchuria, the Manchu emperor seized the opportunity to send his troops under the leadership of Prince Dorgon (1612–50) to the outskirts of Shanhai Pass, where the army waited to cross the Great Wall to enter inner China. Meanwhile, the rebels in Beijing began to march toward the pass, with General Wu’s father as a hostage, in order to annihilate Wu. In this life-or-death situation, Wu chose the Manchus as his allies. He opened the giant gate to allow the Manchu forces to pass through the Great Wall and help him defeat the rebels.
Among those who entered the pass along with the Manchu forces was the crown prince of Chosŏn Korea. The prince had been living with the Manchus for seven years, since 1637, when the Manchus had conquered Chosŏn and taken him and his younger brother hostage.¹ The guardians of the pass, General Wu’s army, also included people of Korean origin. Among them was a young Korean officer, Ch’oe Hyo-il, who had joined General Wu’s anti-Manchu fight after 1627, when the Manchus first invaded Chosŏn. Ch’oe was not to live long, but he did not die at the hands of the Manchu conquerors. On June 6, 1644, the Manchus took over Beijing without a fight. In a hall standing amid the debris of the Forbidden City, which had been burned by the rebels, Prince Dorgon accepted the capitulation of the Chinese officials of the Ming, witnessed by the Korean crown prince. Ch’oe, however, refused to prostrate himself in front of the Manchu prince, who in his mind was a barbarian. Instead, dressed in a Ming-style robe, he went to Chongzhen’s tomb to mourn for the Ming—the civilized Middle Kingdom, or Zhongguo in Chinese. Ch’oe died near the tomb after a seven-day hunger strike. General Wu buried his body and commemorated him in an elegy.²
A Korean subject, Ch’oe died not only for the Chinese emperor but also for a civilization embodied by the Chinese dynasty and his homeland. Yet when he sacrificed himself, he did not realize that the Manchu regime was transforming itself by embracing the ideological, political, and cultural norms of the same civilization. More importantly, before it crossed the Great Wall in 1644, the Qing had begun to use its hierarchical relationship with Chosŏn to fashion itself as the civilized center of the world. As history unfolded, this relationship lasted for 258 years until the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, and it continued to exert a strong influence over China and Korea thereafter. From the early seventeenth to the early twentieth century, the Qing used its relationship with Chosŏn as an ideological tool to consolidate its identity as the Middle Kingdom and to manage its relations with other neighboring countries and the newly conquered polities that stretched from Manchuria and the Mongol steppe to Turkestan and the Himalayas. By the time the Eurasian empire fell apart in 1911, Qing China had evolved into a multiethnic and multicultural modern state, providing a solid foundation for state building in the rest of the twentieth century. Among the factors that helped the
Qing remake the Chinese empire, what stood out in particular were the politico-cultural discourse and imperial norms drawn from the Manchu-Korean contacts. These took place within a hierarchical framework I call Zongfan, a term I will explain below. The microhistory of Manchu-Korean relations vividly reflects the macrohistory of China’s transformation during the course of the three centuries, making Sino-Korean relations distinct from China’s relations with other countries.
This book reveals the development of China from an empire into a modern state through the lens of the dynamics of Sino-Korean political relations from 1616 to 1911. It incorporates Chosŏn Korea into the historical narrative of Qing China by examining the high politics of the two countries. The book shows that the Manchu regime used its constant relations with Chosŏn to establish, legitimize, consolidate, and present its identity as the civilized center of the known world, as a cosmopolitan empire, and as a modern sovereign state. By employing a long-term historical and cross-border perspective to observe the bilateral relationship, this book casts new light on the rise and inner changes of the Chinese empire during the Qing period, the clashes between the Chinese foreign-relations system and its Western counterpart, and the formation of modern sovereign states in East Asia.
Revitalizing the Concept of Zongfan in the Narrative of Late Imperial China
I use the Chinese term Zongfan, or in some cases the English phrase Chinese world order, rather than the oft-adopted English translation tributary, to refer to the nature of the hierarchical relationship between late imperial China and its subordinate countries, which included Korea. I reserve the term tributary for related aspects of this system.³ Late imperial China in this book refers to China from 1368 to 1911, namely, the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing periods following the collapse of the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) of the Mongol Empire. As I argue below, the Zongfan system was central to establishing the political orthodox legitimacy of China and its subordinate countries. As a key concept of Confucianism, political orthodox legitimacy (Ch., Zhengtong) refers to the universal ideological, moral, cultural, and social rationale behind the legitimate status of a political entity in the hierarchy of the Chinese world. In late imperial times, this legitimacy entailed name and status (Ch., mingfen) and great unification (Ch., da yitong) and found its dedicated audience in the ruling elites and Confucian scholars of Ming and Qing China, Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910), and Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868).⁴
As a politico-cultural structure, the Zongfan system is believed to have been established in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). It was associated with the kinship-based feudal system (Ch., zongfa fengjian) of the day. This system was practiced between two sides, Zong and fan. Zong refers to the royal lineage of the Chinese monarch, who claimed to be the Son of Heaven (Ch., tianzi) residing in the Middle Kingdom with absolute patriarchal authority and exclusive orthodox legitimacy as the human agent of the Mandate of Heaven (Ch., tianming). Fan originally meant the clan(s) of the royal family who established outposts on China’s borders, where the rulers’ legitimacy was dependent on investiture by the Son of Heaven. The two sides of the kinship constituted the familistic hierarchy and the order of all-under-Heaven (Ch., tianxia)—the known universe to the people within this political entity.⁵
The connotation of China’s periphery evolved within this feudalistic model by incorporating all countries or polities outside China into the category of fan. According to the ideal tenets, on a regular basis the fan dispatched emissaries, ministers of ministers (Ch., peichen), bearing taxes or tribute to the central court, where they would offer appropriate obedience to the Son of Heaven and receive largesse or gifts. In return, the court would not only send envoys to the fan to invest the rulers with legitimate titles but also protect the fan whenever necessary. This reciprocity was the foundation of the double policy of serving the great (Ch., shida) and cherishing the small (Ch., zixiao). The exchanges of emissaries following ritual codes dictated by the Middle Kingdom kept the Zongfan system running. This model later evolved into the basic philosophy of the foreign policy of late imperial China.⁶
In addition to being defined by its geographical distance from the central court, the fan could also be characterized in kinship terms as inner fan and outer fan.
The inner fan maintained a strong blood relationship with the emperor, but the outer fan did not. In the case of Korea, the situation was complex. The imperial norms of the successive Chinese dynasties preferred to ascribe the beginning of Sino-Korean kinship to Jizi (K., Kija), a royal member of the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600–1046 BC) who was believed to have been invested by the Western Zhou court with the lands of ancient Chosŏn. This legend produced an assumption of a unique cultural homogeneity that the Chinese side deeply endorsed and that helped unified Chinese dynasties see Korea as belonging within China’s territorial perimeter.⁷ The Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) and the Tang Dynasty (618–907) invaded Korea and integrated parts of the Korean lands into China. In the 1260s the Mongol forces of the Yuan Dynasty gradually came to control the Koryŏ Dynasty of Korea (918–1392), and in the 1270s the Mongol court invested King Ch’ungnyŏl (r. 1274–1308), who married the Princess of Qi of Kublai Khan, as the consort of the imperial princess and the king of Koryŏ (K., Puma Koryŏ kugwang).⁸ After the Ming overthrew the Yuan, it ceased practicing the Yuan’s policy toward Koryŏ, which had been based on strong personal ties between the Mongol and Korean courts through state marriage.
After its establishment in 1368, the Ming followed the feudal principles of the Zhou Dynasty and the Zongfan practice of the Yuan in establishing the Zongfan system within its domain, but it had no desire to extend the system to Koryŏ. The founding father of the new dynasty claimed that Ming China would never invade Koryŏ or fourteen other neighboring countries. In 1392 a new Korean regime replaced Koryŏ and immediately sent emissaries to China to pursue imperial investiture of the kingship. Although the Ming conferred the title Chosŏn on the new regime, after Jizi Chosŏn, it did not endow the Korean king with investiture until 1401, when Emperor Jianwen (r. 1399–1402) invested the third king of Chosŏn (T’aejong, r. 1400–1418), formally extending the Zongfan arrangement to the kingdom. In the imperial mandate, the Ming underlined that the king should serve as a fence of the civilized kingdom and assist China forever (Ch., yongfu yu Zhongguo).⁹ In 1403 Emperor Yongle (r. 1402–24) awarded the same king an official robe commensurate with the rank of first-degree prince (Ch., qinwang, a brother of the emperor), further integrating Chosŏn into the Ming Zongfan system.¹⁰
In the transition from the Yuan-Koryŏ relationship to the Ming-Chosŏn one, the Ming made a consequential shift in China’s policy toward Korea: China allowed Korea independence as a foreign country in practice, but it continued to regulate the bilateral relationship with reference to Zongfan norms in the domestic feudal sense and on the ideological level. In the familistic and culturally homogeneous Zongfan context, the Ming depicted Chosŏn as an outer fan descending from Jizi, while Chosŏn identified itself as a vassal (K., chehu; Ch., zhuhou) of the Ming court and viewed their relationship in father-son and monarch-subordinate terms.¹¹ Simultaneously, Neo-Confucianism (K., Chŏngju hak), which celebrated Confucian social hierarchy, had become the ruling ideology during the Yuan Dynasty, and had lately been introduced to Korea, helping to institutionalize and stabilize this bilateral relationship.¹² After the Ming rescued Chosŏn from a Japanese invasion in the 1590s, Chosŏn became even more committed to the Ming, regarding the Ming as its parent nation (K., pumo chi pang).¹³ This arrangement seemed similar to the feudalism practiced in medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan, but as a cross-border framework it possessed features unique to the Confucianism-supported Chinese world. As part 2 of this book demonstrates, in the nineteenth century the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship built on these features confused European and Japanese diplomats, who could not find historical precedents for it within their own worlds. However, as scholars have pointed out, applying the Ming-Chosŏn hierarchical relationship to Sino-Korean contacts or China’s foreign relations before 1400 would be ahistorical.¹⁴
The Qing inherited the Ming Zongfan mechanism in its contacts with Chosŏn, but the Manchus’ kinship relations with Mongol tribes complicated the outer fan spectrum of the empire. This point is illustrated by the multilayered nature of the outer fan and the varied usage of the term in Qing political discourse, particularly in referring to political entities within the Qing pilgrimage system (Ch., chaojin) and to countries in Southeast Asia, such as Siam (Thailand).¹⁵ The Manchu court nevertheless understood Chosŏn and other subordinate entities as members of the Qing-centric family, in which the position of these entities was similar or
even equal to that of their Mongol counterparts.¹⁶ As the Ministry of Rites (Ch., Libu) described it to the Qianlong emperor in 1768 in the context of investing the Korean king’s grandson as the successor to the throne, "The outer fan are the same as Zongfan in terms of their relations with the central court" (Ch., Waifan zhi yu zongfan, shi shu xiangtong). Similarly, in 1790 the Qianlong emperor awarded the Vietnamese king, Nguyễn Huệ (r. 1788–92), a golden leather belt that only Zongfan of the royal family could use.¹⁷ The term Zongfan aptly encapsulates the relationship between the center/patriarch and the periphery/family members during the Qing period, and for this reason I have revitalized it in this book.
Reinterpreting the Rise of the Modern Chinese State through the Lens of Qing-Chosŏn Relations
The involvement of Chosŏn in the Ming-Qing war led to two fierce Manchu invasions of the country in 1627 and 1636. After conquering Chosŏn in early 1637, the Qing established a Zongfan relationship with it by replacing the Ming in the patriarchal position. Scholars have widely regarded Sino-Korean relations in China’s late imperial period as the quintessential manifestation of the Sinocentric order.¹⁸ Some scholars have tended to attribute the uniqueness of the relationship to the parties’ shared Confucian culture, especially Neo-Confucianism, while others have preferred to emphasize China’s political or military influence or control in the hegemonic sense.¹⁹ This book embraces the cultural perspective, but it simultaneously underlines the significant effect that the Manchu use of violence had on the establishment and maintenance of Qing-Chosŏn ties in the early seventeenth century. More importantly, I avoid enshrining the Qing-Chosŏn relationship in the pantheon of Chinese narratives of Sino-Korean relations since the Western Zhou, and I refrain from conflating the Qing-Chosŏn relationship with that between the Ming and Chosŏn. Rather, I explore the unique and crucial role of these bonds in providing the Qing with the political, intellectual, and ideological sources with which it reconstructed itself and the Chinese empire and eventually gave birth to a modern Chinese state.
A key term in analyzing the Sinocentric hierarchical arrangement between Qing China and other countries imagined in Qing imperial discourse is yi. Like so many abstract terms in Chinese (or indeed any language), its meaning varies according to context, but I have generally translated it as barbarians. As the following chapters show, yi, which was often used to describe outsiders in Sino-foreign contacts, did not necessarily carry a pejorative connotation. I also demonstrate a change in the meaning of yi from the perspective of the Manchu regime. The story of the Qing-Chosŏn relationship unfolds within the broader process of the Qing’s efforts to meet the unprecedented challenge of proving its orthodox legitimacy in the politico-cultural setting of the civilized vs. barbarian distinction (Ch., Hua–Yi zhi bian; K., Hwa–I ŭi chai).²⁰ It was against the background of this civilized–barbarian dichotomy that the Korean warrior Ch’oi sacrificed himself in Manchu-occupied Beijing, and it was in light of this distinction that his homeland strengthened its identity as Little China (K., So Chunghwa) in the post-Ming era, while the Qing positioned itself within the pedigree of the Middle Kingdom as the civilized center and the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao).
The establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship in 1637 was a watershed event in the history of the Qing’s prodigious enterprise of redefining itself and remaking the Chinese world. Scholars have commonly dated the Ming-Qing transition to the Manchu occupation of Beijing in 1644, but the Manchu regime in fact had initiated its bid for status as the Middle Kingdom at least a decade earlier, by employing the politico-cultural discourse embedded in the Zongfan structure. After 1637, the Qing progressively converted Chosŏn into a prototypical outer subordinate, known as waifan (outer fan) or shuguo (subordinate country) in the Chinese language and tulergi gurun (outer country) or harangga gurun (subordinate country) in the Manchu language. Very significantly, the Qing imperial terms abruptly reversed the Manchu-Korean hierarchical arrangement in the Ming period by portraying Chosŏn as a country of barbarians on the periphery of the Qing.
In its frequent contacts with Chosŏn from 1637 to 1643, the Qing strengthened the new bilateral political arrangement and developed a mature model for managing its relations with other newly conquered or subordinated entities. I call this model the Chosŏn model (Ch., Chaoxian shili, lit. Korean cases/examples).
As part 1 explains, the model constituted a pattern by which a country or a political entity could follow Chosŏn into the Qing-centric Zongfan system primarily by receiving imperial investitures from the Qing, adopting the regnal titles and calendar of the Qing, and sending emissaries and tribute to the Qing on a regular basis. The idea behind this model was to encourage outlying regions to embrace the Qing as the civilized center of the world and to affirm its supreme political and cultural position. After 1644, as the Qing continued its conquest of inner China by marching west and southwest, it used the Chosŏn model as a handy soft-power weapon to manage its political relations with other entities and to consolidate its new identification as the center of all-under-Heaven.
The Qing-Chosŏn hierarchy was far more than just the final chapter in the long Sino-Korean Zongfan history. Rather, it buttressed the rationale of the entire Zongfan system by keeping the periphery of the Chinese empire informed and regulated while the Manchu regime controlled and remade the empire at the core. The Qing’s dynamic relations with its first Confucian outer fan—Chosŏn—played a vital role in establishing, institutionalizing, and nourishing the entire Qing-centric system of foreign relations. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Qing had constructed a new imperial order within and beyond its Eurasian empire. It had simultaneously labeled Britain and other European states countries of barbarians and posited them on the periphery of China. These states, however, changed their status vis-à-vis China through gunboat diplomacy and treaties in the nineteenth century, when they encountered the Chinese world through such outer fan as Annam (Vietnam), Ryukyu, and Chosŏn. The introduction, translation, and dissemination of international law in the Chinese world put China, China’s outer fan, and the European states on an equal footing in terms of their state sovereignty. Nevertheless, the relationship between Qing China and its outer fan remained unchanged until the very end of the nineteenth century in that they still needed each other to acquire mutually constitutive and mutually defined orthodox legitimacy in their own world.
What confused the Western states in their contacts with the outer fan of China in the late nineteenth century was the nebulous nature of the Zongfan mechanism that constantly shunted them into perplexing negotiations with Beijing, the only place where diplomacy with outsiders could be conducted in accordance with Zongfan conventions. The disputes emerging at the periphery of China were thus transferred to the center of the empire, where they converged as an accumulative force to trigger certain reforms within China that in turn spread to and deeply influenced the periphery. Although this model may seem similar to contemporary relationships between European powers and their overseas colonies, it had a fundamentally different structure, as later sections and chapters will elaborate. The most typical case among the manifold and interwoven disputes regarding this mechanism arose in Chosŏn Korea.
The political and diplomatic conundrum of the international status of Chosŏn led the Qing and Chosŏn into legal quagmires and prompted both sides to modify their time-honored relations in the context of both the inner and the outer dual networks, as chapters 5 and 6 explain. But the various adjustments made to the relationship on both sides in the chaotic decade of the 1880s kept the Zongfan fundamentals untouched, as neither side could overcome the ideological dilemma caused by their mutually constitutive legitimacy at the level of high politics in the Confucian world. This double bind meant that colonizing Chosŏn was not an option for China in the turbulent period before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894. The growing controversy between China, Korea, Japan, and Western states finally resulted in the termination of the Sino-Korean Zongfan relationship in 1895. Accordingly, the cosmopolitan Chinese empire withdrew its political and cultural reach from its subordinate countries and became identical with the Chinese state defined by the norms of international law. After the war, China and Korea negotiated a new treaty for an equal state-to-state relationship, but the new arrangement lasted only a few years before both the Chosŏn Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty ceased to exist in 1910 and 1911, respectively. This book describes the trajectory of this varied relationship and shows its significance for the development of modern China and East Asia.
Revisiting the Chinese Empire under the Qing
This book defines the Qing as an empire and as a Chinese empire. As I explain below, this empire included Chosŏn in a politico-cultural sense. The term empire as a European concept that was always traced back to the Romans did not exist in the Chinese political lexicon until 1895, when the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Shimonoseki addressed the Qing as the Great Qing Empire in Chinese characters (Da Qing diguo), as a counterpart to the Great Japanese Empire (Dai Nippon teikoku).²¹ None of the ruling dynasties before the end of the Qing ever claimed to hold an empire, either in Chinese or, when the ruling house was not Han Chinese, in any other language. Even nowadays, describing a Chinese dynasty as an empire remains rare among historians in China. Nevertheless, if we define an empire broadly as a political entity in which different peoples are governed differently, Chinese history from 221 BC, when the Qin Dynasty (221–207 BC) unified China as a multiethnic polity, to the present is clearly a history of empires.²² In this book, the Chinese empire (Ch., Zhonghua diguo) refers to a multiethnic and multicultural polity in which the Middle Kingdom represented the political and cultural core against the background of the civilized–barbarian distinction and for which the concepts of Mandate of Heaven and all-under-Heaven served as constitutional ideologies to establish its political orthodox legitimacy and Confucian orthodox legitimacy (Ch., daotong). This definition may not fit all the dynasties that claimed the name of the Middle Kingdom, because, as R. Bin Wong observes, the ideas and institutions of this empire were neither constant over time nor uniform through space.²³ But it applies to the dynasties in Chinese history such as the Tang, the Northern and Southern Song (960–1279), the Liao (907–1125), the Xixia (1038–1227), the Jin (1115–1234), the Yuan, the Ming, and the Qing.
The Manchu ethnicity of the imperial house was not a barrier to the Qing’s presentation of itself as a Chinese empire, in particular after 1644, when the term Chinese (Ch., Zhongguo ren) took on a multiethnic character. The Qing had presented itself as a Chinese empire as early as 1689 in the Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia. The original treaty text, written in Latin by the French Jesuit Jean-François Gerbillon (1654–1707), who was serving the Manchu court, called the Qing Sinicum Imperium (Chinese Empire) as a counterpart to Ruthenicum Imperium (Russian Empire). The French version of the treaty rendered the term as l’Empire de la Chine (Empire of China) as a counterpart to l’Empire de Moscovie (Empire of Muscovy).²⁴ In the Manchu translation of the treaty, the Qing court used the term Dulimbai gurun to define itself as China/Zhongguo; this term is equivalent to Chinese Empire in the other versions of the text.²⁵
When Chinese became a multiethnic descriptor, the Qing also became the representative of Chinese culture, in particular the Confucianism that lay at the core of imperial political discourse. In 1712 Emperor Kangxi instructed the Manchu official Tulišen (1667–1740), an envoy to the Turgūt Mongols in Russia, that if the khan of Russia (Ma., Cagan han) asked what was esteemed in China, Tulišen should respond that our country takes fidelity, filial piety, benevolence, justice, and sincerity as fundamentals.²⁶ All of these concepts came from Confucianism, not from Manchu ideologies. After all, it was this Confucian identity and politico-cultural discourse informed by Confucianism, not the Qing’s Manchu characteristics or its realpolitik practiced along the newly conquered frontiers in Inner Asia, that determined the Qing’s political orthodox legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom and enabled it to obtain and justify Confucian orthodox legitimacy. This Confucian identity on the state level later helped the Qing display its Chineseness and win strong support from Han Chinese scholars, who assisted the dynasty in weathering the storm of anti-Manchu rebellions in the nineteenth century. This book broadly defines Chineseness as the state of being the legitimate Middle Kingdom, thus referring to statecraft, not ethnicity.
I interpret the Chinese empire under the Qing in two dimensions: the territorial empire and the politico-cultural empire. The territorial Chinese empire was equal to the Great Qing, composed primarily of the Manchu court, the inner provinces (Ch., zhisheng, directly controlled provinces), and the first group of outer fan, which were under the management of the central institution of Lifan yuan. These outer fan included regions and groups such as the Cahar Mongols, Tibet, and Mongol and Muslim tribes in Xinjiang. The Chinese name Lifan yuan means "the ministry of managing the affairs of the fan," and it differs from the organization’s Manchu name, Tulergi golo be dasara jurgan, which means the institution in charge of the outer provinces. Scholars have generally translated it as "Court of
Colonial Affairs or Mongolian Superintendency." This book adopts the latter rendering. The politico-cultural Chinese empire encompassed not only these political entities but also the second group of outer fan, whose contacts with China took place via the Ministry of Rites and whose shared characteristic was their identification of the Son of Heaven in China as the highest sovereign in the world (see figure I.1).
FIGURE I.1. The structure of the Chinese empire during the Qing. A = the court; B = inner provinces; C = outer fan under the Mongolian Superintendency (MS); D = outer fan under the Ministry of Rites (MOR), primarily Chosŏn, Ryukyu, and Annam; E = Western countries listed by the Qing as outer fan; AB = inner China, or China proper; ABC = the Great Qing, or the territorial Chinese empire; ABCD = the politico-cultural Chinese empire; ABCDE = all-under-Heaven.
Three key issues in the relationship between China and its outer fan within the politico-cultural Chinese empire invite elaboration: sovereignty, borders, and subjects. These issues were woven together in imperial times by the cosmopolitan idea of all-under-Heaven and were critically questioned within the context of the nation-state order of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. China, or Zhongguo, had historically always been mutually defined by its relations with the countries on its periphery—that is, by a combination of the country’s own perception of itself and the devotion of its neighbors to Chinese civilization. The nebulous dual nature of China’s identity posed a challenge to Chinese scholars who sought to define China anew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by comparing it to European states. These scholars could not find an established and consistent name for their homeland in history. For example, Huang Zunxian (1848–1905), a distinguished diplomat and scholar, reviewed the conventional civilized–barbarian discourse and preferred to call China the central civilized country (Ch., Huaxia). In his treatise exploring the reasons for China’s weakness, Liang Qichao (1873–1929), an intellectual leader of China’s modernization, pointed out that for a long time the Chinese had seen no difference between state and all-under-Heaven or between state and court.²⁷ Huang’s and Liang’s arguments reflected the cosmopolitan nature of the Chinese world, in which sovereignty, borders, and subjects manifested themselves in ways distinct from those of its Western counterpart.
The nature of the sovereignty of an outer fan in the Chinese world was twofold: it was fully independent in terms of the territorial Chinese empire but fully dependent in relation to the politico-cultural Chinese empire. An outer fan enjoyed the right of independence, that is, autonomy or self-rule—zizhu in Chinese—within its boundaries. As Jean-Baptiste Grosier (1743–1823) in the 1780s and George N. Curzon (1859–1925) in the 1890s observed, the king of Chosŏn was an independent and supreme sovereign in his own lands.²⁸ The kings of the Nguyễn Dynasty (1802–1945) of Vietnam went even further, claiming to be emperors and calling Vietnam the Middle Kingdom in the first half of the nineteenth century.²⁹ The kingship of the fan, however, was ultimately subjugated to the emperorship of China. As demonstrated by Emperor Qianlong’s deposition of the king of Vietnam, Lê Duy Kỳ (1765–93), and his investment of a new king in 1789, the emperor possessed absolute patriarchal power over the kings. This was particularly true for the Confucian kingship of Chosŏn.³⁰ What determined this relationship was not China’s military power or geopolitical gravity or its suzerainty, as Western and Japanese diplomats understood it in the nineteenth century, but the mutually constitutive legitimacy of each side of the bilateral arrangement that was undergirded by Zongfan tenets and Confucian ethos. As a consequence, in the 1830s and the 1870s, the king of Chosŏn refused to negotiate with Western representatives on the grounds that "subordinates of a fan have no right to conduct diplomacy" (Ch., fanchen wu waijiao).³¹ Vietnam adhered to the same ideology until the early 1880s.³² Within this system, a Korean king did not have his own regnal title during his lifetime but gained a posthumous title or temple name, which is why I tend to refer to Korean kings as, simply, the king, or to use their names (Yi Chong, for example) rather than their temple names (Injo, Yi Chong’s temple name). Although the awarding of temple names to the kings could suggest a portrayal of Korea as independent of China in an abstract sense and in an intellectual sense, in practice China’s patriarchal and divine imperial power was always real and effective.³³
The differences between peoples on either side of the borders that separated Qing China and its outer fan were clear, but these distinctions were not translated into the language of nation-states, as illustrated by the Qing’s cartographic survey in the Kangxi period and the Qing’s juridical negotiations with Annam and Chosŏn over legal cases.³⁴ The territorial border between China and the outer fan could be diluted and blurred by the shared ideology of all-under-Heaven within
the Zongfan framework. In this cultural context, the Qing court treated fan such as Chosŏn as a part—even an indispensable part—of the imperial dynasty (Ch., huangchao) or the Heavenly Dynasty. For the most part, scholars do not consider countries such as Chosŏn to have been components of the Chinese empire during the Qing. This view results from the dissemination of nationalist historiography in East Asia since the late nineteenth century and cleaves closely to a territorial definition of the Chinese empire. The Chinese empire as a politico-cultural unit, however, encompassed its outer fan beyond China’s borders, where China’s centrality was further constructed by local manifestations of the divine authority of the Chinese sovereign. Believing that all lands of the outer fan were under his rule in this sense, Emperor Yongzheng demarcated a new border with Annam in 1727 that allowed Annam to extend its territory 12.45 miles (40 Chinese li) farther into China in order to end the territorial disputes between the two sides.
Chosŏn never ceased trying to redraw its borders, as reflected in its prolonged negotiations with China over border demarcation in the Tumen River area from the 1710s to the 1880s, yet the Korean court had endorsed the Chinese imperial discourse of all-under-Heaven since the Ming period.³⁵ In 1593, for example, the king of Chosŏn (Sŏnjo, r. 1567–1608) claimed that Chosŏn was a vassal (K., chehu) of China and had been regarded by the Chinese dynasties as an inner subordinate (K., naebok; Ch., neifu) since Jizi. The king further emphasized that Chosŏn is actually China’s land and China lets our country manage it.³⁶ In the 1730s the Qing historians in History of the Ming commented that "Chosŏn was the Ming’s subordinate country, but it was not different from an inner part of China [Ch., yunei]."³⁷ The position of Chosŏn as part of the Chinese empire remained unchanged during the Qing in terms of imperial norms. In 1784 and 1788, Emperor Qianlong noted that Korea was almost the peer of the Qing’s inner subordinates.³⁸ In the rituals that marked imperial edicts, the Qing imperial ritual code made it clear that the local officials of Chosŏn should perform the same rituals as did those in directly controlled provinces (Ch., ru zhisheng zhi yi).³⁹
Another indicator of Chosŏn’s position was the annual calendar of the Qing (Ch., Shixian li or Shixian shu; Ma., Erin forgon i ton i bithe), issued every year by the Imperial Astronomical Bureau (Ch., Qintian jian; Ma., Abka be ginggulere yamun), which Korean emissaries had to retrieve from Beijing. The calendar included charts of the sunrise and sunset times and charts of the solar terms in each province (Ch., gesheng; Ma., yaya golo) and each Mongol and Muslim tribe (Ch., ge menggu huibu; Ma., geren monggo be, hoise i aiman) under Qing jurisdiction. From 1645, when the Qing inaugurated the calendar, Chosŏn was included in the list of inner provinces such as Shanxi and Shandong and later showed up alongside Mukden, Nerchinsk (Ma., Nibcu), Sanxing (Ma., Ilan hala), Bodune (Ma., Bedune), Heilongjiang (Ma., Sahaliyan ula), and Jilin. Following Chosŏn, Annam was added to the lists in 1789 and Ryukyu in 1810.⁴⁰ As Johan Elverskog has pointed out, A fundamental role of the emperor was to control the flow of time properly by creating the calendar and propitiating its cultural force through ritual and ceremony.⁴¹ Many maps of the known world produced by the cartographers of the Qing and Chosŏn in the eighteenth century, such as the Huangyu quanlan tu (Map of a complete view of the imperial lands, known as the Kangxi Atlas), also presented and substantiated this cosmopolitan ideology by including Chosŏn as part of the empire.⁴² The Qing thus subtly but unmistakably incorporated the group of outer fan into the Chinese empire.
Cosmopolitan ideas strongly shaped the Qing’s understanding of the subjects within and beyond its borders, even after international law reached China in the 1860s. In 1643, for instance, the Qing emphasized to Chosŏn that the two countries have become one family (Ch., liangguo yijia) and that the people of Chosŏn are also ours.⁴³ In 1882, when the Chinese governors in Manchuria reported to Beijing that many poor Korean peasants had crossed the border to cultivate Chinese lands, Emperor Guangxu noted, "In the eyes of the local officials, there is certainly a line between them and us [Ch., bici zhi fen], but in the eyes of the court, there is originally no difference between the inside and the outside [Ch., neiwai zhi bie]."⁴⁴ A group of Korean students learning Western technologies in Tianjin in 1882 were also treated by Chinese officials as loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao zhi chizi) and were granted free tuition.⁴⁵ In 1886 the Guangxu emperor emphasized that Chosŏn was close to Beijing and had no particular difference from other provinces in the inner land (Ch., you yu neidi
xingsheng wuyi).⁴⁶ For Qing China, Chosŏn was equal to a domestic subordinate (Ch., neichen), which might have been the impetus behind the proposals made by a large number of Chinese officials in the 1880s to convert Chosŏn into prefectures and counties of China—an approach I call provincialization—in order to save our Chosŏn (Ch., wo Chaoxian).
Within the Zongfan framework, these factors—sovereignty, borders, and subjects—were not complex issues between Qing China and its outer fan. But when international law and the norms embedded in it, such as sovereignty and suzerainty, reached East Asia in the 1860s and acted as a catalyst for the independence (Ch., duli; K., t’ŭngnip; J., dokuritsu) of the outer fan, these issues became controversial and began to be reconsidered and redefined in accordance with the imported legal terms in both China and its outer fan. Nevertheless, as part 2 of this book shows, the politico-cultural Chinese empire connecting the Middle Kingdom and its outer fan remained unchanged at that time, because international law could not endow the two sides with the necessary political orthodox legitimacy.
What drew China into the wars with France in Vietnam in 1883 and with Japan in Chosŏn in 1894, therefore, was not the territorial Chinese empire but the politico-cultural one. Similarly, what Japan defeated in 1895 was the tangible former rather than the invisible latter. In this regard, this book reveals the complexity of the dual presentation of the Chinese empire under the Qing, in particular in the late nineteenth century, when China and Korea tried to deliver a legal definition of their relationship to Japan and Western states. After 1895 the politico-cultural empire began to draw back from its extended frontier in its subordinate countries to China’s geographical borders, eventually becoming identical to the territorial empire. Through the decline of the politico-cultural empire emerged a modern Chinese state.
In his study of empires and states, Frederick Cooper argued that France only became a nation-state in 1962, when it gave up the last vital element of its imperial structure, Algeria.⁴⁷ Although China is not France and Korea is not Algeria, Korea had served for centuries as a key part of the politico-cultural Chinese empire, and under the Qing it acted as an outlying province of the empire in the Qing imperial norms.⁴⁸ It is thus not an exaggeration to say that China became a modern nation-state only once it recognized the absolute independence and sovereignty of the Korean state after World War II, especially after the Korean War in the 1950s. It was also in the 1950s that the People’s Republic of China officially endorsed the independence of the Mongolian People’s Republic, which had been part of the Chinese empire under the Qing, while at the same time integrating the northwestern region of the empire—Xinjiang and Tibet—into the territory of New China. At that point, the Korean side finally accomplished the prolonged process of decentering China and became equal to its Chinese counterpart.⁴⁹ Within this conceptual framework, this book traces the historical process through which both China and Korea detached themselves from the Chinese empire and moved toward modern state building in the postimperial era.
Renegotiating Qing Imperialism
Scholars of China and East Asia have commonly identified imperialism (Ch., Diguo zhuyi) with the West or Japan. As a concept, imperialism refers to a system that was underpinned by a series of aggressive political, economic, or diplomatic policies carried out by Western and Japanese powers against other states. Through these policies, the imperial powers attempted to reap the highest possible profits from the countries they subjugated via unequal treaties, while competing with each other for primacy. Imperialism is thus seen as a holdover of Western capitalism (Ch., Ziben zhuyi) and colonialism (Ch., Zhimin zhuyi) that reached the Chinese world aggressively after 1800.⁵⁰ This interpretation also reflects a phenomenon that scholars have called the great divergence between China and the West in world economic history.⁵¹ The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 marks the rise of imperialism in East Asia, a regime under which Qing China, too, suffered heavily. Historical narratives along these lines have promoted a Chinese victim mentality and nourished Chinese nationalism in the twentieth century, in particular after the Leninist definition of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism became popular in scholarship.⁵²
Since the second half of the twentieth century, two groups of scholars have questioned and complicated this received wisdom. The first group comprises students of the High Qing (that is, from the Kangxi to the Qianlong period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), who have promulgated the paradigm of New Qing history that is characterized by an Inner Asian and ethnic approach to interpreting the multiethnic and multicultural Qing.⁵³ The second group consists of students of Sino-Korean relations who have depicted Qing China’s policy toward Chosŏn in the late nineteenth century as imperialism. The approach of the first group might be called High Qing imperialism, and that of the second group Late Qing imperialism.
The High Qing imperialism school describes the High Qing as an institutional agent of imperialism, a system of coercive instruments aimed at extending the core area of the empire and keeping the empire functioning. This Qing imperialism manifested itself in geopolitical and global competitions between the Qing, the Mongol khanates and Muslim tribes in Inner Asia, the indigenous and cross-border tribes in southwestern China, the Russian Empire, and the British Empire.⁵⁴ Chinese and European colonialism and capitalism found their place in these intense competitions.⁵⁵ What fundamentally supports this argument of Qing imperialism is the fact of the Qing’s territorial expansion by force, followed by the political and cultural hegemony that it introduced to the newly conquered borderlands. However, if the High Qing was an agent of imperialism, all Chinese regimes that extended China’s borders would fall into the same category, including the Han, the Tang, the Yuan, the Ming, and the People’s Republic of China. In this sense, the thesis of High Qing imperialism risks detaching its interpretations of the Qing Empire from the pre-Qing Chinese historical context and being construed as a complement to Eurocentric narratives of imperialism in the broader context.
The argument of Late Qing imperialism, by contrast, distinguishes the Qing from its predecessors in Chinese history by asserting that the Late Qing exercised imperialism through coercive means characterized by power politics and economic expansion in the late nineteenth century. The leading proponents of this approach concede that the Late Qing was a victim of Western and Japanese imperialism but claim that it simultaneously practiced its own imperialism over weaker countries. This overseas imperialism fits the general definition that historians have drawn from the history of the Roman Empire: an unequal power relationship between two states in which the dominant state exercises various forms of control, often forcibly, over the weaker state.⁵⁶ Whereas the theory of High Qing imperialism does not take the Manchu conquest of Chosŏn in 1637 into consideration and leaves Chosŏn largely off the list of victims of that imperialism, Chosŏn is typically the only identified victim of Late Qing imperialism, which was embodied by activities such as sending troops to Chosŏn and obtaining treaty ports and settlements through unequal treaties that granted the Chinese extraterritoriality. The concept of informal empire, originally coined to refer to the powerful economic expansion of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, provides this argument with further intellectual support.⁵⁷ In retrospect, the argument of Late Qing imperialism bears a remarkable resemblance to the interpretation of China’s behavior in Chosŏn put forward by Western diplomats and observers in the nineteenth century. As M. Frederick Nelson has pointed out, "Under the assumption that China had nothing but a religious and ceremonial connection with Korea, Westerners viewed her growing de facto control of Korea as pure and unjustified power politics directed against an independent state."⁵⁸ By likening the Qing to its Western imperial counterparts, the thesis of Late Qing imperialism homogenizes Qing China as a major participant and a powerful predator in Eurocentric global history, therefore strengthening the approach of interpreting the histories of others with reference to that of the West instead of contextualizing these histories in their local milieus. As this book shows, the Qing activities in Korea in the late nineteenth century were a manifestation not of imperialism, but of Zongfan empiricism.
The argument of Qing imperialism, including both High Qing imperialism and Late Qing imperialism, serves as a normative tool for interpreting the constant changes undergone by China in its various forms. In order to explain those changes, this book renegotiates Qing imperialism by presenting the Qing as an empire that used ideological tools—the Chosŏn model and a set of imperial norms embodied by the model—to establish and consolidate its political authority and
cultural superiority in the Chinese world. What I call Zongfanism in this book can provide us with a different perspective for observing the rise and fall of the Eurasian Chinese empire under the Qing Dynasty and the rise of modern sovereign states in China and its neighboring countries. Zongfanism refers to a Chinese system of political and diplomatic communication conducted between, on the one hand, a political entity that culturally identified itself as the exclusive civilized center of the world, and, on the other hand, the political entities on its periphery that the center considered less civilized or even barbarian. The sovereign of the center possessed absolute patriarchal authority over the monarchs of the subordinate entities, while the two sides enjoyed mutually constitutive legitimacy informed by their shared politico-cultural norms.
Zongfanism transcends the entrenched divide between premodern and modern Chinese history. Historians have generally identified the Opium War of 1839–42 as the twilight of premodern China and the dawn of modern China. Along these lines, the mainstream narrative of Qing China holds that the pre-modern system of China’s foreign relations was incompatible with the modern treaty system, with which it was finally replaced. The principal problem with this paradigm lies not in its Eurocentrism per se (indeed, modern is a criterion rooted in European history) but rather in its neglect of constant factors within China’s foreign policy that bridged the premodern and modern periods without conspicuous changes. In other words, the factors that historians have widely identified as having led to the stagnation of China before it encountered the industrialized West constitute the very key to understanding late imperial China.⁵⁹ The Chinese empire lived with its indigenous norms, not imported ones.
The Zongfan perspective does not aim to replace that of Qing imperialism, nor can it completely account for the Qing’s activities during the high tide of the Manchu conquest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from Manchuria to the Korean peninsula and from Xinjiang to Tibet.⁶⁰ It instead aims to reveal the crucial relationships between the construction and dissemination of imperial ideology from the center to the periphery on the one hand, and imperial top-down statecraft in practice on the other. In the early twenty-first century, China has begun to exploit sophisticated ideas drawn from its recent history to preserve the legitimacy and unity of the multiethnic and multicultural Chinese state and to manage its relations with neighboring countries and the world. In this contemporary context, it may be helpful to examine the trajectory of changes in the Chinese world from an inside perspective, and the following chapters seek to do just that.
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Part I KOWTOWING TO OUR GREAT EMPEROR
Part I
KOWTOWING TO OUR GREAT EMPEROR
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1 CONQUERING CHOSŎN The Rise of the Manchu Regime as the Middle Kingdom, 1616–43 As the Manchu regime consolidated its power in Manchuria between the late 1610s and the early 1640s, it reshaped the perceptions of other polities and eradi- cated its longstanding barbarian image. The regime derived its political and cultural resources in large part from its relations with Chosŏn, which validated and reinforced the Manchu dynasty’s position as the Middle Kingdom within the newly established multistate hierarchical system. In this process, the Manchus appropriated the Ming’s Zongfan discourse to designate other political entities as barbarians, initiating a prolonged process that I call the barbarianization of oth- ers. By crossing the Great Wall in 1644, the Manchu regime had fundamentally reconceptualized its own identity and position in the Chinese world. Barbarians, Rebellions, and Wars The Jurchen Uprising in Manchuria On February 17, 1616, the lunar New Year and the first day of the Forty-Fourth Year of Wanli of the Ming Dynasty, a number of high-ranking Chinese officials assembled at the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City with tributary emissaries from Chosŏn and China’s other outer fan. They waited to enter the imperial hall to present the emperor with their congratulations on the New Year. Finally, realizing the emperor had no desire to grant them an audience, the officials and emis- saries carried out their ceremonies in front of the gate.¹ This scene was not surprising, as the emperor had long been uninterested in such ceremonies. Many high-ranking officials in Beijing had not seen the hermit-like Son of Heaven for almost thirty years.² The Middle Kingdom and its lethargic human agent seemed to have fallen asleep. The day was significant, however, in Hetuala, a small Manchurian town about seven hundred miles northeast of Beijing, where a tribe called the Jianzhou Ju- rchens announced the establishment of its own country under the leadership of Nurhaci (1559–1626; r. 1616–26). Proclaiming himself the “brilliant khan caring for all countries/peoples” (Ma., abka geren gurun be ujikini seme sindaha genggiyen han), Nurhaci accepted the congratulations of Jurchen and Mongol officials and generals, took the regnal title of Tianming (“mandate of Heaven”; Ma., Abkai fulingga), and named his country Houjin (“the later Jin”).³ He thus defined his regime as the successor to the Jin Dynasty established by the Jurchen ancestors.⁴ Nurhaci’s political ambitions extended far beyond unifying the local tribes. In May 1618 he attacked the Ming forces after announcing the “Seven Grievances” (Ma., Nadan amba koro; Ch., Qi dahen). Nurhaci had visited Beijing three times to present tribute and had been appointed by the Ming court to govern the Jianzhou Jurchens, whom the Ming considered “northeastern barbarians” (Ch., dongbei yi).⁵ In the Seven Grievances, Nurhaci identified the Jianzhou as a subor- dinate that had guarded the Ming’s border for generations, and declared that various conflicts between his tribe, other tribes, and the Ming’s local leaders had led to his rebellion. The Ming was confident about suppressing Nurhaci. To do so it enlisted the aid of the tribe of Yehe, an old and powerful enemy of the Jurchens, as well as the support of Chosŏn. As a loyal fan, Chosŏn had followed the policy of “serving the great” (K., sadae) for more than two centuries. It regarded Nurhaci’s rebellion as intolerable and its military assistance to the Ming as a “legal and moral duty” (K., ŭibun). Although the king, Yi Hon (Kwanghaegun), was worried that his men would be defeated, he nonetheless ordered Gen. Kang Hong-rip in early 1619 to lead thirteen thousand soldiers across the Yalu River to join forces with the Ming
army in Manchuria.⁶ In the battle of Sarhū on April 17, 1619, more than six thousand Korean soldiers were killed, and General Kang surrendered to Nurhaci. Ending Chosŏn’s military engagement in the war, the surrender provided Nurhaci with a golden opportunity to open an official channel of communication with the Korean sovereign. In addition to seeking a peace agreement with Chosŏn to reduce the military threat on his eastern flank, Nurhaci wanted to change his relationship with Chosŏn by identifying his newly founded regime as a state equal to Chosŏn rather than as a state of lower status, as presupposed by the longstanding framework of Jurchen- Chosŏn relations.⁷ This political ambition posed a grave challenge to Chosŏn in the context of the civilized–barbarian distinction and initiated an invisible but intensive struggle of political discourse between the two sides. Chosŏn’s Role in the Jurchen-Ming War The bilateral communications between the Jurchens and Chosŏn started with an exchange of letters. In May 1619 Nurhaci sent a captured officer to Chosŏn to present a “sovereign letter” (Ch., guoshu; K., kuksŏ) and a copy of the Seven Grievances to the king. After explaining why he fought against the “big country” (Ch., daguo; Ma., amba gurun), that is, the Ming, Nurhaci asked the king to make common cause with him against the Ming. Chosŏn had contacted Nurhaci by letter in the 1600s through a local officer in the town of Manpo on the northern border, but now Nurhaci’s “barbarian letter” (K., hosŏ) reached the court directly and posed a thorny problem for the king.⁸ After fierce debate among officials, the king appointed Pak Yŏp, governor of P’yŏngan Province, to write back to Nurhaci, but the format of the reply, and in par- ticular the question of how to address Nurhaci, remained a challenge. In Nurhaci’s letter, the Mongolian characters of his stamp read “Emperor Tianming of the Houjin” (K., Hugŭm ch’ŏnmyŏng hwangje), which greatly shocked the king and the Border Defense Council (K., Pibyŏnsa) because they believed the Ming em- peror to be the sole emperor in the known universe. It was highly likely that the characters defined Nurhaci as a “khan” in the Mongol sense, rather than as an “emperor” (Ch., huangdi; K., hwangje) in the Chinese and Korean sense. Chosŏn had always called Nurhaci “old chieftain” (K., roch’u), “barbarian chieftain” (K., ich’u), “chieftain of slaves” (K., noch’u), or “chieftain of thieves” (K., chŏkch’u), so endorsing Nurhaci’s self-proclaimed imperial title was out of the question. The king, pretending he could not understand the characters on Nurhaci’s seal, instructed Pak to send a letter to the “assistant general of the Jianzhou garrison” (K., Kŏnjuwi mabŏp; Ch., Jianzhouwei mafa).⁹ The Border Defense Council had learned the word mabŏp from previous letters sent by the Jurchens and assumed that it referred to an assistant general (K., p’ŏnbi). In fact, it came from the Manchu word mafa, which means “grandfather.” In addition, the letter addressed its recipient in the second person using the form of “you” (K., chokha) that officials who were equal to each other used among themselves, not for sovereigns.¹⁰ Finally, the letter bore Pak’s official stamp instead of the king’s. In this way, the king downgraded the communication with the Houjin to a provincial level and sidestepped the sensitive issue of the political legitimacy of the Jurchen regime. The Korean letter noted that Chosŏn and the Houjin had been subjects (K., sin) of the “Heavenly Dynasty” for two hundred years and suggested that Nurhaci pledge allegiance to the “Imperial Ming,” an action that would also yield reconciliation between Chosŏn and Nurhaci. This strong pro-Ming stance made the Hou- jin bristle.¹¹ In his reply, calling himself gu, a Chinese term used only by a sovereign to refer to himself, Nurhaci inferred that the Heavenly Dynasty to which Chosŏn referred must be the “southern dynasty”—the Jurchen appellation for the Ming, which indicated that the Houjin no longer endorsed the divine position of the Ming. Nurhaci clearly asked the king to form an alliance with him and suggested that the two countries kill a white horse and a black bull to offer to Heaven and Earth and burn incense to swear an oath.¹² Nurhaci had conducted this ritual with the Yehe, Hada, Ula, and Hūifa tribes in 1597 and with the Ming in 1608 and later started wars with these entities on account of their reneging on the oath.
Chosŏn was uninterested in Nurhaci’s offer, particularly in light of the Ming’s potential reaction to Korean-Jurchen contacts. Ming officials such as Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), a close friend of the Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), suspected that Chosŏn would join the Jurchen rebellion against the Ming and con- sidered it advisable to rein Chosŏn in. In August 1619 he proposed a new policy toward Chosŏn in a memorial to Emperor Wanli. Xu argued that Beijing should follow historical precedents set by the Zhou and Han Dynasties by sending a commissioner to Chosŏn to “supervise and protect” (Ch., jianhu) the country. Xu enthusiastically volunteered to take up this position, but the emperor, who had sent Chinese forces to Chosŏn to defend the country against Japanese invasions in the 1590s, did not grant his request.¹³ As a matter of fact, Chosŏn was not collaborating with the Jurchens, whom it still called “barbarians” (K., orangk’ae), but maintaining its political and moral allegiance to Beijing would not alleviate the risk of a Jurchen attack. Under the circumstances, the king took a practical ap- proach by tactically maintaining connections with the Houjin but confining them to the local level. In the meantime, the outlook for the Ming-Chosŏn alliance was not sanguine. Two Ming emperors died within two months in 1620, and the new emperor, Tian- qi, showed more interest in carpentry than he did in statecraft. On the battlefield, the Ming was losing more lands to the Houjin. In May 1621 the Jurchens occu- pied Liaoyang, a key military fortress in Manchuria, and made it the Houjin’s new capital, cutting off the overland route of communications between Chosŏn and the Ming. Facing a series of dramatic changes, the king made the risky move of sending Nurhaci his first sovereign letter in October 1622 through a civil official of the Ministry of Rites in Hansŏng (today’s Seoul). In the letter, he referred to Houjin as “a neighboring country” and Nurhaci as “khan of the Houjin country” (K., Hugŭmguk kahan). The letter adopted the same format as letters sent to Japan in accordance with Chosŏn’s policy of kyorin, communicating with a neighboring country.¹⁴ By acknowledging the statehood of the Jurchen regime, the king elevated his communications with Nurhaci to the level of a sovereign addressing an- other sovereign. The pragmatism of this policy called into question the king’s loyalty to the Ming, which the king’s nephew, Yi Chong, used to justify a bloody coup that he launched in May 1623 to dethrone the king. Assuming power as the new king (King Injo), Yi Chong blamed his uncle for failing to embrace his monarch- subordinate and father-son relationship with the Ming. He himself took a different tack: in addition to ending the exchange of messengers with Nurhaci and imposing trade sanctions on the Houjin, Yi Chong mobilized his followers to prepare for a war with the Houjin and even planned to lead an army himself to at- tack the Jurchens.¹⁵ Being a usurper, Yi Chong used his fervent pro-Ming attitude to obtain the Ming investiture that legitimized his rulership. The new king also helped Mao Wenlong (1576–1629), a Ming general who had escaped to Chosŏn after the Jurchens’ occupation of Liaoyang and had stationed his forces on Ka Is- land, close to mainland Chosŏn, carry out a guerrilla war to prevent the Jurchens from entering Shanhai Pass. Chosŏn’s new policy posed a considerable military and economic threat to the Jurchens, but it did not stop the Jurchen expansion. In 1625 the Jurchens occupied Shenyang, the political heart and economic center of Manchuria, and made it their new capital. After Nurhaci died in 1626, his son Hongtaiji became the new khan with the regnal title Tiancong (“Heavenly wis- dom”; Ma., Abkai sure) and quickly decided to invade Chosŏn. Becoming the Elder Brother of Chosŏn: The Jin and the First Manchu Invasion In the spring of 1627 Hongtaiji launched an attack on Chosŏn. The forces of the Jin, as the Jurchen regime now styled itself, swept into northern Chosŏn and cap- tured P’yŏngyang within two weeks, forcing the king, who had escaped to Kanghwa Island, to sue for peace. As a precondition of withdrawal, the Jin commander, Amin (?–1640), required the king to swear an oath to Heaven to sever Chosŏn’s relations with the Ming and establish an elder brother–younger brother rela- tionship with the Jin, the latter taking on the dominant role. In Chosŏn, many Confucian officials and students pleaded with the king to stop negotiating with the barbarous invaders, kill their messengers, and fight to the death. Although the king told his subjects that the peace talks with the “Jurchen clowns” were only a
stalling tactic, or a conventional “loose rein” (K., kimi) policy, he had no choice but to continue the negotiations. In his letters to Hongtaiji, the king endorsed Hongtaiji’s political position by addressing him as “Khan of the Country of the Jin,” but he purposely selected neu- tral terms for the Jin and Chosŏn. While he called the Jin “your honorable country,” the king referred to Chosŏn as “our country,” instead of “our humble country” or “our small country,” as he would say in his palace memorials to the Ming. No honorific expressions for Hongtaiji appeared at the beginning of the letter.¹⁶ The king conveyed that Chosŏn would follow the policy of “communicating with a neighboring country” vis-à-vis the Jin and that of “serving the great country” vis-à- vis the Ming. By deliberately using the Ming regnal title “Tianqi” to express the date in his letter, the king implied that he would not betray the Ming. This act of adhering to Ming time led to a deadlock in the negotiations. The king later switched to a “notice” format for his communications, since this format did not require a regnal title. The new format helped the two sides reach an agreement regarding Chosŏn’s oath. The oath-swearing ceremony occurred at the palace on Kanghwa Island on April 18, 1627. The king burned incense and swore the oaths to Heaven after one of his officials read them aloud. Despite the king’s reluctance, the substance of oaths was what Hongtaiji had demanded. The nine highest Chosŏn officials and eight high-ranking Jin officials also read their own oaths. However, the performance of these ceremonies between the king and the Jurchen officials was not men- tioned in either Manchu or Korean records.¹⁷ Another oath-swearing ceremony took place later in P’yŏngyang between Amin and a brother of the king. The P’yŏngyang oath included several additional terms imposed by the Jurchen invaders, emphasizing that the king should present gifts to the khan, host the Jin’s emissaries as he did those of the Ming, and not reinforce the city walls or conduct military drills.¹⁸ The two ceremonies ushered in a decade of peace between the two countries. In political and ideological terms the Jurchens benefited substantially from their invasion of Chosŏn. Chosŏn officially endorsed the Jurchen regime as a coun- try with a supreme sovereign, helping to foster the regime’s political legitimacy in the geopolitical arena. With the support of Chosŏn, the “Little China” that now regarded the Jin as its elder brother, the Jin’s politico-cultural self-identity changed from that of a barbarian, imposed by the discourse of the Ming-centered cos- mopolitan order, to that of the civilized. Although resentment of the Jurchen “barbarians” soared in Chosŏn after the war, the Korean court was unable to escape the newly established brotherhood. Economically, too, Chosŏn yielded to the Jurchens’ terms by opening markets in several towns on its northern border and paying “annual tribute” (K., sep’ye) to the Jurchen court. Constructing a Jin-Centric, Quasi-Zongfan System: The Jin’s New Position The Rise of the Jin-Chosŏn Quasi-Zongfan Order As he withdrew from Chosŏn, Hongtaiji sent the king a letter, explaining why he fought with the “southern dynasty”—the Ming—and attacked Chosŏn. He said, “The southern dynasty regards only itself as Son of Heaven and views people of other countries as inferior servants. … The Mandate of Heaven is truly righteous by assisting us with punishing the southern dynasty…. In the future, our two countries should be brothers forever and never bully others as the southern dynasty does.”¹⁹ By quoting the theory of the Mandate of Heaven, the khan challenged the Ming’s centrality in the universe and justified his war with the Ming. Over the following decade, his construction of a Jin-centric, quasi-Zongfan system in the Jin’s contacts with Chosŏn and other neighboring entities gradually changed the Jin’s position. In the face of serious economic difficulties brought on by the war, the Jin required Chosŏn to open markets for trade in a border city, Ŭiju. Chosŏn yielded to the Jin’s pressure but agreed to hold the markets only twice a year, in the spring and the autumn, rather than three times per year, as the Jin had wished. On March
31, 1628, the Ŭiju market opened for the first time, and the Jin emissary Inggūldai (1596–1648) came to Ŭiju accompanied by eight generals and more than a thou- sand people. As the Ŭiju market fell short of the Jin’s needs, Hongtaiji urged Chosŏn to open another one in Hoeryŏng, a northeastern border city.²⁰ In the midst of the shortage, the Jin relied heavily on the yearly gifts provided by Chosŏn and conveyed to Shenyang by one emissary in the spring and another in the autumn. From 1627 to 1636, the required gift comprised up to eighty-five categories of goods, but the amounts in each category kept changing to reflect the Jin’s needs or Chosŏn’s concerns, becoming a barometer of their relations.²¹ The Korean emissaries brought commercial opportunities to Shenyang. In 1631 the Border Defense Council of Chosŏn complained to the king that “the dispatch of emissaries to Shenyang was no different from opening markets there.”²² On the other hand, the development of the market in Shenyang, like that of the markets in Ŭiju and Hoeryŏng, suffered from significant differentials in the prices of the consumer prod- ucts offered by the two sides. The black cotton cloth and ginseng sold by the Koreans were expensive, whereas the animal skins and furs that the Jurchens traded were not. This difference made it difficult for the Jurchen side to turn a profit. The Jin’s military hegemony could not subordinate Korean capital, which contrib- uted to the Jin’s second invasion of Chosŏn. Given the military and economic situation, the Jin did not force Chosŏn to end its contacts with Beijing. Hongtaiji had the option of concluding a peace agree- ment with the Ming through which he could win the latter’s political endorsement. In a memorial to Hongtaiji in 1630, Gao Hongzhong, a Han Chinese scholar serving the Jin, suggested that the Jin “follow the Chosŏn model to receive the [Ming] investiture with kingship and to use the regnal title [of the Ming] to count the date” (Ch., bi Chaoxian shili, qingfeng wangwei, cong zhengshuo).²³ This proposal reflected a popular perception among the Chinese about Chosŏn’s exemplary tributary position in the Ming-centric world. Had the Ming agreed to negotiate for a Chosŏn-like status for the Jurchen regime, the Jin could have followed Chosŏn to become an outer fan of the Ming. Nevertheless, the war persisted, and the Jin moved toward a broader objective of replacing the Ming. For that purpose, the Jin started to transform its hierarchical relationship with Chosŏn. After 1627 Chosŏn continued to embrace the centrality of the Ming in its contacts with the Jin by applying its kyorin policy to the Jin; this put the Jin on an equal footing with Chosŏn. The king called his emissaries to the Jin “messengers” (K., sinsa), not “tributary emissaries” (K., kongsa), as he did those dispatched to Bei- jing. The goods brought annually to Shenyang were “gifts” (K., yemul) rather than “tributes” (K., kongmul) like those presented to Beijing. As the king noted in 1633 to Hongtaiji, “It is the proper principle [K., ye; Ch., li] that our two countries give each other local products in communications via emissaries.”²⁴ These terms reflected befitting modesty and suggested that Chosŏn treated the Jin as a country lower than the Ming. In stark contrast, the Jin developed a new discourse to nourish its self-identity as a political entity superior to Chosŏn. In documents written in the Manchu lan- guage beginning in 1627, the Jin downgraded the Korean monarch from “khan of Chosŏn” (Ma., Solgoi kan) to “king of Chosŏn” (Ma., Solgo i wang, or Coohiyan gurun i wang).²⁵ With the steady rise of the Jin’s military power, especially after its triumph in the battle at Dalinghe in late 1631 and early 1632, Hongtaiji enacted considerable reforms to the Jin political structure, abolishing the power-sharing system at the highest level of the court and making himself the exclusive sovereign.²⁶ From 1632, in his letters to the Ming and Chosŏn, Hongtaiji began to call himself “brilliant khan of the Manchu country” (Ma., Manju gurun i sure han) rather than “khan of the Jin country” (Ma., Aisin gurun i han), the title he had used before.²⁷ More importantly, he imitated the Ming bureaucracy by estab- lishing a six-ministry system in Shenyang and instructing Manchu officials such as Dahai (1595– 1632) to translate Chinese classics into the Manchu language.²⁸ From then on, the regime substantially accelerated the Sinicization of its imperial norms from the top down, a process carried out through the institution-building efforts of a group of Han Chinese officials and scholars such as Ning Wanwo (1593–1665), Fan Wencheng (1597–1666), Gao Hongzhong, and Bao Chengxian (?–1645). One of the most significant acts of these elites was to persuade Hongtaiji to produce the annals of the monarch and the regime in both the Chinese and
Manchu languages. The Chinese terms that these Han Chinese savants adopted to describe the exchanges of emissaries and diplomatic relations between the Jin and Chosŏn were crucial to revising the Jin’s political identity. According to the Manchu-language records written by the Manchu scholars, the emissaries of Chosŏn (Ma., Solho i elcin) “arrived and delivered the local products as gifts” (Ma., baci tucire doroi jaka benjime isinjiha) in Shenyang. When they left, the khan “gave” (Ma., unggihe) or “awarded” (Ma., šangnaha) them and the king gifts.²⁹ Although these Manchu terms were largely vernacular and had no strong political meaning, their counter- parts in the Chinese-language records offered a very different portrayal. The visit of the “tributary emissaries” (Ch., gongshi), who brought “tribute” (Ch., gongwu) or “local products” (Ch., fangwu), was described as “the coming to the court to present themselves before the sovereign” (Ch., laichao), suggesting that the emis- saries’ visit was prompted not by the Jin’s formidable military might but by its outstanding merits.³⁰ These terms invoked a hierarchical relationship between the sovereign—an emperor in the Chinese sense—and his subjects, which in this case included Chosŏn, Vietnam, Ryukyu, other fan of the Ming, and the Central Asian political entities.³¹ Meanwhile, the Jin applied the political and diplomatic discourse it had developed toward Chosŏn to forces and political entities that sought shelter with or surrendered to the Jin, such as Bar Baturu, Nomun Dalai, Coir Jamsu from Alakcot of Cahar, and the Ming general Kong Youde (?–1652).³² In 1634 Hongtaiji changed the name of Shenyang to Mukden in Manchu and Shengjing (lit. “prosperous capital”) in Chinese, and the following year he in- structed his people to call the country “Manzhou” (M., Manju; “the Manchu state”), not “Jurchen” or other names. The regime’s institutional construction was thus facilitated by a clear ethnic identification, but the rationale behind this framework focused more on politico-cultural factors than on ethnic ones. In this pe- riod, Jin officials, particularly those who were Han Chinese, started to address Hongtaiji as “emperor” (Ch., huangshang, or huangdi). Some suggested that Hong- taiji perform conventional rituals established by the Han Dynasty, through which he would claim to be the Son of Heaven in the Chinese sense. More signif- icantly, these officials invoked the principles of the civilized–barbarian distinction to brand the Ming “southern barbarians” (Ch., manzi) and those Chinese who surrendered to the Jin “Han Chinese barbarians” (Ch., hanyi), thereby appropriating and completely reversing the Ming’s language regarding the center of the world.³³ With this change in its worldview, the Manchu regime began to play the role of the exclusive institutional agent of the Mandate of Heaven, to which “all barbar- ians in the four quarters of the world willingly come in submission” (Ch., siyi xianfu). When the Ming generals Kong Youde and Geng Zhongming (1604–49) sur- rendered to Hongtaiji in 1633, the Jin jubilantly described the event as “people from afar willingly coming to our court for civilization” (Ch., yuanren laigui).³⁴ The euphoric adoption of this phrase demonstrated that the Manchu regime was purposely constructing its identity as the center of the world, with cultural superiority over “barbarians from afar” or on its periphery, which now included the Ming.³⁵ These momentous changes in the Jin’s political discourse were rooted in ortho- dox Chinese political theory as articulated in Confucian classics, such as Analects of Confucius (Ch., Lunyu) and Doctrine of the Mean (Ch., Zhongyong), and they demonstrate the deep significance of both the Sinicization of the Manchu regime and the barbarianization of others by the regime. The use of Chinese political rhetoric of this sort was no mere imitation of the Ming’s discourse to please Hongtaiji. Rather, it was aimed at achieving a political goal by transforming the regime into a new center of gravity in a Jin-dominated world, a goal that the young and vernacular Manchu language—including the New Manchu (Ma., ice manju hergen) developed in 1632—was incapable of securing. The Manchu regime conducted its relations with Chosŏn in accordance with hierarchical principles within a quasi-Zongfan system. Some historians have ar- gued that at this time the Manchus derived their political concepts of imperial rule mainly from their Mongol allies rather than from the Chinese.³⁶ Yet the transformation of the Manchu regime’s understanding of its relations with neighboring nomadic and Confucian states, which took place concurrently
with the transformation of the Manchu-Chosŏn relationship, indicates that the regime was enthusiastically constructing a new politico-cultural self-identity by appropriating and exploiting the Chinese politico-cultural discourse. Scholars have also long debated the theory of the Sinicization or Sinification of the Manchus. The mainstream explorations of this issue so far have focused either on how the Han Chinese culturally assimilated the Manchus or on how the Manchus tried to retain their ethnic identity.³⁷ What this chapter explores is how the Manchu regime, rather than the ethnic Manchus, promoted itself as the exclusively civilized Middle Kingdom—Zhongguo—and it is in this sense that I use the term “Sinicization” in this book. The Manchu Regime’s Strategic Goal of Transforming into Zhongguo While the quasi-Zongfan discourse helped to refashion the self-image of the Manchu regime along Chinese lines, the Manchu language offered an international setting for this reconstruction by framing the Jin’s relations with other political entities as state-to-state interactions. In Manchu records the Jin, the Ming, Chosŏn, and such Mongol polities as Korcin were all defined as gurun. The term gurun has several meanings, including “country,” “tribe,” “people of a tribe,” and “race.” Two of these meanings are primary: “people” and “country.” For instance, amba gurun could mean “big country” or “adults,” and ajige gurun could mean “small country” or “children,” while haha gurun refers to “men” and hehe gurun refers to “women.”³⁸ In political contexts, gurun denoted primarily “country,” as in Aisin gurun (the country of the Jin), Nikan gurun (the country of the Han Chinese, that is, the Ming), Daiming gurun (the country of the Great Ming), Solho gurun or Coohiyan gurun (the country of Chosŏn), Korcin gurun (the country of the Korcin Mongols), and Cahar gurun (the country of the Cahar Mongols).³⁹ The Mongolian equivalent of the term in the Mongol records of the day is ulus (country).⁴⁰ The Manchu rulers drew clear geographical, social, and cultural lines between the Manchu regime and other countries, even as they emphasized common- alities. Nurhaci underlined to the Kalka Mongols in 1619 that “the Ming and Chosŏn have different languages, but they share the same styles in clothing and hair, so the two countries look like a single country; similarly, our two countries look like a single country.”⁴¹ The consciousness of being a state became progressively more transparent in the regime’s political norms, in particular in the Chinese-language records. In 1628, for instance, Hongtaiji called the Cahar Mongols a “dif- ferent country” (Ma., encu gurun; Ch., yiguo) and a “far country” (Ch., yuanguo).⁴² The following year Hongtaiji treated the prince of “the country of Korcin” to the music and dances of “four countries,” including the Jin, the Korcin Mongols, the Ming, and Chosŏn.⁴³ In a letter to Ming officials in 1632, Hongtaiji named his country and the Cahar Mongols as two “countries outside of the border [of the Ming]” (Ma., jasei tulergi gurun; Ch., bianwai zhi guo).⁴⁴ The new political discourse fundamentally transformed the worldview of the Manchu regime from within by representing the regime as a state at the center of a multistate community. The strategic goal of this transformation, as Ning Wanwo indicated in 1633 when he suggested that the Jin compose an institutional code (Ch., Jindian) by modifying that of the Ming, was to break with Ming conventions and “gradually develop the institutions of Zhongguo” (Ch., jianjiu Zhongguo zhi zhi). In other words, the Jin intended to develop its own “institutions of Zhongguo” to replace those of the Ming. According to Ning, only in this way could the regime manage its great enterprise after conquering the “place of the southern barbarians” (Ch., manzi difang), that is, the Ming. Ning justified his proposal by stressing that “a new monarch and his officials must have their own institutional works.”⁴⁵ This strategic plan shows that Zhongguo, as a politico-cultural identity, was available for the Manchu regime to embrace and claim. What is more, it suggests that control over the central plain (Ch., Zhongyuan) was not necessarily a prerequisite for a regime to claim to be Zhongguo, as has been assumed. Nurhaci wished to preserve the ways of his ethnic nation, or Manchuness, by enshrining Shanhai Pass and the Liao River as the border between “the Chinese and Jurchen countries” (Ma., nikan, jušen meni meni gurun). He tried to avoid “turning to the Chinese way” (Ma., nikan i doro de dosimbi; Ch., xiao hansu)—or becoming Sinicized—as the Liao, the Jin, and the Yuan Dynasties had done after their founders left their own homelands for the “Chinese inner land” (Ma., nikan
i dorgi bade; Ch., handi); they had “changed ways and all became Chinese” (Ma., doro forgošoro jakade, gemu nikan ohobi).⁴⁶ Although the Manchu leaders exhorted their ethnic cohorts to keep to the “old way” (Ma., fe doro) in daily life by wearing traditional garb and practicing Manchu archery and horseback riding, the regime was unavoidably following the “Chinese way” in its rapid transformation in the 1630s. The Manchu regime could have become Zhongguo even if it had remained in Manchuria and not crossed the Great Wall in 1644. By employing the newly adopted Chinese political discourse, the Manchu regime gradually absorbed the Chinese political philosophy of the Zongfan order into its understanding of its place within the constellation of polities. Aside from the Ming, other countries served as the Jin’s outer fan by presenting tribute to the khan, who occupied a position akin to that of a Chinese emperor. This quasi-Zongfan system matured to the point that in 1636, in their Chinese letter to Chosŏn, forty-nine princes of sixteen countries of Mongols under the Jin’s leadership termed themselves “Mongols as the outer fan of the Jin” (Ch., Jinguo waifan menggu), equivalent to the Manchu term tulergi goloi monggo (“Mongols as the outer fan ”).⁴⁷ In the same year, the Jin founded Menggu yamen (M., Monggo jurgan, lit. “the ministry of Mongolian affairs”) on the basis of Chinese civil administrational concepts. As an institution parallel to the Ministry of Rites, this ministry enabled the regime to transform its relations with the Mongols and to build and govern an emerging empire. The construction of this quasi-Zongfan discourse occurred primarily within the Jin’s borders, but the Jin found Chosŏn the best external resource to support its discursive revolution. Within the bilateral relationship, the Jin held the role of the supreme power, and it converted Chosŏn from a younger brother into a subor- dinate or outer fan. Students of Sino-Korean relations tend to assume that the Manchus adopted hierarchical discourse in 1637 after the second Manchu invasion, when the Manchu side imposed clear Zongfan terms on Chosŏn. However, in practice the process had begun much earlier. In the 1630s the scholars of the Jin had mined Chinese history for intellectual resources with which to manipulate the civilized–barbarian distinction in order to establish the centrality of the Jin. Within the Zongfan framework, the “central civilized country” (Ch., Huaxia) and its counterpart, “barbarians,” were the two key concepts addressing the status of the Middle Kingdom and that of its outer fan. The two terms were derived from the notion of all-under-Heaven, developed in the Xia (ca. 2070–1600 BC), Shang (1600–1046 BC), and Zhou periods, through which the three dynasties sought to legitimize their rule as divine. At the same time, the political entities spanning China’s lands identified xia (referring not to the Xia Dynasty but to a larger area in which the regime once resided) as the symbol of a civilized commu- nity possessing the Mandate of Heaven, namely, Zhongguo, Zhongyuan (the central plain), or Zhongtu (the central lands). At that time, the term “barbarians” re- ferred primarily to groups that resided along the periphery of the central plain and were reluctant to identify and embrace the concept of “civilized China,” as exemplified by the state relationship between the Qin and the Chu in the third century BC.⁴⁸ The originally geographic notion of “barbarian” became an instrument used by political forces to deprecate their antagonists during the movement of “revering the court of the Zhou and expelling the barbarians” (Ch., zunzhou rangyi) in the Eastern Zhou (770–256 BC), a chaotic time that led Confucius (551–479 BC) to call for restoring the ideal order of “proper conduct” (Ch., li) of the Western Zhou. Due to the fierce interstate rivalries, the civilized– barbarian distinction evolved into a politico-cultural ideology that the dynastic regimes of China contin- uously reinterpreted for the next two thousand years, until 1911. After the Han Dynasty, with the official institutionalization of Confucianism and the expansion of the concept of all-under-Heaven, the civilized–barbarian dis- tinction became a critical theoretical framework for the Chinese court’s management of its foreign relations. As “northern barbarians” gained ascendancy in the Northern Song (960–1127), the distinction presented itself as an essential cultural instrument with which Chinese elites endowed certain regimes with the pedi- gree of “legitimate historical narratives” (Ch., zhengshi) by expelling competing polities from these narratives.⁴⁹ Some scholars, such as Shi Jie (1005–45), the au- thor of A Treatise on the Middle Kingdom (Ch., Zhongguo lun), and Ouyang Xiu (1007–72), the author of A Treatise on Orthodox Legitimacy (Ch., Zhengtong lun),
depicted the Song as the exclusive civilized center of the world and the polities on the Song’s northern border as uncivilized. One of the most influential histories, A Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government (Ch., Zizhi tongjian), edited by Sima Guang (1019–86), drew a clear lineage connecting states identified as “China” from 403 BC to AD 959. The efforts of these scholars to conceptualize the narrative of orthodox legitimacy eventually paid off, for their rhetoric triumphed over that of the northern regimes, especially when Neo-Confucianism, created and elaborated by such Song intellectual vanguards as Cheng Hao (1032–85), Cheng Yi (1033–1107), and Zhu Xi (1130–1200), became China’s official ideology under the Yuan Dynasty. This intellectual history can help explain why the official historical narrative of the People’s Republic of China still celebrates the Song for its legitimate status as Zhongguo and marginalizes the Liao, the Xixia, and the Jin as regimes established by “ethnic minorities” (Ch., shaoshu minzu). It was against this historical back- drop that the scholars of the Manchu regime in the 1630s began to construct the regime’s orthodox legitimacy, which laid the foundation for the Manchu enter- prise of governing a vast empire as the legitimate Middle Kingdom, Zhongguo. The Practices of the Manchu-Chosŏn Quasi-Zongfan Order The Manchu regime implemented its quasi-Zongfan discourse through the rituals that accompanied the exchange of emissaries with Chosŏn by imitating Ming- Chosŏn contacts. In Mukden, the Korean emissaries kowtowed five times to Hongtaiji. They were comfortably lodged in the city and enjoyed a welcome banquet (K., hama yŏn, lit. “banquet for getting off a horse”) and a farewell banquet (K., sangma yŏn, lit. “banquet for getting on a horse”). Hongtaiji dispensed gifts to the Korean king, emissaries, interpreters, and servants.⁵⁰ In exchange, the Jin sent Manchu emissaries to Hansŏng in the spring and autumn of every year. Before they entered the Korean capital, the Manchu emissaries were housed at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country (K., Mohwa gwan), a place that had previ- ously accommodated Ming emissaries. The emissaries also had an audience with the king in the palace and were treated to official welcome and farewell ban- quets. Although Chosŏn did not want to treat the Manchu representatives like those of the Ming, the general ritual procedures of greeting were practically iden- tical. The Manchu emissaries lacked only their Ming counterparts’ standing as “imperial envoy” or “Heavenly envoy.” This de facto Zongfan relationship conflicted with the de jure one of equality between the two brothers, a contradiction strikingly manifested in the different for- mats of their sovereign letters to each other. In its letters to the Jin, Chosŏn placed the two sides on a fully equal political plane, which was hierarchically lower than the status of the Ming. According to the Chinese convention, whenever the characters for Heaven or the Ming emperor appeared, they were placed at the top of a new line, two character spaces higher than the characters for Chosŏn and the first characters of other lines. This honorific elevation acknowledged the em- peror as the supreme human agent of Heaven with the highest spiritual position in the world. Hongtaiji also used honorific elevation in his letters, but he adopted a different arrangement of the hierarchy, as shown by his letters to the Ming general Yuan Chonghuan (1584–1630). Hongtaiji divided the hierarchy into four lev- els, among which his position was lower than that of Heaven and the Ming emperor but higher than that of Ming officials (see figure 1.1). For his part, General Yuan followed Ming custom in his letters to Hongtaiji (see figure 1.2). Frustrated by Yuan’s usage, Hongtaiji exclaimed that he was “the monarch or the khan of another country” (Ma., encu gurun i ejen han) and “son of Heaven and the Buddha” (Ma., abka fucihi i jui). He declared that he would not accept any letters from the Ming that addressed him with a status lower than or even equal to that of the Ming officials.⁵¹ Nevertheless, in his communications with the king of Chosŏn, Hongtaiji was more pragmatic, addressing the king as a near equal in order to avoid offending the Korean monarch (see figure 1.3). The king followed the same format in his responses to Hongtaiji but avoided mention of the imposed brotherhood (see figure 1.4). Although Hongtaiji called the king “younger brother,” the king never referred to Hongtaiji as “elder brother.” When Hongtaiji questioned the king about this discrepancy in 1629, the king shifted to friend-to-friend expressions: “The king of the country of Chosŏn,” he wrote, “presents this letter to the khan of the country of the Jin” (K., Chosŏn
kugwang pongsŏ Kŭmguk han; Ma., Coohiyan gurun i wang ni bithe, Aisin gurun i han de unggimbi). This usage matched Hongtaiji’s wording: “The khan of the country of the Jin sends this letter to the king of the country of Chosŏn” (Ma., Aisin gurun i han i bithe, Coohiyan gurun i wang de unggimbi). Later, the king changed the verb “present” (K., pong; Ma., jafambi) to “send” (K., ch’i; Ma., unggimbi), eliminating the hierarchical connotations of the former term. This subtle change provoked the Jin, but Chosŏn explained that both terms were used between “neighboring countries.”⁵² To the Jin, Chosŏn’s pronounced pro-Ming attitude meant that the brotherhood was unstable. The Jin’s security would not be guaranteed so long as Chosŏn was a loyal subject of the Ming. The only way to solve this problem, the Jin believed, was with another war against Chosŏn.
FIGURE 1.1. The format of Hongtaiji’s letters to Yuan Chonghuan in 1627. In this and the three figures that follow, the Arabic numerals represent horizontal lines from the top down, the English letters represent vertical lines, and the direction of the writing is from right to left. “X” represents a Chinese character. MWLD, 821, 847; MBRT, 4:28, 72. FIGURE 1.2. The format of Yuan Chonghuan’s letters to Hongtaiji in 1627. MWLD, 821; MBRT, 4:28. FIGURE 1.3. The format of Hongtaiji’s letters to the king of Chosŏn, 1627–36. Kakyu gobu .
FIGURE 1.4. The format of the letters of the king of Chosŏn to Hongtaiji, 1627–36. Chosŏnguk raesoȈ bu, vol. 1. From Elder Brother to Father of Chosŏn: The Second Manchu Invasion Manchu-Chosŏn Conflicts over Orthodox Legitimacy In the middle of the 1630s, many Han Chinese and Manchu officials of the Jin sought to persuade Hongtaiji to take the title of emperor. On February 4, 1636, these officials presented memorials to prompt Hongtaiji to follow the Mandate of Heaven by claiming the emperorship. Following Chinese ritual conventions, Hongtaiji ostensibly declined and suggested his officials send emissaries to Chosŏn to discuss the matter with the king, his younger brother.⁵³ Hongtaiji’s true motivation, as the Korean official Hong Ik-han (1586–1637) shrewdly recognized, was to use Chosŏn’s identity as Little China to assert before other countries that Chosŏn revered him as the Son of Heaven. The Manchu officials Inggūldai and Mafuta (?–1640) arrived in Hansŏng on March 30, along with forty-seven Mongol princes, thirty generals, and ninety-eight soldiers. They brought with them five letters. The first three letters extended Hongtaiji’s condolences on the death of the queen of Chosŏn. The fourth letter, writ- ten by eight Manchu princes (Ma., hošoi beile) and seventeen high-ranking Manchu ministers (Ma., gūsai amban), and the fifth letter, by forty-nine Mongol princes under the Chinese name Jinguo waifan menggu (Mongols as the outer fan of the Jin), aimed to persuade the king to submit a memorial urging Hongtaiji to follow the Mandate of Heaven (Ma., Abkai gūnin) and to claim the “great title” (Ma., amba gebu)—namely, that of emperor. The letters emphasized that the Jin now pos- sessed “virtues” (Ma., erdemu) that enabled it to manage the world.⁵⁴ But on March 31, 139 Korean Confucian students presented the king with a petition, calling on him “to kill the barbarian emissaries and burn the barbarian letters.” Inggūldai and his followers were thrown into panic and fled the city.⁵⁵ Chosŏn’s stance was strengthened when the king dispatched Na Tŏk-hŏn as the spring emissary and Yi Kwak as the response emissary to Mukden in late April. On May 15 the Jin held a grand ceremony in which Hongtaiji assumed the title “emperor of lenience, kindheartedness, beneficence, and brilliance” (Ma., gosin onco huwaliyasun enduringge han; Ch., kuan wen ren sheng huangdi) and adopted the regnal title Chongde (Ma., Wesihun erdemungge, lit. “worshiping virtues”). The Jin renamed itself the “Country of the Great Qing” (Ma., Daicing gurun; Ch., Da Qing guo). Gathering on Hongtaiji’s left and right flanks, the Jin’s Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese officials knelt down three times, each time making three prostrations (Ma., ilan jergi niyakūrafi uyun jergi hengkilembi; Ch., san gui jiu koutou)—the highest level of kowtow during the Qing period. Although Na and Yi had performed a ceremony of four kowtows before Hongtaiji upon their arrival, they called this second ceremony a “usurpation of the imperial title” (K., ch’amho) and refused to perform it, expressing their strong opposition to Hongtaiji’s political ambitions.⁵⁶ Chosŏn was the only Confucian country that lay beyond the Manchu regime’s political control but maintained regular and official diplomatic communications with it. Since Hongtaiji had made his claim to be the Son of Heaven in observance of proper Chinese conduct, he desperately needed the sup- port of Chosŏn to counteract the designation of the Manchus as barbarians and to legitimize his emperorship in the Chinese sense. The ritual conflict with the Korean emissaries thus posed a grave identity crisis for him. Without endorsement from Chosŏn, the Manchu regime’s political transformation would remain largely confined to its borders and would not significantly influence regional politics. Hongtaiji sent Na and Yi back to Chosŏn with two Chinese-language letters to the king. In the letters Hongtaiji called himself “emperor of the country of the Great Qing” (Ch., Da Qing guo huangdi) rather than “khan of the Jin” and referred to Chosŏn as “your country” (Ch., erguo) instead of “your honorable country” (Ch., guiguo), signaling the end of the bilateral brotherly relationship. Invoking the time-honored notion that “the Heaven does not belong to one person, but to all people under the Heaven” (Ma., abkai fejergi emu niyalmai abkai fejergi waka, abkai fejergi niyalmai abkai fejergi), Hongtaiji sought to demonstrate that his regime could govern the space of all-under-Heaven (Ch., tianxia; Ma., abkai fejergi) by following the precedent set by previous dynasties: namely, the Liao, which had been founded by the “northeastern barbarians” (Ch., dongbei yi; Ma., dergi amargi jušen); the Jin, founded by the “eastern barbarians” (Ch., dongyi; Ma., dergi jušen); and the Yuan, established by the “northern barbarians” (Ch., beiyi; Ma., amargi monggo, “northern Mongols”). By chronicling the rise and fall of these dynasties, Hongtaiji located the Qing, the dynasty of the Manchu “barbarians,” within this lineage of rulership, with himself as the Son of Heaven. The Qing’s rule was justified, he argued, because the Qing possessed the virtue that the Ming had lost.⁵⁷ This assertion was based on the Chinese political view that “the Great Heaven has no partial affections and it helps only the virtuous” (Ch., huangtian wu qin, wei de shi fu), a theory articulated in The Classic of History (Ch., Shangshu), which had endowed more than thirty dynasties with legitimacy. In short, Hongtaiji hoped that Chosŏn would become the Great Qing’s outer fan, just as it had served the previous dynasties of China. Chosŏn became the first external target of the Qing’s new, Qing-centric Zongfan doctrine. Yet Hongtaiji’s position was unpopular in Chosŏn because it con- flicted with the orthodox legitimacy on which the Confucian country based its political and social principles. With the exception of several high-ranking officials who preferred the Manchus, the majority of the ruling elite resolutely called for “revering China and expelling the barbarians” (K., chon Chungguk, yang yichŏk) in accordance with “the doctrine of revering the Zhou Dynasty” (K., chonju ŭiri).⁵⁸ In the face of tremendous pressure, the king reaffirmed that Chosŏn would not en- dorse Hongtaiji’s emperorship. The Qing thus declared war for the sake of its name and legitimacy. The Establishment of Manchu-Chosŏn Zongfan Relations On December 28, 1636, Qing troops attacked Chosŏn. They captured Hansŏng on January 9, 1637, without encountering strong resistance. The king had escaped
to Namhan Mountain Fortress with the crown prince (K., seja; Ch., shizi; Ma., šidz) and some officials, while the remaining royal family members and other offi- cials fled to Kanghwa Island. The Qing forces surrounded the Namhan Fortress and, as their precondition for negotiations, demanded that the king send the crown prince as hostage. The king refused and mobilized his forces to resist the invasion and protect the “great justice under Heaven” (K., ch’ŏnha taeŭi). While Hongtaiji marched on the fortress with reinforcements on January 19, the king and his officials performed ceremonies to celebrate the birthday of Emperor Chongzhen of the Ming. Yet the king realized that Chosŏn’s fate was now at a crossroads. Ch’oe Myŏng-gil (1586–1647), a minister who had assisted the king in assuming the throne in the coup of 1623 and served as the king’s close adviser since that time, argued for peaceful negotiation with the Qing as he had done in 1627, when the Manchus invaded Chosŏn for the first time. Ch’oe’s approach was not welcomed by the majority of his colleagues, but it was undeniably prag- matic. On January 26, the lunar New Year, the king, fulfilling Chosŏn’s duty as a subject of the Ming, performed vested rituals in the direction of Beijing. Once the ceremony was over, the king sent two officials to negotiate with the Qing. Two days later the king presented a letter to Hongtaiji in which he called Hongtaiji “the emperor of lenience, kindheartedness, beneficence, and brilliance of the country of the Great Qing” and referred to the Qing as the “big country” (K., taeguk) and to Chosŏn as the “small country” (K., sobang). The presentation of the letter was defined as “submitting the letter to the higher authority” (K., songsŏ).⁵⁹ Hongtaiji insisted that the king should surrender to him in person, so the two sides negotiated for two more weeks, during which the Qing troops shelled the fortress and defeated Chosŏn reinforcements sent from provinces. On February 15 the king presented another letter, in which he called Hongtaiji “Your Majesty” and himself a “subordinate” (see figure 1.5). He dated the letter using the Qing reg- nal title “Chongde.”⁶⁰ His letter suggested that the king had decided to surrender before Kanghwa Island was conquered.⁶¹ On February 17 the king submitted a sovereign letter to Hongtaiji, declaring that Chosŏn would “present the humble palace memorial [K., p’yo; Ch., biao] as the subordinate and serve as a fan [K., pŏnbang; Ch., fanbang] of the Great Qing forever,” while “all rituals about serving the big country would be performed in the vested format.”⁶² On February 22, 1637, Inggūldai brought an imperial edict to the king and asked the Korean officials to perform the same rituals that they had done when receiv- ing edicts from the “southern dynasty” (the Ming). This occasion marked the first time that the Qing replaced the Ming in ritual exchanges with Chosŏn on Ko- rean territory. In his edict, Hongtaiji listed ten terms of submission, among which two stood out. First, the king had to surrender to the Qing the book of imperial investiture and the seal that he had received from the Ming, stop communicating with the Ming, and begin to use the regnal title of the Qing instead of that of the Ming to indicate dates in all documents. Second, the king had to dispatch officials to the Qing every year to bring “humble palace memorials,” present gifts, and perform rituals to celebrate occasions such as the winter solstice, the New Year, the birthdays of the emperor, empress, and crown prince, and any good news for the Qing, and to extend condolences on the loss of members of the Qing’s royal house. The format of these memorials was required to follow the established for- mat of Chosŏn’s memorials to the Ming. The rituals of receiving imperial decrees, accommodating imperial envoys in Chosŏn, and paying formal visits to the Qing emperor through tributary emissaries were to dovetail precisely with the “established way of the Ming country” (Ch., Mingguo jiuli). Hongtaiji also listed the items and amounts of the tributes required of Chosŏn and specified that tribute submissions ought to begin in 1639.⁶³
FIGURE 1.5. The format of the king’s letters to Hongtaiji in February 1637. The Arabic numerals represent horizontal lines from the top down, the English letters represent vertical lines, and the direction of the writing is from right to left. X represents a Chinese character. Chosŏnguk raesoȈ bu, 2:26–38. The king unconditionally accepted all of Hongtaiji’s terms. On February 24, 1637, he presented himself before Hongtaiji at Samjŏndo (lit. “three fields ferry”), near the Hangang River, where the Qing had built a massive altar for Hongtaiji to receive the king’s surrender. During the ceremony, presided over by the Qing’s Ministry of Rites, the king knelt down three times, each time bowing his head three times before the emperor, after which he handed in his seal issued by the Ming. This ceremony marked the official establishment of the Zongfan relationship between the Qing and Chosŏn, as the king confirmed in his palace memorial to Hongtaiji on December 16, 1637.⁶⁴ The Qing’s forces soon returned to Mukden, taking the crown prince of Chosŏn, Yi Wang (1612–45), and the king’s second son, Yi Ho (King Hyojong, 1619–59), as hostages. Beginning on March 24, 1637, Chosŏn used the regnal title of the Qing to express the date, thus incorporating the country into the Qing’s temporal realm.⁶⁵ Chosŏn became the Qing’s outer fan . The establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship, which replaced the Ming-Chosŏn relationship that had been officially institutionalized in 1401, was extremely significant for the Qing. The Ming’s passionate endorsement of the Zhou Zongfan system meant that under the Qing, the system was likewise di- rectly connected with the classical and ideal tenets of the Zhou. As its political rhetoric developed after 1644, the Manchu court began to define its relationship with Chosŏn’s court by using more sophisticated terms that were associated with the Zhou Zongfan system. As early as 1649, Emperor Shunzhi, in his imperial mandate to invest King Hyojong, emphasized that Chosŏn served as an “outer fan ” for the “central court” (Ch., wangshi).⁶⁶ In 1659 Emperor Shunzhi began his imperial mandate to invest King Hyŏngjong with the traditional term “dividing cogongrass” (Ch., fenmao), a metaphor for the Zhou’s Zongfan investiture.⁶⁷ Meanwhile, the Manchu court came to define Chosŏn as a “princely submission” (Ch., houfu; Ma., jecen i golo) according to the conventional theory of the “five submissions” (Ch., wufu) of the Zhou.⁶⁸ This definition equated the status of the king with that of China’s princely minister, governor-general, and governor.⁶⁹ Along the same lines, the Qing side, emperors and officials alike, regarded Korean emissaries as “ministers of ministers of the outer fan ” (Ch., waifan peichen).⁷⁰ These established Zongfan tenets determined the familistic nature of the Qing-Chosŏn relationship, which crystallized in a crisis of kingship in 1768. In August of that year, Yi Gŭm (King Yŏngjo) asked Emperor Qianlong to invest his grandson Yi San (later known as Chŏngjo) as the crown successor to the Chosŏn king- ship in the wake of the deaths of Yi Gŭm’s two sons, including the crown prince. Because the Qing court had never before encountered this situation, Emperor Qianlong instructed the Grand Secretariat (Ch., Neige) and the Ministry of Rites to consult Confucian books and historical records in search of appropriate prece- dents for the title of “crown grandson” (Ch., shisun). The ministry cited Confucius’s interpretations in The Book of Rites (Ch., Liji) and historical precedents ranging from the Liu Song Dynasty (420–79) to the Ming Dynasty pertaining to the investment of a vassal’s grandson as crown grandson. Stressing that “the outer fan is fundamentally the same as Zongfan,” the ministry recommended that the emperor invest Yi San as the crown grandson, and the emperor did so.⁷¹ As the Ming had done, the Qing regarded Chosŏn as an extended royal family member of the Middle Kingdom where the patriarch—the Son of Heaven—resided. This ideology continued to exert profound influence over Qing-Chosŏn relations in the nineteenth century. In 1882, under the Qing’s supervision and medi- ation, Chosŏn signed a treaty with the United States that portrayed Chosŏn as an independent state with a sovereign equal to the American president. But regard- less of the treaty’s legal implications based on international law, in 1883 the Chinese official Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), who had negotiated the 1882 treaty with the United States on Chosŏn’s behalf as governor-general of Zhili, superintendent of trade for the northern ports of China (Ch., Beiyang tongshang dachen, here- after “Beiyang superintendent”), and China’s de facto foreign minister, cited the Western Zhou’s Zongfan tenets to declare that the king was an “outer vassal” (Ch., wai zhuhou) of the Son of Heaven in China. Li further pointed out that the king was equal to China’s governors-general and provincial governors, who were “inner vassals” (Ch., nei zhuhou), while the status of lower-ranking Korean officials corresponded to that of their Chinese counterparts.⁷² In 1886, when Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), Li’s protégé, who resided in Chosŏn as the Chinese imperial resident, asked Li what level of ritual he should perform in front of the king, Li replied that it would be courteous enough for Yuan to follow the rituals used by Chinese provincial officials when visiting first-degree princes (Ch., qinjunwang).⁷³ On the Korean side, the king, in a pre-1894 humble memorial to Emperor Guangxu, still referred to Chosŏn as China’s “princely submission.”⁷⁴ In their dealings with each other in the late nineteenth century, both China and Korea looked to Zongfan precedents from the Western Zhou down through the Ming, and their country-to-country contacts were subordinate to their familistic court-to-court hierarchy. All of these stories started in 1637, when the Qing formalized its Zongfan relationship with Chosŏn. At this point it is necessary to explain further why this book prefers the Chinese term “Zongfan” over the oft-used English renderings “tribute system” or “trib- utary system.” In the twentieth century, the promulgation of the term “tribute system,” together with the concepts “suzerain” and “vassal,” owed a great debt to the popularity of a more neutral phrase, “Chinese world order,” proposed by the American historian John King Fairbank. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, Fair- bank prompted a constellation of historians and political scientists to explore the rationale behind China’s foreign relations in the late imperial period. Although Fairbank was aware of the complexity of Sinocentric cosmopolitanism, or “Sinocentrism,” the term “Chinese world order,” which he used broadly to denote this system and to highlight its diversity, became a rough equivalent of “tribute system.” Acceptance of this English rendering has allowed scholars in a variety of fields to treat it as a counterpart to “treaty system” or “treaty port system.” Some scholars have questioned the appositeness of the terms “tributary system” and “suzerain-vassal relations” and criticized them as “a nineteenth- and twentieth-century reinterpretation of an older form of symbolically asymmetric interstate rela- tions,” while others, likewise seeking to avoid the possible misunderstandings caused by English terminology, have proposed new terms, such as “Pax Sinica,” in a world history context.⁷⁵ But their combined efforts have not changed the entrenched renderings or paradigm, and the conventional English parlance still
profoundly influences scholars’ understanding of late imperial China’s foreign relations.⁷⁶ An underlying problem with the term “tribute system,” as chapter 2 shows, is that it can convey only some of the connotations of the comprehensive Zongfan system—namely, chaogong, or sending emissaries to pay tribute to China, the perennial activity that was the most sensational and visible part of the regular ritual contacts between Qing China and its fan. The term “tribute system” thus trims the entire mechanism down to a Sinocentric trade structure. As Peter C. Perdue points out in his study of Qing-Zunghar relations, “Overly simplistic generalizations about the Qing ‘tribute system’ tend to single out one trading relationship as the orthodox, normative one, neglecting the great diversity of ritual, economic, and diplomatic conditions found in the Qing trading regime as a whole.”⁷⁷ The submission of tribute should not be used loosely as a master concept to represent the entire structure and its core nature. This is not to suggest, however, that the term “tribute system” has no analytical utility as a conceptual interpretive tool. This is clear in the debate over the question of when the practices of the Sinocentric order became as mature, institutional, and systematic as they were in the Ming and Qing periods.⁷⁸ Cherishing the Small Country: The Qing’s Construction of Its Zhongguo Identity The Qing’s Transformation into the “Big Country” Within the new Zongfan relationship, the Qing was Chosŏn’s monarch and the patriarch of the big family principally consisting of the Qing, Chosŏn, and the Mongol states. Given its supreme authority, the Qing could use the subordination of Chosŏn to its advantage. The first and most direct effect of the relationship was the formation of a new military alliance between the two countries. By conquering Chosŏn, the Qing reinforced its home front in the war with the Ming by eliminating the potential military threat on its eastern flank. It also gained material assistance from Chosŏn in the form of warhorses, grain, warships, cannons, and soldiers. Two months after Chosŏn’s subordination, the Manchu forces conquered Ka Island, destroying the last Ming military base in Chosŏn. In the next few years, a number of Korean soldiers, particularly gunners, were forced to join the Manchus in their fight against the Ming and to garrison Jinzhou and other cities newly conquered by the Qing in Manchuria.⁷⁹ By transforming its relationship with Chosŏn into one between a monarch and a subordinate, or between a father and a son, the Qing obtained political legit- imacy from Chosŏn, a Confucian country beyond the Qing’s geographical borders but within its political and cultural realm. Given that the Chinese perceived their Zongfan relationships with other countries or political entities within a model centered on China as the Middle Kingdom, the establishment of the Qing- Chosŏn Zongfan relationship defined the Qing as the Middle Kingdom. In other words, the identities of both China and the countries on its periphery within the Zongfan framework were mutually dependent and constitutive. This rationale provided the Qing with the political and cultural foundations that it desperately needed to legitimize its centrality in the Chinese world. In practice, the change of the Qing’s position was materially corroborated by the intensive bilateral exchange of missions between 1637 and 1643. On May 13, 1637, Chosŏn sent its first tributary mission to Mukden, and in the documents submitted to the Qing the Korean side called the city “capital” (K., Kyŏngsa), a term previously reserved for Beijing. This terminological choice indicated that, at least on the surface, Chosŏn acknowledged Mukden as the new political center of the world.⁸⁰ The mission had 315 members, including three primary members: an envoy, an associate envoy, and a secretary. After traveling 517 miles along the con- ventional overland tributary route between Hansŏng and Beijing, the mission arrived in Mukden on July 8.⁸¹ The next day the Korean officials appeared before Hongtaiji to perform the highest level of kowtow. During the imperial audience, the Qing’s officials read the king’s humble memorials, written in the hierarchical format once used for the Ming emperor. By praising the admirable virtues of the “big country” that “brought Chosŏn to life again,” the text of the humble
memorials endowed the Qing with the position of the Middle Kingdom, adding that “all far countries on the periphery [of the Qing] have willingly subordinated themselves” (K., hwangbok hambin) and lauding the Qing for its virtuous act of “cherishing the small.” The Qing’s position was confirmed by the Qing itself in the emperor’s edict to the king, which defined the relationship clearly with reference to orthodox Zongfan principles such as “serving the great” and “cherishing the small.” Chosŏn became a “far country,” a “small country,” and the “remote land” on the periphery of the new civilized center.⁸² This framing of the two coun- tries’ mutually constitutive identities consigned Chosŏn to the category of barbarians surrounding the civilized Middle Kingdom of the Qing. At the same time, the frequent visits to Mukden by tributary emissaries from the Mongols and other ethnic-minority polities whose affairs were under the man- agement of the Mongolian Superintendency highlighted the spread of the Qing-centric Zongfan circle. For the previous two decades, the Manchu regime had gradually eroded the Ming’s Zongfan network at the periphery and used the dislodged parts to construct a similar model with itself at the center. After establishing the Zongfan relationship with Chosŏn, the Qing sought to institutionalize its Zongfan mechanism by imitating the Ming’s policies and improving them to meet the Qing’s needs. The institutionalization of the system took place through the Ministry of Rites. Although the Ministries of Revenue, War, and Justice also ex- changed official notes with the king over cases involving financial and military assistance or illegal border crossings, the Ministry of Rites constituted the most important channel between the emissaries and the Qing court. It forwarded the king’s humble memorials to the emperor, directed the emissaries’ visits, treated the emissaries to banquets, accommodated them at a dedicated residence in Mukden for forty days, forwarded imperial edicts to them, and issued official re- sponse notes to the king. With the ministry’s guidance, the Korean emissaries performed the highest level of kowtow to the emperor, presented tributes, and re- ceived imperial edicts and gifts. These highly programmed ritual practices demonstrated, institutionalized, and consolidated the two sides’ bilateral relationship and strict hierarchy. To formalize the Zongfan relationship, the Qing sent ethnic Manchu emissaries to Chosŏn to invest the king and other core members of the royal family with certain titles. On January 4, 1638, the first imperial mission led by Inggūldai, Mafuta, and Daiyun arrived in Hansŏng to officially invest the king. The king greeted the envoys at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country outside the West Gate of the capital.⁸³ Later, in the palace, the king received the imperial edicts of investiture, a gold seal, and gifts, and performed established rituals for the occasion. The edicts stated that, with the establishment of “investiture-subordinate” (Ch., fanfeng) relations between the Qing and Chosŏn, the latter was expected to serve as a “ fan and fence” (Ch., fanping) of the Great Qing “until the Yellow River becomes as narrow as a belt and Mount Tai becomes as small as a grindstone” (Ch., daihe lishan). The emperor’s mandate noted that both sides “have an estab- lished name and status, which will regulate the relationship and hierarchy for ten thousand years” (Ch., li yishi zhi mingfen, ding wanzai zhi gangchang).⁸⁴ Fol- lowing the ceremony, the king visited the envoys at their residence, the South Palace Annex (K., Nambyŏl gung), where he treated them to banquets. All of these ritual procedures were identical to those that had been performed between Chosŏn and the Ming. The Qing’s investiture legitimatized the bilateral Zongfan rela- tionship between the two countries, an arrangement that would last for 258 years. The Establishment of the Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing In the precise spot in Samjŏndo where the Korean king had subordinated himself to Hongtaiji in 1637, the Qing forced Chosŏn to erect a stele to commemorate Hongtaiji’s achievements. Despite the Koreans’ reluctance to memorialize the humiliating invasion, the Qing continued to advance the project, and the Korean official Yi Kyŏng-sŏk (1595–1671) eventually drafted a Chinese-language inscription based on the Korean letters to the Qing side during the war.⁸⁵ After the Chinese official Fan Wencheng approved the inscription, the Qing sent interpreters to Hansŏng to translate it into Manchu and Mongolian. In 1639 the stele, inscribed in three languages, was erected as the Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing (Ma., Daicing gurun i enduringge han i gung erdemui bei; Ch.,
Da Qing huangdi gongde bei) (see figure 1.6). The inscription reviewed the history between the two countries from 1619 to 1637 from Chosŏn’s perspective and exalted the Qing’s great virtues in “bringing Chosŏn to life again.” It claimed that the king had surrendered in 1637 “not to[the Qing’s] might but to [its] virtues” (Ma., horon de gelere teile waka, erdemu de dahahangge kai), given that those virtues made “all the far [people] subordinate themselves willingly” (Ma., goroki ci aname gemu dahambi). The stele also stated that the bilateral relationship would last for ten thousand years under “the emperor’s goodness.” The most significant aspect was the official transformation of the identity of the Manchu regime as manifested in certain terms. The inscription called the Qing the “big country” (Ch., dabang, dachao; Ma., amba gurun) or the “upper country” (Ch., shangguo; Ma., dergi gurun), while terming Chosŏn the “small country” (Ch., xiaobang; Ma., ajige gurun) as well as “a faraway country.” The fact that the two countries geographically bordered each other did not prevent the Qing from redefining Chosŏn as “faraway” in the politico-cultural sense.
FIGURE 1.6. The Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing. The stele is now located in a small park next to Lotte World in Seoul. Photo taken by the author in 2015. Among these terms, which had been used between Chosŏn and the Ming and were now grafted onto the Qing-Chosŏn relationship, the Manchu phrase amba gurun (big country) was particularly significant. As a literal translation of the Chinese dabang or dachao, the term had once referred exclusively to the Ming. More importantly, as chapter 2 shows, after 1644 the Qing adopted amba gurun as a key equivalent of the Chinese terms Zhongguo (Ma., Dulimbai gurun) and Tianchao (“the Heavenly Dynasty”; Ma., abkai gurun). The inscription of the Samjŏndo stele was probably the first instance in which the Qing publicly and officially called itself amba gurun; over the following two and a half centuries, this term would refer solely to Qing China. “Cherishing Men from Afar”: Publicizing Qing Centrality, 1637–43 The Manchu invasion of 1636 and the king’s surrender to Hongtaiji, known in Chosŏn as Pyŏngja horan (lit. “the invasion of the northern barbarians in the year of Pyŏngja”), were humiliating to the Koreans and stimulated widespread anti-Manchu feeling in the country. Korean resentment is evident, for example, in an inci- dent that took place in December 1637, when the Manchu envoys visiting Chosŏn asked Korean local officials to procure courtesans (K., panggi), but the women “killed themselves to show their resistance” (K., yisa kŏchi).⁸⁶ In order to win Chosŏn’s loyalty beyond mere lip service, the Qing quickly adopted the traditional Chinese policies of “cherishing the small” and “cherishing men from afar” (Ch., huairou yuanren; Ma., goroki niyalma be bilume gosimbi).⁸⁷ In addition to providing Chosŏn’s delegation with better accommodations in Mukden and bestowing more gifts on the king and his emissaries, the Qing pro- gressively reduced the tribute required of Chosŏn beginning in the early 1640s, when the Qing controlled more resources as a result of its military triumphs over the Ming. In 1640, for instance, the Qing lowered the number of sacks of rice that Chosŏn was expected to offer as tribute from ten thousand to just one thou- sand. In 1643 the Qing further reduced the annual tribute and furthermore cut by more than half the gifts that Chosŏn gave to the Manchu envoys. Proclaiming that “the two countries have become one family,” the Shunzhi emperor also permanently abolished many tributary conventions, such as the requirement that Chosŏn provide the imperial envoys with official courtesans. These exemptions, the emperor suggested, embodied the Qing policy of “cherishing the small with benevolence.”⁸⁸ Compared with the late Ming, which tried to extract the maximum economic and military benefits from Chosŏn, the Qing took a deliberately placatory approach toward its outer fan, represented by the many exemptions. This benign policy substantially facilitated the Qing’s historical transformation into Zhongguo. The Qing was characterized more by its actions than by its pronouncements. Its policy of appealing to the subordinate country was manifested above all in its frequent contacts with Chosŏn. From 1637 to 1643, the Qing sent twelve missions and twenty-eight emissaries to Chosŏn, an average of one and a half missions per year, while Chosŏn sent fifty-six missions and 102 emissaries to the Qing, an average of seven missions per year.⁸⁹ In this context, some Koreans changed their established understandings of the Qing. In the spring of 1643, for example, Yi Chŏng-hae from Kyŏngsang Province submitted a letter to the Qing envoys in Hansŏng, volunteering to go to Mukden to serve the Qing and “our emperor” (K., a hwangje).⁹⁰ The Qing used its intensive contacts with Chosŏn as a powerful tool to manage its relations with other political entities. In 1638, a year after it converted Chosŏn from a younger brother into an outer fan, the Qing changed the Chinese name of the Mongolian Superintendency from Menggu yamen to Lifan yuan, applying the Chosŏn precedent to add the Mongols, too, to the Qing-centric family of nations as a fan. This move was part of the Manchu leaders’ project of steadily transforming Mongol conceptualizations of their position in the Qing-dominated world.⁹¹ In this sense, it could be argued that the dramatic change in the
Manchu-Mongol relationship had deep roots in the Zongfan concepts promulgated by Han Chinese officials of the Manchu regime since the early 1630s. This shift could also indicate that the Qing was streamlining the administration of its outer fan in order to strengthen its centrality and pursue an imperial enterprise beyond Manchuria.
1
CONQUERING CHOSŎN
The Rise of the Manchu Regime as the Middle Kingdom, 1616–43
As the Manchu regime consolidated its power in Manchuria between the late 1610s and the early 1640s, it reshaped the perceptions of other polities and eradicated its longstanding barbarian image. The regime derived its political and cultural resources in large part from its relations with Chosŏn, which validated and reinforced the Manchu dynasty’s position as the Middle Kingdom within the newly established multistate hierarchical system. In this process, the Manchus appropriated the Ming’s Zongfan discourse to designate other political entities as barbarians, initiating a prolonged process that I call the barbarianization of others. By crossing the Great Wall in 1644, the Manchu regime had fundamentally reconceptualized its own identity and position in the Chinese world.
Barbarians, Rebellions, and Wars
The Jurchen Uprising in Manchuria
On February 17, 1616, the lunar New Year and the first day of the Forty-Fourth Year of Wanli of the Ming Dynasty, a number of high-ranking Chinese officials assembled at the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City with tributary emissaries from Chosŏn and China’s other outer fan. They waited to enter the imperial hall to present the emperor with their congratulations on the New Year. Finally, realizing the emperor had no desire to grant them an audience, the officials and emissaries carried out their ceremonies in front of the gate.¹ This scene was not surprising, as the emperor had long been uninterested in such ceremonies. Many high-ranking officials in Beijing had not seen the hermit-like Son of Heaven for almost thirty years.² The Middle Kingdom and its lethargic human agent seemed to have fallen asleep.
The day was significant, however, in Hetuala, a small Manchurian town about seven hundred miles northeast of Beijing, where a tribe called the Jianzhou Jurchens announced the establishment of its own country under the leadership of Nurhaci (1559–1626; r. 1616–26). Proclaiming himself the brilliant khan caring for all countries/peoples (Ma., abka geren gurun be ujikini seme sindaha genggiyen han), Nurhaci accepted the congratulations of Jurchen and Mongol officials and generals, took the regnal title of Tianming (mandate of Heaven; Ma., Abkai fulingga), and named his country Houjin (the later Jin).³ He thus defined his regime as the successor to the Jin Dynasty established by the Jurchen ancestors.⁴
Nurhaci’s political ambitions extended far beyond unifying the local tribes. In May 1618 he attacked the Ming forces after announcing the Seven Grievances (Ma., Nadan amba koro; Ch., Qi dahen). Nurhaci had visited Beijing three times to present tribute and had been appointed by the Ming court to govern the Jianzhou Jurchens, whom the Ming considered northeastern barbarians (Ch., dongbei yi).⁵ In the Seven Grievances, Nurhaci identified the Jianzhou as a subordinate that had guarded the Ming’s border for generations, and declared that various conflicts between his tribe, other tribes, and the Ming’s local leaders had led to his rebellion.
The Ming was confident about suppressing Nurhaci. To do so it enlisted the aid of the tribe of Yehe, an old and powerful enemy of the Jurchens, as well as the support of Chosŏn. As a loyal fan, Chosŏn had followed the policy of serving the great (K., sadae) for more than two centuries. It regarded Nurhaci’s rebellion as intolerable and its military assistance to the Ming as a legal and moral duty (K., ŭibun). Although the king, Yi Hon (Kwanghaegun), was worried that his men would be defeated, he nonetheless ordered Gen. Kang Hong-rip in early 1619 to lead thirteen thousand soldiers across the Yalu River to join forces with the Ming
army in Manchuria.⁶
In the battle of Sarhū on April 17, 1619, more than six thousand Korean soldiers were killed, and General Kang surrendered to Nurhaci. Ending Chosŏn’s military engagement in the war, the surrender provided Nurhaci with a golden opportunity to open an official channel of communication with the Korean sovereign. In addition to seeking a peace agreement with Chosŏn to reduce the military threat on his eastern flank, Nurhaci wanted to change his relationship with Chosŏn by identifying his newly founded regime as a state equal to Chosŏn rather than as a state of lower status, as presupposed by the longstanding framework of Jurchen-Chosŏn relations.⁷ This political ambition posed a grave challenge to Chosŏn in the context of the civilized–barbarian distinction and initiated an invisible but intensive struggle of political discourse between the two sides.
Chosŏn’s Role in the Jurchen-Ming War
The bilateral communications between the Jurchens and Chosŏn started with an exchange of letters. In May 1619 Nurhaci sent a captured officer to Chosŏn to present a sovereign letter (Ch., guoshu; K., kuksŏ) and a copy of the Seven Grievances to the king. After explaining why he fought against the big country (Ch., daguo; Ma., amba gurun), that is, the Ming, Nurhaci asked the king to make common cause with him against the Ming. Chosŏn had contacted Nurhaci by letter in the 1600s through a local officer in the town of Manpo on the northern border, but now Nurhaci’s barbarian letter (K., hosŏ) reached the court directly and posed a thorny problem for the king.⁸
After fierce debate among officials, the king appointed Pak Yŏp, governor of P’yŏngan Province, to write back to Nurhaci, but the format of the reply, and in particular the question of how to address Nurhaci, remained a challenge. In Nurhaci’s letter, the Mongolian characters of his stamp read Emperor Tianming of the Houjin (K., Hugŭm ch’ŏnmyŏng hwangje), which greatly shocked the king and the Border Defense Council (K., Pibyŏnsa) because they believed the Ming emperor to be the sole emperor in the known universe. It was highly likely that the characters defined Nurhaci as a khan in the Mongol sense, rather than as an emperor (Ch., huangdi; K., hwangje) in the Chinese and Korean sense. Chosŏn had always called Nurhaci old chieftain (K., roch’u), barbarian chieftain (K., ich’u), chieftain of slaves (K., noch’u), or chieftain of thieves (K., chŏkch’u), so endorsing Nurhaci’s self-proclaimed imperial title was out of the question. The king, pretending he could not understand the characters on Nurhaci’s seal, instructed Pak to send a letter to the assistant general of the Jianzhou garrison (K., Kŏnjuwi mabŏp; Ch., Jianzhouwei mafa).⁹ The Border Defense Council had learned the word mabŏp from previous letters sent by the Jurchens and assumed that it referred to an assistant general (K., p’ŏnbi). In fact, it came from the Manchu word mafa, which means grandfather. In addition, the letter addressed its recipient in the second person using the form of you (K., chokha) that officials who were equal to each other used among themselves, not for sovereigns.¹⁰ Finally, the letter bore Pak’s official stamp instead of the king’s. In this way, the king downgraded the communication with the Houjin to a provincial level and sidestepped the sensitive issue of the political legitimacy of the Jurchen regime.
The Korean letter noted that Chosŏn and the Houjin had been subjects (K., sin) of the Heavenly Dynasty for two hundred years and suggested that Nurhaci pledge allegiance to the Imperial Ming, an action that would also yield reconciliation between Chosŏn and Nurhaci. This strong pro-Ming stance made the Houjin bristle.¹¹ In his reply, calling himself gu, a Chinese term used only by a sovereign to refer to himself, Nurhaci inferred that the Heavenly Dynasty to which Chosŏn referred must be the southern dynasty—the Jurchen appellation for the Ming, which indicated that the Houjin no longer endorsed the divine position of the Ming. Nurhaci clearly asked the king to form an alliance with him and suggested that the two countries kill a white horse and a black bull to offer to Heaven and Earth and burn incense to swear an oath.¹² Nurhaci had conducted this ritual with the Yehe, Hada, Ula, and Hūifa tribes in 1597 and with the Ming in 1608 and later started wars with these entities on account of their reneging on the oath.
Chosŏn was uninterested in Nurhaci’s offer, particularly in light of the Ming’s potential reaction to Korean-Jurchen contacts. Ming officials such as Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), a close friend of the Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), suspected that Chosŏn would join the Jurchen rebellion against the Ming and considered it advisable to rein Chosŏn in. In August 1619 he proposed a new policy toward Chosŏn in a memorial to Emperor Wanli. Xu argued that Beijing should follow historical precedents set by the Zhou and Han Dynasties by sending a commissioner to Chosŏn to supervise and protect (Ch., jianhu) the country. Xu enthusiastically volunteered to take up this position, but the emperor, who had sent Chinese forces to Chosŏn to defend the country against Japanese invasions in the 1590s, did not grant his request.¹³ As a matter of fact, Chosŏn was not collaborating with the Jurchens, whom it still called barbarians (K., orangk’ae), but maintaining its political and moral allegiance to Beijing would not alleviate the risk of a Jurchen attack. Under the circumstances, the king took a practical approach by tactically maintaining connections with the Houjin but confining them to the local level.
In the meantime, the outlook for the Ming-Chosŏn alliance was not sanguine. Two Ming emperors died within two months in 1620, and the new emperor, Tianqi, showed more interest in carpentry than he did in statecraft. On the battlefield, the Ming was losing more lands to the Houjin. In May 1621 the Jurchens occupied Liaoyang, a key military fortress in Manchuria, and made it the Houjin’s new capital, cutting off the overland route of communications between Chosŏn and the Ming. Facing a series of dramatic changes, the king made the risky move of sending Nurhaci his first sovereign letter in October 1622 through a civil official of the Ministry of Rites in Hansŏng (today’s Seoul). In the letter, he referred to Houjin as a neighboring country and Nurhaci as khan of the Houjin country (K., Hugŭmguk kahan). The letter adopted the same format as letters sent to Japan in accordance with Chosŏn’s policy of kyorin, communicating with a neighboring country.¹⁴ By acknowledging the statehood of the Jurchen regime, the king elevated his communications with Nurhaci to the level of a sovereign addressing another sovereign.
The pragmatism of this policy called into question the king’s loyalty to the Ming, which the king’s nephew, Yi Chong, used to justify a bloody coup that he launched in May 1623 to dethrone the king. Assuming power as the new king (King Injo), Yi Chong blamed his uncle for failing to embrace his monarch-subordinate and father-son relationship with the Ming. He himself took a different tack: in addition to ending the exchange of messengers with Nurhaci and imposing trade sanctions on the Houjin, Yi Chong mobilized his followers to prepare for a war with the Houjin and even planned to lead an army himself to attack the Jurchens.¹⁵ Being a usurper, Yi Chong used his fervent pro-Ming attitude to obtain the Ming investiture that legitimized his rulership. The new king also helped Mao Wenlong (1576–1629), a Ming general who had escaped to Chosŏn after the Jurchens’ occupation of Liaoyang and had stationed his forces on Ka Island, close to mainland Chosŏn, carry out a guerrilla war to prevent the Jurchens from entering Shanhai Pass. Chosŏn’s new policy posed a considerable military and economic threat to the Jurchens, but it did not stop the Jurchen expansion. In 1625 the Jurchens occupied Shenyang, the political heart and economic center of Manchuria, and made it their new capital. After Nurhaci died in 1626, his son Hongtaiji became the new khan with the regnal title Tiancong (Heavenly wisdom; Ma., Abkai sure) and quickly decided to invade Chosŏn.
Becoming the Elder Brother of Chosŏn: The Jin and the First Manchu Invasion
In the spring of 1627 Hongtaiji launched an attack on Chosŏn. The forces of the Jin, as the Jurchen regime now styled itself, swept into northern Chosŏn and captured P’yŏngyang within two weeks, forcing the king, who had escaped to Kanghwa Island, to sue for peace. As a precondition of withdrawal, the Jin commander, Amin (?–1640), required the king to swear an oath to Heaven to sever Chosŏn’s relations with the Ming and establish an elder brother–younger brother relationship with the Jin, the latter taking on the dominant role. In Chosŏn, many Confucian officials and students pleaded with the king to stop negotiating with the barbarous invaders, kill their messengers, and fight to the death. Although the king told his subjects that the peace talks with the Jurchen clowns were only a
stalling tactic, or a conventional loose rein (K., kimi) policy, he had no choice but to continue the negotiations.
In his letters to Hongtaiji, the king endorsed Hongtaiji’s political position by addressing him as Khan of the Country of the Jin, but he purposely selected neutral terms for the Jin and Chosŏn. While he called the Jin your honorable country, the king referred to Chosŏn as our country, instead of our humble country or our small country, as he would say in his palace memorials to the Ming. No honorific expressions for Hongtaiji appeared at the beginning of the letter.¹⁶ The king conveyed that Chosŏn would follow the policy of communicating with a neighboring country vis-à-vis the Jin and that of serving the great country vis-à-vis the Ming. By deliberately using the Ming regnal title Tianqi to express the date in his letter, the king implied that he would not betray the Ming. This act of adhering to Ming time led to a deadlock in the negotiations. The king later switched to a notice format for his communications, since this format did not require a regnal title. The new format helped the two sides reach an agreement regarding Chosŏn’s oath.
The oath-swearing ceremony occurred at the palace on Kanghwa Island on April 18, 1627. The king burned incense and swore the oaths to Heaven after one of his officials read them aloud. Despite the king’s reluctance, the substance of oaths was what Hongtaiji had demanded. The nine highest Chosŏn officials and eight high-ranking Jin officials also read their own oaths. However, the performance of these ceremonies between the king and the Jurchen officials was not mentioned in either Manchu or Korean records.¹⁷ Another oath-swearing ceremony took place later in P’yŏngyang between Amin and a brother of the king. The P’yŏngyang oath included several additional terms imposed by the Jurchen invaders, emphasizing that the king should present gifts to the khan, host the Jin’s emissaries as he did those of the Ming, and not reinforce the city walls or conduct military drills.¹⁸ The two ceremonies ushered in a decade of peace between the two countries.
In political and ideological terms the Jurchens benefited substantially from their invasion of Chosŏn. Chosŏn officially endorsed the Jurchen regime as a country with a supreme sovereign, helping to foster the regime’s political legitimacy in the geopolitical arena. With the support of Chosŏn, the Little China that now regarded the Jin as its elder brother, the Jin’s politico-cultural self-identity changed from that of a barbarian, imposed by the discourse of the Ming-centered cosmopolitan order, to that of the civilized. Although resentment of the Jurchen barbarians soared in Chosŏn after the war, the Korean court was unable to escape the newly established brotherhood. Economically, too, Chosŏn yielded to the Jurchens’ terms by opening markets in several towns on its northern border and paying annual tribute (K., sep’ye) to the Jurchen court.
Constructing a Jin-Centric, Quasi-Zongfan System: The Jin’s New Position
The Rise of the Jin-Chosŏn Quasi-Zongfan Order
As he withdrew from Chosŏn, Hongtaiji sent the king a letter, explaining why he fought with the southern dynasty—the Ming—and attacked Chosŏn. He said, The southern dynasty regards only itself as Son of Heaven and views people of other countries as inferior servants. … The Mandate of Heaven is truly righteous by assisting us with punishing the southern dynasty…. In the future, our two countries should be brothers forever and never bully others as the southern dynasty does.¹⁹ By quoting the theory of the Mandate of Heaven, the khan challenged the Ming’s centrality in the universe and justified his war with the Ming. Over the following decade, his construction of a Jin-centric, quasi-Zongfan system in the Jin’s contacts with Chosŏn and other neighboring entities gradually changed the Jin’s position.
In the face of serious economic difficulties brought on by the war, the Jin required Chosŏn to open markets for trade in a border city, Ŭiju. Chosŏn yielded to the Jin’s pressure but agreed to hold the markets only twice a year, in the spring and the autumn, rather than three times per year, as the Jin had wished. On March
31, 1628, the Ŭiju market opened for the first time, and the Jin emissary Inggūldai (1596–1648) came to Ŭiju accompanied by eight generals and more than a thousand people. As the Ŭiju market fell short of the Jin’s needs, Hongtaiji urged Chosŏn to open another one in Hoeryŏng, a northeastern border city.²⁰ In the midst of the shortage, the Jin relied heavily on the yearly gifts provided by Chosŏn and conveyed to Shenyang by one emissary in the spring and another in the autumn. From 1627 to 1636, the required gift comprised up to eighty-five categories of goods, but the amounts in each category kept changing to reflect the Jin’s needs or Chosŏn’s concerns, becoming a barometer of their relations.²¹ The Korean emissaries brought commercial opportunities to Shenyang. In 1631 the Border Defense Council of Chosŏn complained to the king that the dispatch of emissaries to Shenyang was no different from opening markets there.²² On the other hand, the development of the market in Shenyang, like that of the markets in Ŭiju and Hoeryŏng, suffered from significant differentials in the prices of the consumer products offered by the two sides. The black cotton cloth and ginseng sold by the Koreans were expensive, whereas the animal skins and furs that the Jurchens traded were not. This difference made it difficult for the Jurchen side to turn a profit. The Jin’s military hegemony could not subordinate Korean capital, which contributed to the Jin’s second invasion of Chosŏn.
Given the military and economic situation, the Jin did not force Chosŏn to end its contacts with Beijing. Hongtaiji had the option of concluding a peace agreement with the Ming through which he could win the latter’s political endorsement. In a memorial to Hongtaiji in 1630, Gao Hongzhong, a Han Chinese scholar serving the Jin, suggested that the Jin follow the Chosŏn model to receive the [Ming] investiture with kingship and to use the regnal title [of the Ming] to count the date (Ch., bi Chaoxian shili, qingfeng wangwei, cong zhengshuo).²³ This proposal reflected a popular perception among the Chinese about Chosŏn’s exemplary tributary position in the Ming-centric world. Had the Ming agreed to negotiate for a Chosŏn-like status for the Jurchen regime, the Jin could have followed Chosŏn to become an outer fan of the Ming. Nevertheless, the war persisted, and the Jin moved toward a broader objective of replacing the Ming. For that purpose, the Jin started to transform its hierarchical relationship with Chosŏn.
After 1627 Chosŏn continued to embrace the centrality of the Ming in its contacts with the Jin by applying its kyorin policy to the Jin; this put the Jin on an equal footing with Chosŏn. The king called his emissaries to the Jin messengers (K., sinsa), not tributary emissaries (K., kongsa), as he did those dispatched to Beijing. The goods brought annually to Shenyang were gifts (K., yemul) rather than tributes (K., kongmul) like those presented to Beijing. As the king noted in 1633 to Hongtaiji, "It is the proper principle [K., ye; Ch., li] that our two countries give each other local products in communications via emissaries."²⁴ These terms reflected befitting modesty and suggested that Chosŏn treated the Jin as a country lower than the Ming.
In stark contrast, the Jin developed a new discourse to nourish its self-identity as a political entity superior to Chosŏn. In documents written in the Manchu language beginning in 1627, the Jin downgraded the Korean monarch from khan of Chosŏn (Ma., Solgoi kan) to king of Chosŏn (Ma., Solgo i wang, or Coohiyan gurun i wang).²⁵ With the steady rise of the Jin’s military power, especially after its triumph in the battle at Dalinghe in late 1631 and early 1632, Hongtaiji enacted considerable reforms to the Jin political structure, abolishing the power-sharing system at the highest level of the court and making himself the exclusive sovereign.²⁶ From 1632, in his letters to the Ming and Chosŏn, Hongtaiji began to call himself brilliant khan of the Manchu country (Ma., Manju gurun i sure han) rather than khan of the Jin country (Ma., Aisin gurun i han), the title he had used before.²⁷ More importantly, he imitated the Ming bureaucracy by establishing a six-ministry system in Shenyang and instructing Manchu officials such as Dahai (1595– 1632) to translate Chinese classics into the Manchu language.²⁸ From then on, the regime substantially accelerated the Sinicization of its imperial norms from the top down, a process carried out through the institution-building efforts of a group of Han Chinese officials and scholars such as Ning Wanwo (1593–1665), Fan Wencheng (1597–1666), Gao Hongzhong, and Bao Chengxian (?–1645). One of the most significant acts of these elites was to persuade Hongtaiji to produce the annals of the monarch and the regime in both the Chinese and
Manchu languages.
The Chinese terms that these Han Chinese savants adopted to describe the exchanges of emissaries and diplomatic relations between the Jin and Chosŏn were crucial to revising the Jin’s political identity. According to the Manchu-language records written by the Manchu scholars, the emissaries of Chosŏn (Ma., Solho i elcin) arrived and delivered the local products as gifts (Ma., baci tucire doroi jaka benjime isinjiha) in Shenyang. When they left, the khan gave (Ma., unggihe) or awarded (Ma., šangnaha) them and the king gifts.²⁹ Although these Manchu terms were largely vernacular and had no strong political meaning, their counterparts in the Chinese-language records offered a very different portrayal. The visit of the tributary emissaries (Ch., gongshi), who brought tribute (Ch., gongwu) or local products (Ch., fangwu), was described as the coming to the court to present themselves before the sovereign (Ch., laichao), suggesting that the emissaries’ visit was prompted not by the Jin’s formidable military might but by its outstanding merits.³⁰ These terms invoked a hierarchical relationship between the sovereign—an emperor in the Chinese sense—and his subjects, which in this case included Chosŏn, Vietnam, Ryukyu, other fan of the Ming, and the Central Asian political entities.³¹ Meanwhile, the Jin applied the political and diplomatic discourse it had developed toward Chosŏn to forces and political entities that sought shelter with or surrendered to the Jin, such as Bar Baturu, Nomun Dalai, Coir Jamsu from Alakcot of Cahar, and the Ming general Kong Youde (?–1652).³²
In 1634 Hongtaiji changed the name of Shenyang to Mukden in Manchu and Shengjing (lit. prosperous capital) in Chinese, and the following year he instructed his people to call the country Manzhou (M., Manju; the Manchu state), not Jurchen or other names. The regime’s institutional construction was thus facilitated by a clear ethnic identification, but the rationale behind this framework focused more on politico-cultural factors than on ethnic ones. In this period, Jin officials, particularly those who were Han Chinese, started to address Hongtaiji as emperor (Ch., huangshang, or huangdi). Some suggested that Hongtaiji perform conventional rituals established by the Han Dynasty, through which he would claim to be the Son of Heaven in the Chinese sense. More significantly, these officials invoked the principles of the civilized–barbarian distinction to brand the Ming southern barbarians (Ch., manzi) and those Chinese who surrendered to the Jin Han Chinese barbarians (Ch., hanyi), thereby appropriating and completely reversing the Ming’s language regarding the center of the world.³³
With this change in its worldview, the Manchu regime began to play the role of the exclusive institutional agent of the Mandate of Heaven, to which all barbarians in the four quarters of the world willingly come in submission (Ch., siyi xianfu). When the Ming generals Kong Youde and Geng Zhongming (1604–49) surrendered to Hongtaiji in 1633, the Jin jubilantly described the event as people from afar willingly coming to our court for civilization (Ch., yuanren laigui).³⁴ The euphoric adoption of this phrase demonstrated that the Manchu regime was purposely constructing its identity as the center of the world, with cultural superiority over barbarians from afar or on its periphery, which now included the Ming.³⁵ These momentous changes in the Jin’s political discourse were rooted in orthodox Chinese political theory as articulated in Confucian classics, such as Analects of Confucius (Ch., Lunyu) and Doctrine of the Mean (Ch., Zhongyong), and they demonstrate the deep significance of both the Sinicization of the Manchu regime and the barbarianization of others by the regime. The use of Chinese political rhetoric of this sort was no mere imitation of the Ming’s discourse to please Hongtaiji. Rather, it was aimed at achieving a political goal by transforming the regime into a new center of gravity in a Jin-dominated world, a goal that the young and vernacular Manchu language—including the New Manchu (Ma., ice manju hergen) developed in 1632—was incapable of securing.
The Manchu regime conducted its relations with Chosŏn in accordance with hierarchical principles within a quasi-Zongfan system. Some historians have argued that at this time the Manchus derived their political concepts of imperial rule mainly from their Mongol allies rather than from the Chinese.³⁶
Yet the transformation of the Manchu regime’s understanding of its relations with neighboring nomadic and Confucian states, which took place concurrently
with the transformation of the Manchu-Chosŏn relationship, indicates that the regime was enthusiastically constructing a new politico-cultural self-identity by appropriating and exploiting the Chinese politico-cultural discourse. Scholars have also long debated the theory of the Sinicization or Sinification of the Manchus. The mainstream explorations of this issue so far have focused either on how the Han Chinese culturally assimilated the Manchus or on how the Manchus tried to retain their ethnic identity.³⁷ What this chapter explores is how the Manchu regime, rather than the ethnic Manchus, promoted itself as the exclusively civilized Middle Kingdom—Zhongguo—and it is in this sense that I use the term Sinicization in this book.
The Manchu Regime’s Strategic Goal of Transforming into Zhongguo
While the quasi-Zongfan discourse helped to refashion the self-image of the Manchu regime along Chinese lines, the Manchu language offered an international setting for this reconstruction by framing the Jin’s relations with other political entities as state-to-state interactions. In Manchu records the Jin, the Ming, Chosŏn, and such Mongol polities as Korcin were all defined as gurun. The term gurun has several meanings, including country, tribe, people of a tribe, and race. Two of these meanings are primary: people and country. For instance, amba gurun could mean big country or adults, and ajige gurun could mean small country or children, while haha gurun refers to men and hehe gurun refers to women.³⁸ In political contexts, gurun denoted primarily country, as in Aisin gurun (the country of the Jin), Nikan gurun (the country of the Han Chinese, that is, the Ming), Daiming gurun (the country of the Great Ming), Solho gurun or Coohiyan gurun (the country of Chosŏn), Korcin gurun (the country of the Korcin Mongols), and Cahar gurun (the country of the Cahar Mongols).³⁹ The Mongolian equivalent of the term in the Mongol records of the day is ulus (country).⁴⁰
The Manchu rulers drew clear geographical, social, and cultural lines between the Manchu regime and other countries, even as they emphasized commonalities. Nurhaci underlined to the Kalka Mongols in 1619 that the Ming and Chosŏn have different languages, but they share the same styles in clothing and hair, so the two countries look like a single country; similarly, our two countries look like a single country.⁴¹ The consciousness of being a state became progressively more transparent in the regime’s political norms, in particular in the Chinese-language records. In 1628, for instance, Hongtaiji called the Cahar Mongols a different country (Ma., encu gurun; Ch., yiguo) and a far country (Ch., yuanguo).⁴² The following year Hongtaiji treated the prince of the country of Korcin to the music and dances of four countries, including the Jin, the Korcin Mongols, the Ming, and Chosŏn.⁴³ In a letter to Ming officials in 1632, Hongtaiji named his country and the Cahar Mongols as two countries outside of the border [of the Ming] (Ma., jasei tulergi gurun; Ch., bianwai zhi guo).⁴⁴
The new political discourse fundamentally transformed the worldview of the Manchu regime from within by representing the regime as a state at the center of a multistate community. The strategic goal of this transformation, as Ning Wanwo indicated in 1633 when he suggested that the Jin compose an institutional code (Ch., Jindian) by modifying that of the Ming, was to break with Ming conventions and gradually develop the institutions of Zhongguo (Ch., jianjiu Zhongguo zhi zhi). In other words, the Jin intended to develop its own institutions of Zhongguo to replace those of the Ming. According to Ning, only in this way could the regime manage its great enterprise after conquering the place of the southern barbarians (Ch., manzi difang), that is, the Ming. Ning justified his proposal by stressing that a new monarch and his officials must have their own institutional works.⁴⁵ This strategic plan shows that Zhongguo, as a politico-cultural identity, was available for the Manchu regime to embrace and claim. What is more, it suggests that control over the central plain (Ch., Zhongyuan) was not necessarily a prerequisite for a regime to claim to be Zhongguo, as has been assumed.
Nurhaci wished to preserve the ways of his ethnic nation, or Manchuness, by enshrining Shanhai Pass and the Liao River as the border between the Chinese and Jurchen countries (Ma., nikan, jušen meni meni gurun). He tried to avoid turning to the Chinese way (Ma., nikan i doro de dosimbi; Ch., xiao hansu)—or becoming Sinicized—as the Liao, the Jin, and the Yuan Dynasties had done after their founders left their own homelands for the Chinese inner land (Ma., nikan
i dorgi bade; Ch., handi); they had changed ways and all became Chinese (Ma., doro forgošoro jakade, gemu nikan ohobi).⁴⁶ Although the Manchu leaders exhorted their ethnic cohorts to keep to the old way (Ma., fe doro) in daily life by wearing traditional garb and practicing Manchu archery and horseback riding, the regime was unavoidably following the Chinese way in its rapid transformation in the 1630s. The Manchu regime could have become Zhongguo even if it had remained in Manchuria and not crossed the Great Wall in 1644.
By employing the newly adopted Chinese political discourse, the Manchu regime gradually absorbed the Chinese political philosophy of the Zongfan order into its understanding of its place within the constellation of polities. Aside from the Ming, other countries served as the Jin’s outer fan by presenting tribute to the khan, who occupied a position akin to that of a Chinese emperor. This quasi-Zongfan system matured to the point that in 1636, in their Chinese letter to Chosŏn, forty-nine princes of sixteen countries of Mongols under the Jin’s leadership termed themselves "Mongols as the outer fan of the Jin" (Ch., Jinguo waifan menggu), equivalent to the Manchu term tulergi goloi monggo ("Mongols as the outer fan ").⁴⁷ In the same year, the Jin founded Menggu yamen (M., Monggo jurgan, lit. the ministry of Mongolian affairs) on the basis of Chinese civil administrational concepts. As an institution parallel to the Ministry of Rites, this ministry enabled the regime to transform its relations with the Mongols and to build and govern an emerging empire.
The construction of this quasi-Zongfan discourse occurred primarily within the Jin’s borders, but the Jin found Chosŏn the best external resource to support its discursive revolution. Within the bilateral relationship, the Jin held the role of the supreme power, and it converted Chosŏn from a younger brother into a subordinate or outer fan. Students of Sino-Korean relations tend to assume that the Manchus adopted hierarchical discourse in 1637 after the second Manchu invasion, when the Manchu side imposed clear Zongfan terms on Chosŏn. However, in practice the process had begun much earlier. In the 1630s the scholars of the Jin had mined Chinese history for intellectual resources with which to manipulate the civilized–barbarian distinction in order to establish the centrality of the Jin.
Within the Zongfan framework, the central civilized country (Ch., Huaxia) and its counterpart, barbarians, were the two key concepts addressing the status of the Middle Kingdom and that of its outer fan. The two terms were derived from the notion of all-under-Heaven, developed in the Xia (ca. 2070–1600 BC), Shang (1600–1046 BC), and Zhou periods, through which the three dynasties sought to legitimize their rule as divine. At the same time, the political entities spanning China’s lands identified xia (referring not to the Xia Dynasty but to a larger area in which the regime once resided) as the symbol of a civilized community possessing the Mandate of Heaven, namely, Zhongguo, Zhongyuan (the central plain), or Zhongtu (the central lands). At that time, the term barbarians referred primarily to groups that resided along the periphery of the central plain and were reluctant to identify and embrace the concept of civilized China, as exemplified by the state relationship between the Qin and the Chu in the third century BC.⁴⁸ The originally geographic notion of barbarian became an instrument used by political forces to deprecate their antagonists during the movement of revering the court of the Zhou and expelling the barbarians (Ch., zunzhou rangyi) in the Eastern Zhou (770–256 BC), a chaotic time that led Confucius (551–479 BC) to call for restoring the ideal order of proper conduct (Ch., li) of the Western Zhou. Due to the fierce interstate rivalries, the civilized– barbarian distinction evolved into a politico-cultural ideology that the dynastic regimes of China continuously reinterpreted for the next two thousand years, until 1911.
After the Han Dynasty, with the official institutionalization of Confucianism and the expansion of the concept of all-under-Heaven, the civilized–barbarian distinction became a critical theoretical framework for the Chinese court’s management of its foreign relations. As northern barbarians gained ascendancy in the Northern Song (960–1127), the distinction presented itself as an essential cultural instrument with which Chinese elites endowed certain regimes with the pedigree of legitimate historical narratives (Ch., zhengshi) by expelling competing polities from these narratives.⁴⁹ Some scholars, such as Shi Jie (1005–45), the author of A Treatise on the Middle Kingdom (Ch., Zhongguo lun), and Ouyang Xiu (1007–72), the author of A Treatise on Orthodox Legitimacy (Ch., Zhengtong lun),
depicted the Song as the exclusive civilized center of the world and the polities on the Song’s northern border as uncivilized. One of the most influential histories, A Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government (Ch., Zizhi tongjian), edited by Sima Guang (1019–86), drew a clear lineage connecting states identified as China from 403 BC to AD 959. The efforts of these scholars to conceptualize the narrative of orthodox legitimacy eventually paid off, for their rhetoric triumphed over that of the northern regimes, especially when Neo-Confucianism, created and elaborated by such Song intellectual vanguards as Cheng Hao (1032–85), Cheng Yi (1033–1107), and Zhu Xi (1130–1200), became China’s official ideology under the Yuan Dynasty.
This intellectual history can help explain why the official historical narrative of the People’s Republic of China still celebrates the Song for its legitimate status as Zhongguo and marginalizes the Liao, the Xixia, and the Jin as regimes established by ethnic minorities (Ch., shaoshu minzu). It was against this historical backdrop that the scholars of the Manchu regime in the 1630s began to construct the regime’s orthodox legitimacy, which laid the foundation for the Manchu enterprise of governing a vast empire as the legitimate Middle Kingdom, Zhongguo.
The Practices of the Manchu-Chosŏn Quasi-Zongfan Order
The Manchu regime implemented its quasi-Zongfan discourse through the rituals that accompanied the exchange of emissaries with Chosŏn by imitating Ming-Chosŏn contacts. In Mukden, the Korean emissaries kowtowed five times to Hongtaiji. They were comfortably lodged in the city and enjoyed a welcome banquet (K., hama yŏn, lit. banquet for getting off a horse) and a farewell banquet (K., sangma yŏn, lit. banquet for getting on a horse). Hongtaiji dispensed gifts to the Korean king, emissaries, interpreters, and servants.⁵⁰ In exchange, the Jin sent Manchu emissaries to Hansŏng in the spring and autumn of every year. Before they entered the Korean capital, the Manchu emissaries were housed at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country (K., Mohwa gwan), a place that had previously accommodated Ming emissaries. The emissaries also had an audience with the king in the palace and were treated to official welcome and farewell banquets. Although Chosŏn did not want to treat the Manchu representatives like those of the Ming, the general ritual procedures of greeting were practically identical. The Manchu emissaries lacked only their Ming counterparts’ standing as imperial envoy or Heavenly envoy.
This de facto Zongfan relationship conflicted with the de jure one of equality between the two brothers, a contradiction strikingly manifested in the different formats of their sovereign letters to each other. In its letters to the Jin, Chosŏn placed the two sides on a fully equal political plane, which was hierarchically lower than the status of the Ming. According to the Chinese convention, whenever the characters for Heaven or the Ming emperor appeared, they were placed at the top of a new line, two character spaces higher than the characters for Chosŏn and the first characters of other lines. This honorific elevation acknowledged the emperor as the supreme human agent of Heaven with the highest spiritual position in the world. Hongtaiji also used honorific elevation in his letters, but he adopted a different arrangement of the hierarchy, as shown by his letters to the Ming general Yuan Chonghuan (1584–1630). Hongtaiji divided the hierarchy into four levels, among which his position was lower than that of Heaven and the Ming emperor but higher than that of Ming officials (see figure 1.1). For his part, General Yuan followed Ming custom in his letters to Hongtaiji (see figure 1.2). Frustrated by Yuan’s usage, Hongtaiji exclaimed that he was the monarch or the khan of another country (Ma., encu gurun i ejen han) and son of Heaven and the Buddha (Ma., abka fucihi i jui). He declared that he would not accept any letters from the Ming that addressed him with a status lower than or even equal to that of the Ming officials.⁵¹ Nevertheless, in his communications with the king of Chosŏn, Hongtaiji was more pragmatic, addressing the king as a near equal in order to avoid offending the Korean monarch (see figure 1.3).
The king followed the same format in his responses to Hongtaiji but avoided mention of the imposed brotherhood (see figure 1.4). Although Hongtaiji called the king younger brother, the king never referred to Hongtaiji as elder brother. When Hongtaiji questioned the king about this discrepancy in 1629, the king shifted to friend-to-friend expressions: The king of the country of Chosŏn, he wrote, presents this letter to the khan of the country of the Jin (K., Chosŏn
kugwang pongsŏ Kŭmguk han; Ma., Coohiyan gurun i wang ni bithe, Aisin gurun i han de unggimbi). This usage matched Hongtaiji’s wording: The khan of the country of the Jin sends this letter to the king of the country of Chosŏn (Ma., Aisin gurun i han i bithe, Coohiyan gurun i wang de unggimbi). Later, the king changed the verb present (K., pong; Ma., jafambi) to send (K., ch’i; Ma., unggimbi), eliminating the hierarchical connotations of the former term. This subtle change provoked the Jin, but Chosŏn explained that both terms were used between neighboring countries.⁵² To the Jin, Chosŏn’s pronounced pro-Ming attitude meant that the brotherhood was unstable. The Jin’s security would not be guaranteed so long as Chosŏn was a loyal subject of the Ming. The only way to solve this problem, the Jin believed, was with another war against Chosŏn.
FIGURE 1.1. The format of Hongtaiji’s letters to Yuan Chonghuan in 1627. In this and the three figures that follow, the Arabic numerals represent horizontal lines from the top down, the English letters represent vertical lines, and the direction of the writing is from right to left. X represents a Chinese character. MWLD, 821, 847; MBRT, 4:28, 72.
FIGURE 1.2. The format of Yuan Chonghuan’s letters to Hongtaiji in 1627. MWLD, 821; MBRT, 4:28.
FIGURE 1.3. The format of Hongtaiji’s letters to the king of Chosŏn, 1627–36. Kakyu gobu .
FIGURE 1.4. The format of the letters of the king of Chosŏn to Hongtaiji, 1627–36. Chosŏnguk raesoȈ bu, vol. 1.
From Elder Brother to Father of Chosŏn: The Second Manchu Invasion
Manchu-Chosŏn Conflicts over Orthodox Legitimacy
In the middle of the 1630s, many Han Chinese and Manchu officials of the Jin sought to persuade Hongtaiji to take the title of emperor. On February 4, 1636, these officials presented memorials to prompt Hongtaiji to follow the Mandate of Heaven by claiming the emperorship. Following Chinese ritual conventions, Hongtaiji ostensibly declined and suggested his officials send emissaries to Chosŏn to discuss the matter with the king, his younger brother.⁵³ Hongtaiji’s true motivation, as the Korean official Hong Ik-han (1586–1637) shrewdly recognized, was to use Chosŏn’s identity as Little China to assert before other countries that Chosŏn revered him as the Son of Heaven.
The Manchu officials Inggūldai and Mafuta (?–1640) arrived in Hansŏng on March 30, along with forty-seven Mongol princes, thirty generals, and ninety-eight soldiers. They brought with them five letters. The first three letters extended Hongtaiji’s condolences on the death of the queen of Chosŏn. The fourth letter, written by eight Manchu princes (Ma., hošoi beile) and seventeen high-ranking Manchu ministers (Ma., gūsai amban), and the fifth letter, by forty-nine Mongol princes under the Chinese name Jinguo waifan menggu (Mongols as the outer fan of the Jin), aimed to persuade the king to submit a memorial urging Hongtaiji to follow the Mandate of Heaven (Ma., Abkai gūnin) and to claim the great title (Ma., amba gebu)—namely, that of emperor. The letters emphasized that the Jin now possessed virtues (Ma., erdemu) that enabled it to manage the world.⁵⁴ But on March 31, 139 Korean Confucian students presented the king with a petition, calling
on him to kill the barbarian emissaries and burn the barbarian letters. Inggūldai and his followers were thrown into panic and fled the city.⁵⁵
Chosŏn’s stance was strengthened when the king dispatched Na Tŏk-hŏn as the spring emissary and Yi Kwak as the response emissary to Mukden in late April. On May 15 the Jin held a grand ceremony in which Hongtaiji assumed the title emperor of lenience, kindheartedness, beneficence, and brilliance (Ma., gosin onco huwaliyasun enduringge han; Ch., kuan wen ren sheng huangdi) and adopted the regnal title Chongde (Ma., Wesihun erdemungge, lit. worshiping virtues). The Jin renamed itself the Country of the Great Qing (Ma., Daicing gurun; Ch., Da Qing guo). Gathering on Hongtaiji’s left and right flanks, the Jin’s Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese officials knelt down three times, each time making three prostrations (Ma., ilan jergi niyakūrafi uyun jergi hengkilembi; Ch., san gui jiu koutou)—the highest level of kowtow during the Qing period. Although Na and Yi had performed a ceremony of four kowtows before Hongtaiji upon their arrival, they called this second ceremony a usurpation of the imperial title (K., ch’amho) and refused to perform it, expressing their strong opposition to Hongtaiji’s political ambitions.⁵⁶ Chosŏn was the only Confucian country that lay beyond the Manchu regime’s political control but maintained regular and official diplomatic communications with it. Since Hongtaiji had made his claim to be the Son of Heaven in observance of proper Chinese conduct, he desperately needed the support of Chosŏn to counteract the designation of the Manchus as barbarians and to legitimize his emperorship in the Chinese sense. The ritual conflict with the Korean emissaries thus posed a grave identity crisis for him. Without endorsement from Chosŏn, the Manchu regime’s political transformation would remain largely confined to its borders and would not significantly influence regional politics.
Hongtaiji sent Na and Yi back to Chosŏn with two Chinese-language letters to the king. In the letters Hongtaiji called himself emperor of the country of the Great Qing (Ch., Da Qing guo huangdi) rather than khan of the Jin and referred to Chosŏn as your country (Ch., erguo) instead of your honorable country (Ch., guiguo), signaling the end of the bilateral brotherly relationship. Invoking the time-honored notion that the Heaven does not belong to one person, but to all people under the Heaven (Ma., abkai fejergi emu niyalmai abkai fejergi waka, abkai fejergi niyalmai abkai fejergi), Hongtaiji sought to demonstrate that his regime could govern the space of all-under-Heaven (Ch., tianxia; Ma., abkai fejergi) by following the precedent set by previous dynasties: namely, the Liao, which had been founded by the northeastern barbarians (Ch., dongbei yi; Ma., dergi amargi jušen); the Jin, founded by the eastern barbarians (Ch., dongyi; Ma., dergi jušen); and the Yuan, established by the northern barbarians (Ch., beiyi; Ma., amargi monggo, northern Mongols). By chronicling the rise and fall of these dynasties, Hongtaiji located the Qing, the dynasty of the Manchu barbarians, within this lineage of rulership, with himself as the Son of Heaven. The Qing’s rule was justified, he argued, because the Qing possessed the virtue that the Ming had lost.⁵⁷ This assertion was based on the Chinese political view that the Great Heaven has no partial affections and it helps only the virtuous (Ch., huangtian wu qin, wei de shi fu), a theory articulated in The Classic of History (Ch., Shangshu), which had endowed more than thirty dynasties with legitimacy. In short, Hongtaiji hoped that Chosŏn would become the Great Qing’s outer fan, just as it had served the previous dynasties of China.
Chosŏn became the first external target of the Qing’s new, Qing-centric Zongfan doctrine. Yet Hongtaiji’s position was unpopular in Chosŏn because it conflicted with the orthodox legitimacy on which the Confucian country based its political and social principles. With the exception of several high-ranking officials who preferred the Manchus, the majority of the ruling elite resolutely called for revering China and expelling the barbarians (K., chon Chungguk, yang yichŏk) in accordance with the doctrine of revering the Zhou Dynasty (K., chonju ŭiri).⁵⁸ In the face of tremendous pressure, the king reaffirmed that Chosŏn would not endorse Hongtaiji’s emperorship. The Qing thus declared war for the sake of its name and legitimacy.
The Establishment of Manchu-Chosŏn Zongfan Relations
On December 28, 1636, Qing troops attacked Chosŏn. They captured Hansŏng on January 9, 1637, without encountering strong resistance. The king had escaped
to Namhan Mountain Fortress with the crown prince (K., seja; Ch., shizi; Ma., šidz) and some officials, while the remaining royal family members and other officials fled to Kanghwa Island. The Qing forces surrounded the Namhan Fortress and, as their precondition for negotiations, demanded that the king send the crown prince as hostage. The king refused and mobilized his forces to resist the invasion and protect the great justice under Heaven (K., ch’ŏnha taeŭi). While Hongtaiji marched on the fortress with reinforcements on January 19, the king and his officials performed ceremonies to celebrate the birthday of Emperor Chongzhen of the Ming. Yet the king realized that Chosŏn’s fate was now at a crossroads. Ch’oe Myŏng-gil (1586–1647), a minister who had assisted the king in assuming the throne in the coup of 1623 and served as the king’s close adviser since that time, argued for peaceful negotiation with the Qing as he had done in 1627, when the Manchus invaded Chosŏn for the first time. Ch’oe’s approach was not welcomed by the majority of his colleagues, but it was undeniably pragmatic. On January 26, the lunar New Year, the king, fulfilling Chosŏn’s duty as a subject of the Ming, performed vested rituals in the direction of Beijing. Once the ceremony was over, the king sent two officials to negotiate with the Qing.
Two days later the king presented a letter to Hongtaiji in which he called Hongtaiji the emperor of lenience, kindheartedness, beneficence, and brilliance of the country of the Great Qing and referred to the Qing as the big country (K., taeguk) and to Chosŏn as the small country (K., sobang). The presentation of the letter was defined as submitting the letter to the higher authority (K., songsŏ).⁵⁹ Hongtaiji insisted that the king should surrender to him in person, so the two sides negotiated for two more weeks, during which the Qing troops shelled the fortress and defeated Chosŏn reinforcements sent from provinces. On February 15 the king presented another letter, in which he called Hongtaiji Your Majesty and himself a subordinate (see figure 1.5). He dated the letter using the Qing regnal title Chongde.⁶⁰ His letter suggested that the king had decided to surrender before Kanghwa Island was conquered.⁶¹ On February 17 the king submitted a sovereign letter to Hongtaiji, declaring that Chosŏn would "present the humble palace memorial [K., p’yo; Ch., biao] as the subordinate and serve as a fan [K., pŏnbang; Ch., fanbang] of the Great Qing forever, while all rituals about serving the big country would be performed in the vested format."⁶²
On February 22, 1637, Inggūldai brought an imperial edict to the king and asked the Korean officials to perform the same rituals that they had done when receiving edicts from the southern dynasty (the Ming). This occasion marked the first time that the Qing replaced the Ming in ritual exchanges with Chosŏn on Korean territory. In his edict, Hongtaiji listed ten terms of submission, among which two stood out. First, the king had to surrender to the Qing the book of imperial investiture and the seal that he had received from the Ming, stop communicating with the Ming, and begin to use the regnal title of the Qing instead of that of the Ming to indicate dates in all documents. Second, the king had to dispatch officials to the Qing every year to bring humble palace memorials, present gifts, and perform rituals to celebrate occasions such as the winter solstice, the New Year, the birthdays of the emperor, empress, and crown prince, and any good news for the Qing, and to extend condolences on the loss of members of the Qing’s royal house. The format of these memorials was required to follow the established format of Chosŏn’s memorials to the Ming. The rituals of receiving imperial decrees, accommodating imperial envoys in Chosŏn, and paying formal visits to the Qing emperor through tributary emissaries were to dovetail precisely with the established way of the Ming country (Ch., Mingguo jiuli). Hongtaiji also listed the items and amounts of the tributes required of Chosŏn and specified that tribute submissions ought to begin in 1639.⁶³
FIGURE 1.5. The format of the king’s letters to Hongtaiji in February 1637. The Arabic numerals represent horizontal lines from the top down, the English letters represent vertical lines, and the direction of the writing is from right to left. X represents a Chinese character. Chosŏnguk raesoȈ bu, 2:26–38.
The king unconditionally accepted all of Hongtaiji’s terms. On February 24, 1637, he presented himself before Hongtaiji at Samjŏndo (lit. three fields ferry), near the Hangang River, where the Qing had built a massive altar for Hongtaiji to receive the king’s surrender. During the ceremony, presided over by the Qing’s Ministry of Rites, the king knelt down three times, each time bowing his head three times before the emperor, after which he handed in his seal issued by the Ming. This ceremony marked the official establishment of the Zongfan relationship between the Qing and Chosŏn, as the king confirmed in his palace memorial to Hongtaiji on December 16, 1637.⁶⁴ The Qing’s forces soon returned to Mukden, taking the crown prince of Chosŏn, Yi Wang (1612–45), and the king’s second son, Yi Ho (King Hyojong, 1619–59), as hostages. Beginning on March 24, 1637, Chosŏn used the regnal title of the Qing to express the date, thus incorporating the country into the Qing’s temporal realm.⁶⁵ Chosŏn became the Qing’s outer fan .
The establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship, which replaced the Ming-Chosŏn relationship that had been officially institutionalized in 1401, was extremely significant for the Qing. The Ming’s passionate endorsement of the Zhou Zongfan system meant that under the Qing, the system was likewise directly connected with the classical and ideal tenets of the Zhou. As its political rhetoric developed after 1644, the Manchu court began to define its relationship with Chosŏn’s court by using more sophisticated terms that were associated with the Zhou Zongfan system. As early as 1649, Emperor Shunzhi, in his imperial mandate to invest King Hyojong, emphasized that Chosŏn served as an "outer fan for the central court" (Ch., wangshi).⁶⁶ In 1659 Emperor Shunzhi began his imperial mandate to invest King Hyŏngjong with the traditional term dividing cogongrass (Ch., fenmao), a metaphor for the Zhou’s Zongfan investiture.⁶⁷ Meanwhile, the Manchu court came to define Chosŏn as a princely submission (Ch., houfu; Ma., jecen i golo) according to the conventional theory of the five submissions (Ch., wufu) of the Zhou.⁶⁸ This definition equated the status of the king with that of China’s princely minister, governor-general, and governor.⁶⁹
Along the same lines, the Qing side, emperors and officials alike, regarded Korean emissaries as "ministers of ministers of the outer fan " (Ch., waifan peichen).⁷⁰
These established Zongfan tenets determined the familistic nature of the Qing-Chosŏn relationship, which crystallized in a crisis of kingship in 1768. In August of that year, Yi Gŭm (King Yŏngjo) asked Emperor Qianlong to invest his grandson Yi San (later known as Chŏngjo) as the crown successor to the Chosŏn kingship in the wake of the deaths of Yi Gŭm’s two sons, including the crown prince. Because the Qing court had never before encountered this situation, Emperor Qianlong instructed the Grand Secretariat (Ch., Neige) and the Ministry of Rites to consult Confucian books and historical records in search of appropriate precedents for the title of crown grandson (Ch., shisun). The ministry cited Confucius’s interpretations in The Book of Rites (Ch., Liji) and historical precedents ranging from the Liu Song Dynasty (420–79) to the Ming Dynasty pertaining to the investment of a vassal’s grandson as crown grandson. Stressing that "the outer fan is fundamentally the same as Zongfan," the ministry recommended that the emperor invest Yi San as the crown grandson, and the emperor did so.⁷¹ As the Ming had done, the Qing regarded Chosŏn as an extended royal family member of the Middle Kingdom where the patriarch—the Son of Heaven—resided.
This ideology continued to exert profound influence over Qing-Chosŏn relations in the nineteenth century. In 1882, under the Qing’s supervision and mediation, Chosŏn signed a treaty with the United States that portrayed Chosŏn as an independent state with a sovereign equal to the American president. But regardless of the treaty’s legal implications based on international law, in 1883 the Chinese official Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), who had negotiated the 1882 treaty with the United States on Chosŏn’s behalf as governor-general of Zhili, superintendent of trade for the northern ports of China (Ch., Beiyang tongshang dachen, hereafter Beiyang superintendent), and China’s de facto foreign minister, cited the Western Zhou’s Zongfan tenets to declare that the king was an outer vassal (Ch., wai zhuhou) of the Son of Heaven in China. Li further pointed out that the king was equal to China’s governors-general and provincial governors, who were inner vassals (Ch., nei zhuhou), while the status of lower-ranking Korean officials corresponded to that of their Chinese counterparts.⁷² In 1886, when Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), Li’s protégé, who resided in Chosŏn as the Chinese imperial resident, asked Li what level of ritual he should perform in front of the king, Li replied that it would be courteous enough for Yuan to follow the rituals used by Chinese provincial officials when visiting first-degree princes (Ch., qinjunwang).⁷³ On the Korean side, the king, in a pre-1894 humble memorial to Emperor Guangxu, still referred to Chosŏn as China’s princely submission.⁷⁴ In their dealings with each other in the late nineteenth century, both China and Korea looked to Zongfan precedents from the Western Zhou down through the Ming, and their country-to-country contacts were subordinate to their familistic court-to-court hierarchy. All of these stories started in 1637, when the Qing formalized its Zongfan relationship with Chosŏn.
At this point it is necessary to explain further why this book prefers the Chinese term Zongfan over the oft-used English renderings tribute system or tributary system. In the twentieth century, the promulgation of the term tribute system, together with the concepts suzerain and vassal, owed a great debt to the popularity of a more neutral phrase, Chinese world order, proposed by the American historian John King Fairbank. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, Fairbank prompted a constellation of historians and political scientists to explore the rationale behind China’s foreign relations in the late imperial period. Although Fairbank was aware of the complexity of Sinocentric cosmopolitanism, or Sinocentrism, the term Chinese world order, which he used broadly to denote this system and to highlight its diversity, became a rough equivalent of tribute system. Acceptance of this English rendering has allowed scholars in a variety of fields to treat it as a counterpart to treaty system or treaty port system. Some scholars have questioned the appositeness of the terms tributary system and suzerain-vassal relations and criticized them as a nineteenth- and twentieth-century reinterpretation of an older form of symbolically asymmetric interstate relations, while others, likewise seeking to avoid the possible misunderstandings caused by English terminology, have proposed new terms, such as Pax Sinica, in a world history context.⁷⁵ But their combined efforts have not changed the entrenched renderings or paradigm, and the conventional English parlance still
profoundly influences scholars’ understanding of late imperial China’s foreign relations.⁷⁶
An underlying problem with the term tribute system, as chapter 2 shows, is that it can convey only some of the connotations of the comprehensive Zongfan system—namely, chaogong, or sending emissaries to pay tribute to China, the perennial activity that was the most sensational and visible part of the regular ritual contacts between Qing China and its fan. The term tribute system thus trims the entire mechanism down to a Sinocentric trade structure. As Peter C. Perdue points out in his study of Qing-Zunghar relations, Overly simplistic generalizations about the Qing ‘tribute system’ tend to single out one trading relationship as the orthodox, normative one, neglecting the great diversity of ritual, economic, and diplomatic conditions found in the Qing trading regime as a whole.⁷⁷ The submission of tribute should not be used loosely as a master concept to represent the entire structure and its core nature. This is not to suggest, however, that the term tribute system has no analytical utility as a conceptual interpretive tool. This is clear in the debate over the question of when the practices of the Sinocentric order became as mature, institutional, and systematic as they were in the Ming and Qing periods.⁷⁸
Cherishing the Small Country: The Qing’s Construction of Its Zhongguo Identity
The Qing’s Transformation into the Big Country
Within the new Zongfan relationship, the Qing was Chosŏn’s monarch and the patriarch of the big family principally consisting of the Qing, Chosŏn, and the Mongol states. Given its supreme authority, the Qing could use the subordination of Chosŏn to its advantage. The first and most direct effect of the relationship was the formation of a new military alliance between the two countries. By conquering Chosŏn, the Qing reinforced its home front in the war with the Ming by eliminating the potential military threat on its eastern flank. It also gained material assistance from Chosŏn in the form of warhorses, grain, warships, cannons, and soldiers. Two months after Chosŏn’s subordination, the Manchu forces conquered Ka Island, destroying the last Ming military base in Chosŏn. In the next few years, a number of Korean soldiers, particularly gunners, were forced to join the Manchus in their fight against the Ming and to garrison Jinzhou and other cities newly conquered by the Qing in Manchuria.⁷⁹
By transforming its relationship with Chosŏn into one between a monarch and a subordinate, or between a father and a son, the Qing obtained political legitimacy from Chosŏn, a Confucian country beyond the Qing’s geographical borders but within its political and cultural realm. Given that the Chinese perceived their Zongfan relationships with other countries or political entities within a model centered on China as the Middle Kingdom, the establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship defined the Qing as the Middle Kingdom. In other words, the identities of both China and the countries on its periphery within the Zongfan framework were mutually dependent and constitutive. This rationale provided the Qing with the political and cultural foundations that it desperately needed to legitimize its centrality in the Chinese world.
In practice, the change of the Qing’s position was materially corroborated by the intensive bilateral exchange of missions between 1637 and 1643. On May 13, 1637, Chosŏn sent its first tributary mission to Mukden, and in the documents submitted to the Qing the Korean side called the city capital (K., Kyŏngsa), a term previously reserved for Beijing. This terminological choice indicated that, at least on the surface, Chosŏn acknowledged Mukden as the new political center of the world.⁸⁰ The mission had 315 members, including three primary members: an envoy, an associate envoy, and a secretary. After traveling 517 miles along the conventional overland tributary route between Hansŏng and Beijing, the mission arrived in Mukden on July 8.⁸¹ The next day the Korean officials appeared before Hongtaiji to perform the highest level of kowtow. During the imperial audience, the Qing’s officials read the king’s humble memorials, written in the hierarchical format once used for the Ming emperor. By praising the admirable virtues of the big country that brought Chosŏn to life again, the text of the humble
memorials endowed the Qing with the position of the Middle Kingdom, adding that all far countries on the periphery [of the Qing] have willingly subordinated themselves (K., hwangbok hambin) and lauding the Qing for its virtuous act of cherishing the small. The Qing’s position was confirmed by the Qing itself in the emperor’s edict to the king, which defined the relationship clearly with reference to orthodox Zongfan principles such as serving the great and cherishing the small. Chosŏn became a far country, a small country, and the remote land on the periphery of the new civilized center.⁸² This framing of the two countries’ mutually constitutive identities consigned Chosŏn to the category of barbarians surrounding the civilized Middle Kingdom of the Qing.
At the same time, the frequent visits to Mukden by tributary emissaries from the Mongols and other ethnic-minority polities whose affairs were under the management of the Mongolian Superintendency highlighted the spread of the Qing-centric Zongfan circle. For the previous two decades, the Manchu regime had gradually eroded the Ming’s Zongfan network at the periphery and used the dislodged parts to construct a similar model with itself at the center. After establishing the Zongfan relationship with Chosŏn, the Qing sought to institutionalize its Zongfan mechanism by imitating the Ming’s policies and improving them to meet the Qing’s needs. The institutionalization of the system took place through the Ministry of Rites. Although the Ministries of Revenue, War, and Justice also exchanged official notes with the king over cases involving financial and military assistance or illegal border crossings, the Ministry of Rites constituted the most important channel between the emissaries and the Qing court. It forwarded the king’s humble memorials to the emperor, directed the emissaries’ visits, treated the emissaries to banquets, accommodated them at a dedicated residence in Mukden for forty days, forwarded imperial edicts to them, and issued official response notes to the king. With the ministry’s guidance, the Korean emissaries performed the highest level of kowtow to the emperor, presented tributes, and received imperial edicts and gifts. These highly programmed ritual practices demonstrated, institutionalized, and consolidated the two sides’ bilateral relationship and strict hierarchy.
To formalize the Zongfan relationship, the Qing sent ethnic Manchu emissaries to Chosŏn to invest the king and other core members of the royal family with certain titles. On January 4, 1638, the first imperial mission led by Inggūldai, Mafuta, and Daiyun arrived in Hansŏng to officially invest the king. The king greeted the envoys at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country outside the West Gate of the capital.⁸³ Later, in the palace, the king received the imperial edicts of investiture, a gold seal, and gifts, and performed established rituals for the occasion. The edicts stated that, with the establishment of investiture-subordinate (Ch., fanfeng) relations between the Qing and Chosŏn, the latter was expected to serve as a " fan and fence" (Ch., fanping) of the Great Qing until the Yellow River becomes as narrow as a belt and Mount Tai becomes as small as a grindstone (Ch., daihe lishan). The emperor’s mandate noted that both sides have an established name and status, which will regulate the relationship and hierarchy for ten thousand years (Ch., li yishi zhi mingfen, ding wanzai zhi gangchang).⁸⁴ Following the ceremony, the king visited the envoys at their residence, the South Palace Annex (K., Nambyŏl gung), where he treated them to banquets. All of these ritual procedures were identical to those that had been performed between Chosŏn and the Ming. The Qing’s investiture legitimatized the bilateral Zongfan relationship between the two countries, an arrangement that would last for 258 years.
The Establishment of the Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing
In the precise spot in Samjŏndo where the Korean king had subordinated himself to Hongtaiji in 1637, the Qing forced Chosŏn to erect a stele to commemorate Hongtaiji’s achievements. Despite the Koreans’ reluctance to memorialize the humiliating invasion, the Qing continued to advance the project, and the Korean official Yi Kyŏng-sŏk (1595–1671) eventually drafted a Chinese-language inscription based on the Korean letters to the Qing side during the war.⁸⁵ After the Chinese official Fan Wencheng approved the inscription, the Qing sent interpreters to Hansŏng to translate it into Manchu and Mongolian. In 1639 the stele, inscribed in three languages, was erected as the Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing (Ma., Daicing gurun i enduringge han i gung erdemui bei; Ch.,
Da Qing huangdi gongde bei) (see figure 1.6).
The inscription reviewed the history between the two countries from 1619 to 1637 from Chosŏn’s perspective and exalted the Qing’s great virtues in bringing Chosŏn to life again. It claimed that the king had surrendered in 1637 not to[the Qing’s] might but to [its] virtues (Ma., horon de gelere teile waka, erdemu de dahahangge kai), given that those virtues made all the far [people] subordinate themselves willingly (Ma., goroki ci aname gemu dahambi). The stele also stated that the bilateral relationship would last for ten thousand years under the emperor’s goodness. The most significant aspect was the official transformation of the identity of the Manchu regime as manifested in certain terms. The inscription called the Qing the big country (Ch., dabang, dachao; Ma., amba gurun) or the upper country (Ch., shangguo; Ma., dergi gurun), while terming Chosŏn the small country (Ch., xiaobang; Ma., ajige gurun) as well as a faraway country. The fact that the two countries geographically bordered each other did not prevent the Qing from redefining Chosŏn as faraway in the politico-cultural sense.
FIGURE 1.6. The Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing. The stele is now located in a small park next to Lotte World in Seoul. Photo taken by the author in 2015.
Among these terms, which had been used between Chosŏn and the Ming and were now grafted onto the Qing-Chosŏn relationship, the Manchu phrase amba gurun (big country) was particularly significant. As a literal translation of the Chinese dabang or dachao, the term had once referred exclusively to the Ming. More importantly, as chapter 2 shows, after 1644 the Qing adopted amba gurun as a key equivalent of the Chinese terms Zhongguo (Ma., Dulimbai gurun) and Tianchao (the Heavenly Dynasty; Ma., abkai gurun). The inscription of the Samjŏndo stele was probably the first instance in which the Qing publicly and officially called itself amba gurun; over the following two and a half centuries, this term would refer solely to Qing China.
Cherishing Men from Afar: Publicizing Qing Centrality, 1637–43
The Manchu invasion of 1636 and the king’s surrender to Hongtaiji, known in Chosŏn as Pyŏngja horan (lit. the invasion of the northern barbarians in the year of Pyŏngja), were humiliating to the Koreans and stimulated widespread anti-Manchu feeling in the country. Korean resentment is evident, for example, in an incident that took place in December 1637, when the Manchu envoys visiting Chosŏn asked Korean local officials to procure courtesans (K., panggi), but the women killed themselves to show their resistance (K., yisa kŏchi).⁸⁶ In order to win Chosŏn’s loyalty beyond mere lip service, the Qing quickly adopted the traditional Chinese policies of cherishing the small and cherishing men from afar (Ch., huairou yuanren; Ma., goroki niyalma be bilume gosimbi).⁸⁷
In addition to providing Chosŏn’s delegation with better accommodations in Mukden and bestowing more gifts on the king and his emissaries, the Qing progressively reduced the tribute required of Chosŏn beginning in the early 1640s, when the Qing controlled more resources as a result of its military triumphs over the Ming. In 1640, for instance, the Qing lowered the number of sacks of rice that Chosŏn was expected to offer as tribute from ten thousand to just one thousand. In 1643 the Qing further reduced the annual tribute and furthermore cut by more than half the gifts that Chosŏn gave to the Manchu envoys. Proclaiming that the two countries have become one family, the Shunzhi emperor also permanently abolished many tributary conventions, such as the requirement that Chosŏn provide the imperial envoys with official courtesans. These exemptions, the emperor suggested, embodied the Qing policy of cherishing the small with benevolence.⁸⁸ Compared with the late Ming, which tried to extract the maximum economic and military benefits from Chosŏn, the Qing took a deliberately placatory approach toward its outer fan, represented by the many exemptions. This benign policy substantially facilitated the Qing’s historical transformation into Zhongguo.
The Qing was characterized more by its actions than by its pronouncements. Its policy of appealing to the subordinate country was manifested above all in its frequent contacts with Chosŏn. From 1637 to 1643, the Qing sent twelve missions and twenty-eight emissaries to Chosŏn, an average of one and a half missions per year, while Chosŏn sent fifty-six missions and 102 emissaries to the Qing, an average of seven missions per year.⁸⁹ In this context, some Koreans changed their established understandings of the Qing. In the spring of 1643, for example, Yi Chŏng-hae from Kyŏngsang Province submitted a letter to the Qing envoys in Hansŏng, volunteering to go to Mukden to serve the Qing and our emperor (K., a hwangje).⁹⁰
The Qing used its intensive contacts with Chosŏn as a powerful tool to manage its relations with other political entities. In 1638, a year after it converted Chosŏn from a younger brother into an outer fan, the Qing changed the Chinese name of the Mongolian Superintendency from Menggu yamen to Lifan yuan, applying the Chosŏn precedent to add the Mongols, too, to the Qing-centric family of nations as a fan. This move was part of the Manchu leaders’ project of steadily transforming Mongol conceptualizations of their position in the Qing-dominated world.⁹¹ In this sense, it could be argued that the dramatic change in the
Manchu-Mongol relationship had deep roots in the Zongfan concepts promulgated by Han Chinese officials of the Manchu regime since the early 1630s. This shift could also indicate that the Qing was streamlining the administration of its outer fan in order to strengthen its centrality and pursue an imperial enterprise beyond Manchuria.
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1 CONQUERING CHOSŎN The Rise of the Manchu Regime as the Middle Kingdom, 1616–43 As the Manchu regime consolidated its power in Manchuria between the late 1610s and the early 1640s, it reshaped the perceptions of other polities and eradi- cated its longstanding barbarian image. The regime derived its political and cultural resources in large part from its relations with Chosŏn, which validated and reinforced the Manchu dynasty’s position as the Middle Kingdom within the newly established multistate hierarchical system. In this process, the Manchus appropriated the Ming’s Zongfan discourse to designate other political entities as barbarians, initiating a prolonged process that I call the barbarianization of oth- ers. By crossing the Great Wall in 1644, the Manchu regime had fundamentally reconceptualized its own identity and position in the Chinese world. Barbarians, Rebellions, and Wars The Jurchen Uprising in Manchuria On February 17, 1616, the lunar New Year and the first day of the Forty-Fourth Year of Wanli of the Ming Dynasty, a number of high-ranking Chinese officials assembled at the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City with tributary emissaries from Chosŏn and China’s other outer fan. They waited to enter the imperial hall to present the emperor with their congratulations on the New Year. Finally, realizing the emperor had no desire to grant them an audience, the officials and emis- saries carried out their ceremonies in front of the gate.¹ This scene was not surprising, as the emperor had long been uninterested in such ceremonies. Many high-ranking officials in Beijing had not seen the hermit-like Son of Heaven for almost thirty years.² The Middle Kingdom and its lethargic human agent seemed to have fallen asleep. The day was significant, however, in Hetuala, a small Manchurian town about seven hundred miles northeast of Beijing, where a tribe called the Jianzhou Ju- rchens announced the establishment of its own country under the leadership of Nurhaci (1559–1626; r. 1616–26). Proclaiming himself the “brilliant khan caring for all countries/peoples” (Ma., abka geren gurun be ujikini seme sindaha genggiyen han), Nurhaci accepted the congratulations of Jurchen and Mongol officials and generals, took the regnal title of Tianming (“mandate of Heaven”; Ma., Abkai fulingga), and named his country Houjin (“the later Jin”).³ He thus defined his regime as the successor to the Jin Dynasty established by the Jurchen ancestors.⁴ Nurhaci’s political ambitions extended far beyond unifying the local tribes. In May 1618 he attacked the Ming forces after announcing the “Seven Grievances” (Ma., Nadan amba koro; Ch., Qi dahen). Nurhaci had visited Beijing three times to present tribute and had been appointed by the Ming court to govern the Jianzhou Jurchens, whom the Ming considered “northeastern barbarians” (Ch., dongbei yi).⁵ In the Seven Grievances, Nurhaci identified the Jianzhou as a subor- dinate that had guarded the Ming’s border for generations, and declared that various conflicts between his tribe, other tribes, and the Ming’s local leaders had led to his rebellion. The Ming was confident about suppressing Nurhaci. To do so it enlisted the aid of the tribe of Yehe, an old and powerful enemy of the Jurchens, as well as the support of Chosŏn. As a loyal fan, Chosŏn had followed the policy of “serving the great” (K., sadae) for more than two centuries. It regarded Nurhaci’s rebellion as intolerable and its military assistance to the Ming as a “legal and moral duty” (K., ŭibun). Although the king, Yi Hon (Kwanghaegun), was worried that his men would be defeated, he nonetheless ordered Gen. Kang Hong-rip in early 1619 to lead thirteen thousand soldiers across the Yalu River to join forces with the Ming
army in Manchuria.⁶ In the battle of Sarhū on April 17, 1619, more than six thousand Korean soldiers were killed, and General Kang surrendered to Nurhaci. Ending Chosŏn’s military engagement in the war, the surrender provided Nurhaci with a golden opportunity to open an official channel of communication with the Korean sovereign. In addition to seeking a peace agreement with Chosŏn to reduce the military threat on his eastern flank, Nurhaci wanted to change his relationship with Chosŏn by identifying his newly founded regime as a state equal to Chosŏn rather than as a state of lower status, as presupposed by the longstanding framework of Jurchen- Chosŏn relations.⁷ This political ambition posed a grave challenge to Chosŏn in the context of the civilized–barbarian distinction and initiated an invisible but intensive struggle of political discourse between the two sides. Chosŏn’s Role in the Jurchen-Ming War The bilateral communications between the Jurchens and Chosŏn started with an exchange of letters. In May 1619 Nurhaci sent a captured officer to Chosŏn to present a “sovereign letter” (Ch., guoshu; K., kuksŏ) and a copy of the Seven Grievances to the king. After explaining why he fought against the “big country” (Ch., daguo; Ma., amba gurun), that is, the Ming, Nurhaci asked the king to make common cause with him against the Ming. Chosŏn had contacted Nurhaci by letter in the 1600s through a local officer in the town of Manpo on the northern border, but now Nurhaci’s “barbarian letter” (K., hosŏ) reached the court directly and posed a thorny problem for the king.⁸ After fierce debate among officials, the king appointed Pak Yŏp, governor of P’yŏngan Province, to write back to Nurhaci, but the format of the reply, and in par- ticular the question of how to address Nurhaci, remained a challenge. In Nurhaci’s letter, the Mongolian characters of his stamp read “Emperor Tianming of the Houjin” (K., Hugŭm ch’ŏnmyŏng hwangje), which greatly shocked the king and the Border Defense Council (K., Pibyŏnsa) because they believed the Ming em- peror to be the sole emperor in the known universe. It was highly likely that the characters defined Nurhaci as a “khan” in the Mongol sense, rather than as an “emperor” (Ch., huangdi; K., hwangje) in the Chinese and Korean sense. Chosŏn had always called Nurhaci “old chieftain” (K., roch’u), “barbarian chieftain” (K., ich’u), “chieftain of slaves” (K., noch’u), or “chieftain of thieves” (K., chŏkch’u), so endorsing Nurhaci’s self-proclaimed imperial title was out of the question. The king, pretending he could not understand the characters on Nurhaci’s seal, instructed Pak to send a letter to the “assistant general of the Jianzhou garrison” (K., Kŏnjuwi mabŏp; Ch., Jianzhouwei mafa).⁹ The Border Defense Council had learned the word mabŏp from previous letters sent by the Jurchens and assumed that it referred to an assistant general (K., p’ŏnbi). In fact, it came from the Manchu word mafa, which means “grandfather.” In addition, the letter addressed its recipient in the second person using the form of “you” (K., chokha) that officials who were equal to each other used among themselves, not for sovereigns.¹⁰ Finally, the letter bore Pak’s official stamp instead of the king’s. In this way, the king downgraded the communication with the Houjin to a provincial level and sidestepped the sensitive issue of the political legitimacy of the Jurchen regime. The Korean letter noted that Chosŏn and the Houjin had been subjects (K., sin) of the “Heavenly Dynasty” for two hundred years and suggested that Nurhaci pledge allegiance to the “Imperial Ming,” an action that would also yield reconciliation between Chosŏn and Nurhaci. This strong pro-Ming stance made the Hou- jin bristle.¹¹ In his reply, calling himself gu, a Chinese term used only by a sovereign to refer to himself, Nurhaci inferred that the Heavenly Dynasty to which Chosŏn referred must be the “southern dynasty”—the Jurchen appellation for the Ming, which indicated that the Houjin no longer endorsed the divine position of the Ming. Nurhaci clearly asked the king to form an alliance with him and suggested that the two countries kill a white horse and a black bull to offer to Heaven and Earth and burn incense to swear an oath.¹² Nurhaci had conducted this ritual with the Yehe, Hada, Ula, and Hūifa tribes in 1597 and with the Ming in 1608 and later started wars with these entities on account of their reneging on the oath.
Chosŏn was uninterested in Nurhaci’s offer, particularly in light of the Ming’s potential reaction to Korean-Jurchen contacts. Ming officials such as Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), a close friend of the Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), suspected that Chosŏn would join the Jurchen rebellion against the Ming and con- sidered it advisable to rein Chosŏn in. In August 1619 he proposed a new policy toward Chosŏn in a memorial to Emperor Wanli. Xu argued that Beijing should follow historical precedents set by the Zhou and Han Dynasties by sending a commissioner to Chosŏn to “supervise and protect” (Ch., jianhu) the country. Xu enthusiastically volunteered to take up this position, but the emperor, who had sent Chinese forces to Chosŏn to defend the country against Japanese invasions in the 1590s, did not grant his request.¹³ As a matter of fact, Chosŏn was not collaborating with the Jurchens, whom it still called “barbarians” (K., orangk’ae), but maintaining its political and moral allegiance to Beijing would not alleviate the risk of a Jurchen attack. Under the circumstances, the king took a practical ap- proach by tactically maintaining connections with the Houjin but confining them to the local level. In the meantime, the outlook for the Ming-Chosŏn alliance was not sanguine. Two Ming emperors died within two months in 1620, and the new emperor, Tian- qi, showed more interest in carpentry than he did in statecraft. On the battlefield, the Ming was losing more lands to the Houjin. In May 1621 the Jurchens occu- pied Liaoyang, a key military fortress in Manchuria, and made it the Houjin’s new capital, cutting off the overland route of communications between Chosŏn and the Ming. Facing a series of dramatic changes, the king made the risky move of sending Nurhaci his first sovereign letter in October 1622 through a civil official of the Ministry of Rites in Hansŏng (today’s Seoul). In the letter, he referred to Houjin as “a neighboring country” and Nurhaci as “khan of the Houjin country” (K., Hugŭmguk kahan). The letter adopted the same format as letters sent to Japan in accordance with Chosŏn’s policy of kyorin, communicating with a neighboring country.¹⁴ By acknowledging the statehood of the Jurchen regime, the king elevated his communications with Nurhaci to the level of a sovereign addressing an- other sovereign. The pragmatism of this policy called into question the king’s loyalty to the Ming, which the king’s nephew, Yi Chong, used to justify a bloody coup that he launched in May 1623 to dethrone the king. Assuming power as the new king (King Injo), Yi Chong blamed his uncle for failing to embrace his monarch- subordinate and father-son relationship with the Ming. He himself took a different tack: in addition to ending the exchange of messengers with Nurhaci and imposing trade sanctions on the Houjin, Yi Chong mobilized his followers to prepare for a war with the Houjin and even planned to lead an army himself to at- tack the Jurchens.¹⁵ Being a usurper, Yi Chong used his fervent pro-Ming attitude to obtain the Ming investiture that legitimized his rulership. The new king also helped Mao Wenlong (1576–1629), a Ming general who had escaped to Chosŏn after the Jurchens’ occupation of Liaoyang and had stationed his forces on Ka Is- land, close to mainland Chosŏn, carry out a guerrilla war to prevent the Jurchens from entering Shanhai Pass. Chosŏn’s new policy posed a considerable military and economic threat to the Jurchens, but it did not stop the Jurchen expansion. In 1625 the Jurchens occupied Shenyang, the political heart and economic center of Manchuria, and made it their new capital. After Nurhaci died in 1626, his son Hongtaiji became the new khan with the regnal title Tiancong (“Heavenly wis- dom”; Ma., Abkai sure) and quickly decided to invade Chosŏn. Becoming the Elder Brother of Chosŏn: The Jin and the First Manchu Invasion In the spring of 1627 Hongtaiji launched an attack on Chosŏn. The forces of the Jin, as the Jurchen regime now styled itself, swept into northern Chosŏn and cap- tured P’yŏngyang within two weeks, forcing the king, who had escaped to Kanghwa Island, to sue for peace. As a precondition of withdrawal, the Jin commander, Amin (?–1640), required the king to swear an oath to Heaven to sever Chosŏn’s relations with the Ming and establish an elder brother–younger brother rela- tionship with the Jin, the latter taking on the dominant role. In Chosŏn, many Confucian officials and students pleaded with the king to stop negotiating with the barbarous invaders, kill their messengers, and fight to the death. Although the king told his subjects that the peace talks with the “Jurchen clowns” were only a
stalling tactic, or a conventional “loose rein” (K., kimi) policy, he had no choice but to continue the negotiations. In his letters to Hongtaiji, the king endorsed Hongtaiji’s political position by addressing him as “Khan of the Country of the Jin,” but he purposely selected neu- tral terms for the Jin and Chosŏn. While he called the Jin “your honorable country,” the king referred to Chosŏn as “our country,” instead of “our humble country” or “our small country,” as he would say in his palace memorials to the Ming. No honorific expressions for Hongtaiji appeared at the beginning of the letter.¹⁶ The king conveyed that Chosŏn would follow the policy of “communicating with a neighboring country” vis-à-vis the Jin and that of “serving the great country” vis-à- vis the Ming. By deliberately using the Ming regnal title “Tianqi” to express the date in his letter, the king implied that he would not betray the Ming. This act of adhering to Ming time led to a deadlock in the negotiations. The king later switched to a “notice” format for his communications, since this format did not require a regnal title. The new format helped the two sides reach an agreement regarding Chosŏn’s oath. The oath-swearing ceremony occurred at the palace on Kanghwa Island on April 18, 1627. The king burned incense and swore the oaths to Heaven after one of his officials read them aloud. Despite the king’s reluctance, the substance of oaths was what Hongtaiji had demanded. The nine highest Chosŏn officials and eight high-ranking Jin officials also read their own oaths. However, the performance of these ceremonies between the king and the Jurchen officials was not men- tioned in either Manchu or Korean records.¹⁷ Another oath-swearing ceremony took place later in P’yŏngyang between Amin and a brother of the king. The P’yŏngyang oath included several additional terms imposed by the Jurchen invaders, emphasizing that the king should present gifts to the khan, host the Jin’s emissaries as he did those of the Ming, and not reinforce the city walls or conduct military drills.¹⁸ The two ceremonies ushered in a decade of peace between the two countries. In political and ideological terms the Jurchens benefited substantially from their invasion of Chosŏn. Chosŏn officially endorsed the Jurchen regime as a coun- try with a supreme sovereign, helping to foster the regime’s political legitimacy in the geopolitical arena. With the support of Chosŏn, the “Little China” that now regarded the Jin as its elder brother, the Jin’s politico-cultural self-identity changed from that of a barbarian, imposed by the discourse of the Ming-centered cos- mopolitan order, to that of the civilized. Although resentment of the Jurchen “barbarians” soared in Chosŏn after the war, the Korean court was unable to escape the newly established brotherhood. Economically, too, Chosŏn yielded to the Jurchens’ terms by opening markets in several towns on its northern border and paying “annual tribute” (K., sep’ye) to the Jurchen court. Constructing a Jin-Centric, Quasi-Zongfan System: The Jin’s New Position The Rise of the Jin-Chosŏn Quasi-Zongfan Order As he withdrew from Chosŏn, Hongtaiji sent the king a letter, explaining why he fought with the “southern dynasty”—the Ming—and attacked Chosŏn. He said, “The southern dynasty regards only itself as Son of Heaven and views people of other countries as inferior servants. … The Mandate of Heaven is truly righteous by assisting us with punishing the southern dynasty…. In the future, our two countries should be brothers forever and never bully others as the southern dynasty does.”¹⁹ By quoting the theory of the Mandate of Heaven, the khan challenged the Ming’s centrality in the universe and justified his war with the Ming. Over the following decade, his construction of a Jin-centric, quasi-Zongfan system in the Jin’s contacts with Chosŏn and other neighboring entities gradually changed the Jin’s position. In the face of serious economic difficulties brought on by the war, the Jin required Chosŏn to open markets for trade in a border city, Ŭiju. Chosŏn yielded to the Jin’s pressure but agreed to hold the markets only twice a year, in the spring and the autumn, rather than three times per year, as the Jin had wished. On March
31, 1628, the Ŭiju market opened for the first time, and the Jin emissary Inggūldai (1596–1648) came to Ŭiju accompanied by eight generals and more than a thou- sand people. As the Ŭiju market fell short of the Jin’s needs, Hongtaiji urged Chosŏn to open another one in Hoeryŏng, a northeastern border city.²⁰ In the midst of the shortage, the Jin relied heavily on the yearly gifts provided by Chosŏn and conveyed to Shenyang by one emissary in the spring and another in the autumn. From 1627 to 1636, the required gift comprised up to eighty-five categories of goods, but the amounts in each category kept changing to reflect the Jin’s needs or Chosŏn’s concerns, becoming a barometer of their relations.²¹ The Korean emissaries brought commercial opportunities to Shenyang. In 1631 the Border Defense Council of Chosŏn complained to the king that “the dispatch of emissaries to Shenyang was no different from opening markets there.”²² On the other hand, the development of the market in Shenyang, like that of the markets in Ŭiju and Hoeryŏng, suffered from significant differentials in the prices of the consumer prod- ucts offered by the two sides. The black cotton cloth and ginseng sold by the Koreans were expensive, whereas the animal skins and furs that the Jurchens traded were not. This difference made it difficult for the Jurchen side to turn a profit. The Jin’s military hegemony could not subordinate Korean capital, which contrib- uted to the Jin’s second invasion of Chosŏn. Given the military and economic situation, the Jin did not force Chosŏn to end its contacts with Beijing. Hongtaiji had the option of concluding a peace agree- ment with the Ming through which he could win the latter’s political endorsement. In a memorial to Hongtaiji in 1630, Gao Hongzhong, a Han Chinese scholar serving the Jin, suggested that the Jin “follow the Chosŏn model to receive the [Ming] investiture with kingship and to use the regnal title [of the Ming] to count the date” (Ch., bi Chaoxian shili, qingfeng wangwei, cong zhengshuo).²³ This proposal reflected a popular perception among the Chinese about Chosŏn’s exemplary tributary position in the Ming-centric world. Had the Ming agreed to negotiate for a Chosŏn-like status for the Jurchen regime, the Jin could have followed Chosŏn to become an outer fan of the Ming. Nevertheless, the war persisted, and the Jin moved toward a broader objective of replacing the Ming. For that purpose, the Jin started to transform its hierarchical relationship with Chosŏn. After 1627 Chosŏn continued to embrace the centrality of the Ming in its contacts with the Jin by applying its kyorin policy to the Jin; this put the Jin on an equal footing with Chosŏn. The king called his emissaries to the Jin “messengers” (K., sinsa), not “tributary emissaries” (K., kongsa), as he did those dispatched to Bei- jing. The goods brought annually to Shenyang were “gifts” (K., yemul) rather than “tributes” (K., kongmul) like those presented to Beijing. As the king noted in 1633 to Hongtaiji, “It is the proper principle [K., ye; Ch., li] that our two countries give each other local products in communications via emissaries.”²⁴ These terms reflected befitting modesty and suggested that Chosŏn treated the Jin as a country lower than the Ming. In stark contrast, the Jin developed a new discourse to nourish its self-identity as a political entity superior to Chosŏn. In documents written in the Manchu lan- guage beginning in 1627, the Jin downgraded the Korean monarch from “khan of Chosŏn” (Ma., Solgoi kan) to “king of Chosŏn” (Ma., Solgo i wang, or Coohiyan gurun i wang).²⁵ With the steady rise of the Jin’s military power, especially after its triumph in the battle at Dalinghe in late 1631 and early 1632, Hongtaiji enacted considerable reforms to the Jin political structure, abolishing the power-sharing system at the highest level of the court and making himself the exclusive sovereign.²⁶ From 1632, in his letters to the Ming and Chosŏn, Hongtaiji began to call himself “brilliant khan of the Manchu country” (Ma., Manju gurun i sure han) rather than “khan of the Jin country” (Ma., Aisin gurun i han), the title he had used before.²⁷ More importantly, he imitated the Ming bureaucracy by estab- lishing a six-ministry system in Shenyang and instructing Manchu officials such as Dahai (1595– 1632) to translate Chinese classics into the Manchu language.²⁸ From then on, the regime substantially accelerated the Sinicization of its imperial norms from the top down, a process carried out through the institution-building efforts of a group of Han Chinese officials and scholars such as Ning Wanwo (1593–1665), Fan Wencheng (1597–1666), Gao Hongzhong, and Bao Chengxian (?–1645). One of the most significant acts of these elites was to persuade Hongtaiji to produce the annals of the monarch and the regime in both the Chinese and
Manchu languages. The Chinese terms that these Han Chinese savants adopted to describe the exchanges of emissaries and diplomatic relations between the Jin and Chosŏn were crucial to revising the Jin’s political identity. According to the Manchu-language records written by the Manchu scholars, the emissaries of Chosŏn (Ma., Solho i elcin) “arrived and delivered the local products as gifts” (Ma., baci tucire doroi jaka benjime isinjiha) in Shenyang. When they left, the khan “gave” (Ma., unggihe) or “awarded” (Ma., šangnaha) them and the king gifts.²⁹ Although these Manchu terms were largely vernacular and had no strong political meaning, their counter- parts in the Chinese-language records offered a very different portrayal. The visit of the “tributary emissaries” (Ch., gongshi), who brought “tribute” (Ch., gongwu) or “local products” (Ch., fangwu), was described as “the coming to the court to present themselves before the sovereign” (Ch., laichao), suggesting that the emis- saries’ visit was prompted not by the Jin’s formidable military might but by its outstanding merits.³⁰ These terms invoked a hierarchical relationship between the sovereign—an emperor in the Chinese sense—and his subjects, which in this case included Chosŏn, Vietnam, Ryukyu, other fan of the Ming, and the Central Asian political entities.³¹ Meanwhile, the Jin applied the political and diplomatic discourse it had developed toward Chosŏn to forces and political entities that sought shelter with or surrendered to the Jin, such as Bar Baturu, Nomun Dalai, Coir Jamsu from Alakcot of Cahar, and the Ming general Kong Youde (?–1652).³² In 1634 Hongtaiji changed the name of Shenyang to Mukden in Manchu and Shengjing (lit. “prosperous capital”) in Chinese, and the following year he in- structed his people to call the country “Manzhou” (M., Manju; “the Manchu state”), not “Jurchen” or other names. The regime’s institutional construction was thus facilitated by a clear ethnic identification, but the rationale behind this framework focused more on politico-cultural factors than on ethnic ones. In this pe- riod, Jin officials, particularly those who were Han Chinese, started to address Hongtaiji as “emperor” (Ch., huangshang, or huangdi). Some suggested that Hong- taiji perform conventional rituals established by the Han Dynasty, through which he would claim to be the Son of Heaven in the Chinese sense. More signif- icantly, these officials invoked the principles of the civilized–barbarian distinction to brand the Ming “southern barbarians” (Ch., manzi) and those Chinese who surrendered to the Jin “Han Chinese barbarians” (Ch., hanyi), thereby appropriating and completely reversing the Ming’s language regarding the center of the world.³³ With this change in its worldview, the Manchu regime began to play the role of the exclusive institutional agent of the Mandate of Heaven, to which “all barbar- ians in the four quarters of the world willingly come in submission” (Ch., siyi xianfu). When the Ming generals Kong Youde and Geng Zhongming (1604–49) sur- rendered to Hongtaiji in 1633, the Jin jubilantly described the event as “people from afar willingly coming to our court for civilization” (Ch., yuanren laigui).³⁴ The euphoric adoption of this phrase demonstrated that the Manchu regime was purposely constructing its identity as the center of the world, with cultural superiority over “barbarians from afar” or on its periphery, which now included the Ming.³⁵ These momentous changes in the Jin’s political discourse were rooted in ortho- dox Chinese political theory as articulated in Confucian classics, such as Analects of Confucius (Ch., Lunyu) and Doctrine of the Mean (Ch., Zhongyong), and they demonstrate the deep significance of both the Sinicization of the Manchu regime and the barbarianization of others by the regime. The use of Chinese political rhetoric of this sort was no mere imitation of the Ming’s discourse to please Hongtaiji. Rather, it was aimed at achieving a political goal by transforming the regime into a new center of gravity in a Jin-dominated world, a goal that the young and vernacular Manchu language—including the New Manchu (Ma., ice manju hergen) developed in 1632—was incapable of securing. The Manchu regime conducted its relations with Chosŏn in accordance with hierarchical principles within a quasi-Zongfan system. Some historians have ar- gued that at this time the Manchus derived their political concepts of imperial rule mainly from their Mongol allies rather than from the Chinese.³⁶ Yet the transformation of the Manchu regime’s understanding of its relations with neighboring nomadic and Confucian states, which took place concurrently
with the transformation of the Manchu-Chosŏn relationship, indicates that the regime was enthusiastically constructing a new politico-cultural self-identity by appropriating and exploiting the Chinese politico-cultural discourse. Scholars have also long debated the theory of the Sinicization or Sinification of the Manchus. The mainstream explorations of this issue so far have focused either on how the Han Chinese culturally assimilated the Manchus or on how the Manchus tried to retain their ethnic identity.³⁷ What this chapter explores is how the Manchu regime, rather than the ethnic Manchus, promoted itself as the exclusively civilized Middle Kingdom—Zhongguo—and it is in this sense that I use the term “Sinicization” in this book. The Manchu Regime’s Strategic Goal of Transforming into Zhongguo While the quasi-Zongfan discourse helped to refashion the self-image of the Manchu regime along Chinese lines, the Manchu language offered an international setting for this reconstruction by framing the Jin’s relations with other political entities as state-to-state interactions. In Manchu records the Jin, the Ming, Chosŏn, and such Mongol polities as Korcin were all defined as gurun. The term gurun has several meanings, including “country,” “tribe,” “people of a tribe,” and “race.” Two of these meanings are primary: “people” and “country.” For instance, amba gurun could mean “big country” or “adults,” and ajige gurun could mean “small country” or “children,” while haha gurun refers to “men” and hehe gurun refers to “women.”³⁸ In political contexts, gurun denoted primarily “country,” as in Aisin gurun (the country of the Jin), Nikan gurun (the country of the Han Chinese, that is, the Ming), Daiming gurun (the country of the Great Ming), Solho gurun or Coohiyan gurun (the country of Chosŏn), Korcin gurun (the country of the Korcin Mongols), and Cahar gurun (the country of the Cahar Mongols).³⁹ The Mongolian equivalent of the term in the Mongol records of the day is ulus (country).⁴⁰ The Manchu rulers drew clear geographical, social, and cultural lines between the Manchu regime and other countries, even as they emphasized common- alities. Nurhaci underlined to the Kalka Mongols in 1619 that “the Ming and Chosŏn have different languages, but they share the same styles in clothing and hair, so the two countries look like a single country; similarly, our two countries look like a single country.”⁴¹ The consciousness of being a state became progressively more transparent in the regime’s political norms, in particular in the Chinese-language records. In 1628, for instance, Hongtaiji called the Cahar Mongols a “dif- ferent country” (Ma., encu gurun; Ch., yiguo) and a “far country” (Ch., yuanguo).⁴² The following year Hongtaiji treated the prince of “the country of Korcin” to the music and dances of “four countries,” including the Jin, the Korcin Mongols, the Ming, and Chosŏn.⁴³ In a letter to Ming officials in 1632, Hongtaiji named his country and the Cahar Mongols as two “countries outside of the border [of the Ming]” (Ma., jasei tulergi gurun; Ch., bianwai zhi guo).⁴⁴ The new political discourse fundamentally transformed the worldview of the Manchu regime from within by representing the regime as a state at the center of a multistate community. The strategic goal of this transformation, as Ning Wanwo indicated in 1633 when he suggested that the Jin compose an institutional code (Ch., Jindian) by modifying that of the Ming, was to break with Ming conventions and “gradually develop the institutions of Zhongguo” (Ch., jianjiu Zhongguo zhi zhi). In other words, the Jin intended to develop its own “institutions of Zhongguo” to replace those of the Ming. According to Ning, only in this way could the regime manage its great enterprise after conquering the “place of the southern barbarians” (Ch., manzi difang), that is, the Ming. Ning justified his proposal by stressing that “a new monarch and his officials must have their own institutional works.”⁴⁵ This strategic plan shows that Zhongguo, as a politico-cultural identity, was available for the Manchu regime to embrace and claim. What is more, it suggests that control over the central plain (Ch., Zhongyuan) was not necessarily a prerequisite for a regime to claim to be Zhongguo, as has been assumed. Nurhaci wished to preserve the ways of his ethnic nation, or Manchuness, by enshrining Shanhai Pass and the Liao River as the border between “the Chinese and Jurchen countries” (Ma., nikan, jušen meni meni gurun). He tried to avoid “turning to the Chinese way” (Ma., nikan i doro de dosimbi; Ch., xiao hansu)—or becoming Sinicized—as the Liao, the Jin, and the Yuan Dynasties had done after their founders left their own homelands for the “Chinese inner land” (Ma., nikan
i dorgi bade; Ch., handi); they had “changed ways and all became Chinese” (Ma., doro forgošoro jakade, gemu nikan ohobi).⁴⁶ Although the Manchu leaders exhorted their ethnic cohorts to keep to the “old way” (Ma., fe doro) in daily life by wearing traditional garb and practicing Manchu archery and horseback riding, the regime was unavoidably following the “Chinese way” in its rapid transformation in the 1630s. The Manchu regime could have become Zhongguo even if it had remained in Manchuria and not crossed the Great Wall in 1644. By employing the newly adopted Chinese political discourse, the Manchu regime gradually absorbed the Chinese political philosophy of the Zongfan order into its understanding of its place within the constellation of polities. Aside from the Ming, other countries served as the Jin’s outer fan by presenting tribute to the khan, who occupied a position akin to that of a Chinese emperor. This quasi-Zongfan system matured to the point that in 1636, in their Chinese letter to Chosŏn, forty-nine princes of sixteen countries of Mongols under the Jin’s leadership termed themselves “Mongols as the outer fan of the Jin” (Ch., Jinguo waifan menggu), equivalent to the Manchu term tulergi goloi monggo (“Mongols as the outer fan ”).⁴⁷ In the same year, the Jin founded Menggu yamen (M., Monggo jurgan, lit. “the ministry of Mongolian affairs”) on the basis of Chinese civil administrational concepts. As an institution parallel to the Ministry of Rites, this ministry enabled the regime to transform its relations with the Mongols and to build and govern an emerging empire. The construction of this quasi-Zongfan discourse occurred primarily within the Jin’s borders, but the Jin found Chosŏn the best external resource to support its discursive revolution. Within the bilateral relationship, the Jin held the role of the supreme power, and it converted Chosŏn from a younger brother into a subor- dinate or outer fan. Students of Sino-Korean relations tend to assume that the Manchus adopted hierarchical discourse in 1637 after the second Manchu invasion, when the Manchu side imposed clear Zongfan terms on Chosŏn. However, in practice the process had begun much earlier. In the 1630s the scholars of the Jin had mined Chinese history for intellectual resources with which to manipulate the civilized–barbarian distinction in order to establish the centrality of the Jin. Within the Zongfan framework, the “central civilized country” (Ch., Huaxia) and its counterpart, “barbarians,” were the two key concepts addressing the status of the Middle Kingdom and that of its outer fan. The two terms were derived from the notion of all-under-Heaven, developed in the Xia (ca. 2070–1600 BC), Shang (1600–1046 BC), and Zhou periods, through which the three dynasties sought to legitimize their rule as divine. At the same time, the political entities spanning China’s lands identified xia (referring not to the Xia Dynasty but to a larger area in which the regime once resided) as the symbol of a civilized commu- nity possessing the Mandate of Heaven, namely, Zhongguo, Zhongyuan (the central plain), or Zhongtu (the central lands). At that time, the term “barbarians” re- ferred primarily to groups that resided along the periphery of the central plain and were reluctant to identify and embrace the concept of “civilized China,” as exemplified by the state relationship between the Qin and the Chu in the third century BC.⁴⁸ The originally geographic notion of “barbarian” became an instrument used by political forces to deprecate their antagonists during the movement of “revering the court of the Zhou and expelling the barbarians” (Ch., zunzhou rangyi) in the Eastern Zhou (770–256 BC), a chaotic time that led Confucius (551–479 BC) to call for restoring the ideal order of “proper conduct” (Ch., li) of the Western Zhou. Due to the fierce interstate rivalries, the civilized– barbarian distinction evolved into a politico-cultural ideology that the dynastic regimes of China contin- uously reinterpreted for the next two thousand years, until 1911. After the Han Dynasty, with the official institutionalization of Confucianism and the expansion of the concept of all-under-Heaven, the civilized–barbarian dis- tinction became a critical theoretical framework for the Chinese court’s management of its foreign relations. As “northern barbarians” gained ascendancy in the Northern Song (960–1127), the distinction presented itself as an essential cultural instrument with which Chinese elites endowed certain regimes with the pedi- gree of “legitimate historical narratives” (Ch., zhengshi) by expelling competing polities from these narratives.⁴⁹ Some scholars, such as Shi Jie (1005–45), the au- thor of A Treatise on the Middle Kingdom (Ch., Zhongguo lun), and Ouyang Xiu (1007–72), the author of A Treatise on Orthodox Legitimacy (Ch., Zhengtong lun),
depicted the Song as the exclusive civilized center of the world and the polities on the Song’s northern border as uncivilized. One of the most influential histories, A Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government (Ch., Zizhi tongjian), edited by Sima Guang (1019–86), drew a clear lineage connecting states identified as “China” from 403 BC to AD 959. The efforts of these scholars to conceptualize the narrative of orthodox legitimacy eventually paid off, for their rhetoric triumphed over that of the northern regimes, especially when Neo-Confucianism, created and elaborated by such Song intellectual vanguards as Cheng Hao (1032–85), Cheng Yi (1033–1107), and Zhu Xi (1130–1200), became China’s official ideology under the Yuan Dynasty. This intellectual history can help explain why the official historical narrative of the People’s Republic of China still celebrates the Song for its legitimate status as Zhongguo and marginalizes the Liao, the Xixia, and the Jin as regimes established by “ethnic minorities” (Ch., shaoshu minzu). It was against this historical back- drop that the scholars of the Manchu regime in the 1630s began to construct the regime’s orthodox legitimacy, which laid the foundation for the Manchu enter- prise of governing a vast empire as the legitimate Middle Kingdom, Zhongguo. The Practices of the Manchu-Chosŏn Quasi-Zongfan Order The Manchu regime implemented its quasi-Zongfan discourse through the rituals that accompanied the exchange of emissaries with Chosŏn by imitating Ming- Chosŏn contacts. In Mukden, the Korean emissaries kowtowed five times to Hongtaiji. They were comfortably lodged in the city and enjoyed a welcome banquet (K., hama yŏn, lit. “banquet for getting off a horse”) and a farewell banquet (K., sangma yŏn, lit. “banquet for getting on a horse”). Hongtaiji dispensed gifts to the Korean king, emissaries, interpreters, and servants.⁵⁰ In exchange, the Jin sent Manchu emissaries to Hansŏng in the spring and autumn of every year. Before they entered the Korean capital, the Manchu emissaries were housed at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country (K., Mohwa gwan), a place that had previ- ously accommodated Ming emissaries. The emissaries also had an audience with the king in the palace and were treated to official welcome and farewell ban- quets. Although Chosŏn did not want to treat the Manchu representatives like those of the Ming, the general ritual procedures of greeting were practically iden- tical. The Manchu emissaries lacked only their Ming counterparts’ standing as “imperial envoy” or “Heavenly envoy.” This de facto Zongfan relationship conflicted with the de jure one of equality between the two brothers, a contradiction strikingly manifested in the different for- mats of their sovereign letters to each other. In its letters to the Jin, Chosŏn placed the two sides on a fully equal political plane, which was hierarchically lower than the status of the Ming. According to the Chinese convention, whenever the characters for Heaven or the Ming emperor appeared, they were placed at the top of a new line, two character spaces higher than the characters for Chosŏn and the first characters of other lines. This honorific elevation acknowledged the em- peror as the supreme human agent of Heaven with the highest spiritual position in the world. Hongtaiji also used honorific elevation in his letters, but he adopted a different arrangement of the hierarchy, as shown by his letters to the Ming general Yuan Chonghuan (1584–1630). Hongtaiji divided the hierarchy into four lev- els, among which his position was lower than that of Heaven and the Ming emperor but higher than that of Ming officials (see figure 1.1). For his part, General Yuan followed Ming custom in his letters to Hongtaiji (see figure 1.2). Frustrated by Yuan’s usage, Hongtaiji exclaimed that he was “the monarch or the khan of another country” (Ma., encu gurun i ejen han) and “son of Heaven and the Buddha” (Ma., abka fucihi i jui). He declared that he would not accept any letters from the Ming that addressed him with a status lower than or even equal to that of the Ming officials.⁵¹ Nevertheless, in his communications with the king of Chosŏn, Hongtaiji was more pragmatic, addressing the king as a near equal in order to avoid offending the Korean monarch (see figure 1.3). The king followed the same format in his responses to Hongtaiji but avoided mention of the imposed brotherhood (see figure 1.4). Although Hongtaiji called the king “younger brother,” the king never referred to Hongtaiji as “elder brother.” When Hongtaiji questioned the king about this discrepancy in 1629, the king shifted to friend-to-friend expressions: “The king of the country of Chosŏn,” he wrote, “presents this letter to the khan of the country of the Jin” (K., Chosŏn
kugwang pongsŏ Kŭmguk han; Ma., Coohiyan gurun i wang ni bithe, Aisin gurun i han de unggimbi). This usage matched Hongtaiji’s wording: “The khan of the country of the Jin sends this letter to the king of the country of Chosŏn” (Ma., Aisin gurun i han i bithe, Coohiyan gurun i wang de unggimbi). Later, the king changed the verb “present” (K., pong; Ma., jafambi) to “send” (K., ch’i; Ma., unggimbi), eliminating the hierarchical connotations of the former term. This subtle change provoked the Jin, but Chosŏn explained that both terms were used between “neighboring countries.”⁵² To the Jin, Chosŏn’s pronounced pro-Ming attitude meant that the brotherhood was unstable. The Jin’s security would not be guaranteed so long as Chosŏn was a loyal subject of the Ming. The only way to solve this problem, the Jin believed, was with another war against Chosŏn.
FIGURE 1.1. The format of Hongtaiji’s letters to Yuan Chonghuan in 1627. In this and the three figures that follow, the Arabic numerals represent horizontal lines from the top down, the English letters represent vertical lines, and the direction of the writing is from right to left. “X” represents a Chinese character. MWLD, 821, 847; MBRT, 4:28, 72. FIGURE 1.2. The format of Yuan Chonghuan’s letters to Hongtaiji in 1627. MWLD, 821; MBRT, 4:28. FIGURE 1.3. The format of Hongtaiji’s letters to the king of Chosŏn, 1627–36. Kakyu gobu .
FIGURE 1.4. The format of the letters of the king of Chosŏn to Hongtaiji, 1627–36. Chosŏnguk raesoȈ bu, vol. 1. From Elder Brother to Father of Chosŏn: The Second Manchu Invasion Manchu-Chosŏn Conflicts over Orthodox Legitimacy In the middle of the 1630s, many Han Chinese and Manchu officials of the Jin sought to persuade Hongtaiji to take the title of emperor. On February 4, 1636, these officials presented memorials to prompt Hongtaiji to follow the Mandate of Heaven by claiming the emperorship. Following Chinese ritual conventions, Hongtaiji ostensibly declined and suggested his officials send emissaries to Chosŏn to discuss the matter with the king, his younger brother.⁵³ Hongtaiji’s true motivation, as the Korean official Hong Ik-han (1586–1637) shrewdly recognized, was to use Chosŏn’s identity as Little China to assert before other countries that Chosŏn revered him as the Son of Heaven. The Manchu officials Inggūldai and Mafuta (?–1640) arrived in Hansŏng on March 30, along with forty-seven Mongol princes, thirty generals, and ninety-eight soldiers. They brought with them five letters. The first three letters extended Hongtaiji’s condolences on the death of the queen of Chosŏn. The fourth letter, writ- ten by eight Manchu princes (Ma., hošoi beile) and seventeen high-ranking Manchu ministers (Ma., gūsai amban), and the fifth letter, by forty-nine Mongol princes under the Chinese name Jinguo waifan menggu (Mongols as the outer fan of the Jin), aimed to persuade the king to submit a memorial urging Hongtaiji to follow the Mandate of Heaven (Ma., Abkai gūnin) and to claim the “great title” (Ma., amba gebu)—namely, that of emperor. The letters emphasized that the Jin now pos- sessed “virtues” (Ma., erdemu) that enabled it to manage the world.⁵⁴ But on March 31, 139 Korean Confucian students presented the king with a petition, calling on him “to kill the barbarian emissaries and burn the barbarian letters.” Inggūldai and his followers were thrown into panic and fled the city.⁵⁵ Chosŏn’s stance was strengthened when the king dispatched Na Tŏk-hŏn as the spring emissary and Yi Kwak as the response emissary to Mukden in late April. On May 15 the Jin held a grand ceremony in which Hongtaiji assumed the title “emperor of lenience, kindheartedness, beneficence, and brilliance” (Ma., gosin onco huwaliyasun enduringge han; Ch., kuan wen ren sheng huangdi) and adopted the regnal title Chongde (Ma., Wesihun erdemungge, lit. “worshiping virtues”). The Jin renamed itself the “Country of the Great Qing” (Ma., Daicing gurun; Ch., Da Qing guo). Gathering on Hongtaiji’s left and right flanks, the Jin’s Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese officials knelt down three times, each time making three prostrations (Ma., ilan jergi niyakūrafi uyun jergi hengkilembi; Ch., san gui jiu koutou)—the highest level of kowtow during the Qing period. Although Na and Yi had performed a ceremony of four kowtows before Hongtaiji upon their arrival, they called this second ceremony a “usurpation of the imperial title” (K., ch’amho) and refused to perform it, expressing their strong opposition to Hongtaiji’s political ambitions.⁵⁶ Chosŏn was the only Confucian country that lay beyond the Manchu regime’s political control but maintained regular and official diplomatic communications with it. Since Hongtaiji had made his claim to be the Son of Heaven in observance of proper Chinese conduct, he desperately needed the sup- port of Chosŏn to counteract the designation of the Manchus as barbarians and to legitimize his emperorship in the Chinese sense. The ritual conflict with the Korean emissaries thus posed a grave identity crisis for him. Without endorsement from Chosŏn, the Manchu regime’s political transformation would remain largely confined to its borders and would not significantly influence regional politics. Hongtaiji sent Na and Yi back to Chosŏn with two Chinese-language letters to the king. In the letters Hongtaiji called himself “emperor of the country of the Great Qing” (Ch., Da Qing guo huangdi) rather than “khan of the Jin” and referred to Chosŏn as “your country” (Ch., erguo) instead of “your honorable country” (Ch., guiguo), signaling the end of the bilateral brotherly relationship. Invoking the time-honored notion that “the Heaven does not belong to one person, but to all people under the Heaven” (Ma., abkai fejergi emu niyalmai abkai fejergi waka, abkai fejergi niyalmai abkai fejergi), Hongtaiji sought to demonstrate that his regime could govern the space of all-under-Heaven (Ch., tianxia; Ma., abkai fejergi) by following the precedent set by previous dynasties: namely, the Liao, which had been founded by the “northeastern barbarians” (Ch., dongbei yi; Ma., dergi amargi jušen); the Jin, founded by the “eastern barbarians” (Ch., dongyi; Ma., dergi jušen); and the Yuan, established by the “northern barbarians” (Ch., beiyi; Ma., amargi monggo, “northern Mongols”). By chronicling the rise and fall of these dynasties, Hongtaiji located the Qing, the dynasty of the Manchu “barbarians,” within this lineage of rulership, with himself as the Son of Heaven. The Qing’s rule was justified, he argued, because the Qing possessed the virtue that the Ming had lost.⁵⁷ This assertion was based on the Chinese political view that “the Great Heaven has no partial affections and it helps only the virtuous” (Ch., huangtian wu qin, wei de shi fu), a theory articulated in The Classic of History (Ch., Shangshu), which had endowed more than thirty dynasties with legitimacy. In short, Hongtaiji hoped that Chosŏn would become the Great Qing’s outer fan, just as it had served the previous dynasties of China. Chosŏn became the first external target of the Qing’s new, Qing-centric Zongfan doctrine. Yet Hongtaiji’s position was unpopular in Chosŏn because it con- flicted with the orthodox legitimacy on which the Confucian country based its political and social principles. With the exception of several high-ranking officials who preferred the Manchus, the majority of the ruling elite resolutely called for “revering China and expelling the barbarians” (K., chon Chungguk, yang yichŏk) in accordance with “the doctrine of revering the Zhou Dynasty” (K., chonju ŭiri).⁵⁸ In the face of tremendous pressure, the king reaffirmed that Chosŏn would not en- dorse Hongtaiji’s emperorship. The Qing thus declared war for the sake of its name and legitimacy. The Establishment of Manchu-Chosŏn Zongfan Relations On December 28, 1636, Qing troops attacked Chosŏn. They captured Hansŏng on January 9, 1637, without encountering strong resistance. The king had escaped
to Namhan Mountain Fortress with the crown prince (K., seja; Ch., shizi; Ma., šidz) and some officials, while the remaining royal family members and other offi- cials fled to Kanghwa Island. The Qing forces surrounded the Namhan Fortress and, as their precondition for negotiations, demanded that the king send the crown prince as hostage. The king refused and mobilized his forces to resist the invasion and protect the “great justice under Heaven” (K., ch’ŏnha taeŭi). While Hongtaiji marched on the fortress with reinforcements on January 19, the king and his officials performed ceremonies to celebrate the birthday of Emperor Chongzhen of the Ming. Yet the king realized that Chosŏn’s fate was now at a crossroads. Ch’oe Myŏng-gil (1586–1647), a minister who had assisted the king in assuming the throne in the coup of 1623 and served as the king’s close adviser since that time, argued for peaceful negotiation with the Qing as he had done in 1627, when the Manchus invaded Chosŏn for the first time. Ch’oe’s approach was not welcomed by the majority of his colleagues, but it was undeniably prag- matic. On January 26, the lunar New Year, the king, fulfilling Chosŏn’s duty as a subject of the Ming, performed vested rituals in the direction of Beijing. Once the ceremony was over, the king sent two officials to negotiate with the Qing. Two days later the king presented a letter to Hongtaiji in which he called Hongtaiji “the emperor of lenience, kindheartedness, beneficence, and brilliance of the country of the Great Qing” and referred to the Qing as the “big country” (K., taeguk) and to Chosŏn as the “small country” (K., sobang). The presentation of the letter was defined as “submitting the letter to the higher authority” (K., songsŏ).⁵⁹ Hongtaiji insisted that the king should surrender to him in person, so the two sides negotiated for two more weeks, during which the Qing troops shelled the fortress and defeated Chosŏn reinforcements sent from provinces. On February 15 the king presented another letter, in which he called Hongtaiji “Your Majesty” and himself a “subordinate” (see figure 1.5). He dated the letter using the Qing reg- nal title “Chongde.”⁶⁰ His letter suggested that the king had decided to surrender before Kanghwa Island was conquered.⁶¹ On February 17 the king submitted a sovereign letter to Hongtaiji, declaring that Chosŏn would “present the humble palace memorial [K., p’yo; Ch., biao] as the subordinate and serve as a fan [K., pŏnbang; Ch., fanbang] of the Great Qing forever,” while “all rituals about serving the big country would be performed in the vested format.”⁶² On February 22, 1637, Inggūldai brought an imperial edict to the king and asked the Korean officials to perform the same rituals that they had done when receiv- ing edicts from the “southern dynasty” (the Ming). This occasion marked the first time that the Qing replaced the Ming in ritual exchanges with Chosŏn on Ko- rean territory. In his edict, Hongtaiji listed ten terms of submission, among which two stood out. First, the king had to surrender to the Qing the book of imperial investiture and the seal that he had received from the Ming, stop communicating with the Ming, and begin to use the regnal title of the Qing instead of that of the Ming to indicate dates in all documents. Second, the king had to dispatch officials to the Qing every year to bring “humble palace memorials,” present gifts, and perform rituals to celebrate occasions such as the winter solstice, the New Year, the birthdays of the emperor, empress, and crown prince, and any good news for the Qing, and to extend condolences on the loss of members of the Qing’s royal house. The format of these memorials was required to follow the established for- mat of Chosŏn’s memorials to the Ming. The rituals of receiving imperial decrees, accommodating imperial envoys in Chosŏn, and paying formal visits to the Qing emperor through tributary emissaries were to dovetail precisely with the “established way of the Ming country” (Ch., Mingguo jiuli). Hongtaiji also listed the items and amounts of the tributes required of Chosŏn and specified that tribute submissions ought to begin in 1639.⁶³
FIGURE 1.5. The format of the king’s letters to Hongtaiji in February 1637. The Arabic numerals represent horizontal lines from the top down, the English letters represent vertical lines, and the direction of the writing is from right to left. X represents a Chinese character. Chosŏnguk raesoȈ bu, 2:26–38. The king unconditionally accepted all of Hongtaiji’s terms. On February 24, 1637, he presented himself before Hongtaiji at Samjŏndo (lit. “three fields ferry”), near the Hangang River, where the Qing had built a massive altar for Hongtaiji to receive the king’s surrender. During the ceremony, presided over by the Qing’s Ministry of Rites, the king knelt down three times, each time bowing his head three times before the emperor, after which he handed in his seal issued by the Ming. This ceremony marked the official establishment of the Zongfan relationship between the Qing and Chosŏn, as the king confirmed in his palace memorial to Hongtaiji on December 16, 1637.⁶⁴ The Qing’s forces soon returned to Mukden, taking the crown prince of Chosŏn, Yi Wang (1612–45), and the king’s second son, Yi Ho (King Hyojong, 1619–59), as hostages. Beginning on March 24, 1637, Chosŏn used the regnal title of the Qing to express the date, thus incorporating the country into the Qing’s temporal realm.⁶⁵ Chosŏn became the Qing’s outer fan . The establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship, which replaced the Ming-Chosŏn relationship that had been officially institutionalized in 1401, was extremely significant for the Qing. The Ming’s passionate endorsement of the Zhou Zongfan system meant that under the Qing, the system was likewise di- rectly connected with the classical and ideal tenets of the Zhou. As its political rhetoric developed after 1644, the Manchu court began to define its relationship with Chosŏn’s court by using more sophisticated terms that were associated with the Zhou Zongfan system. As early as 1649, Emperor Shunzhi, in his imperial mandate to invest King Hyojong, emphasized that Chosŏn served as an “outer fan ” for the “central court” (Ch., wangshi).⁶⁶ In 1659 Emperor Shunzhi began his imperial mandate to invest King Hyŏngjong with the traditional term “dividing cogongrass” (Ch., fenmao), a metaphor for the Zhou’s Zongfan investiture.⁶⁷ Meanwhile, the Manchu court came to define Chosŏn as a “princely submission” (Ch., houfu; Ma., jecen i golo) according to the conventional theory of the “five submissions” (Ch., wufu) of the Zhou.⁶⁸ This definition equated the status of the king with that of China’s princely minister, governor-general, and governor.⁶⁹ Along the same lines, the Qing side, emperors and officials alike, regarded Korean emissaries as “ministers of ministers of the outer fan ” (Ch., waifan peichen).⁷⁰ These established Zongfan tenets determined the familistic nature of the Qing-Chosŏn relationship, which crystallized in a crisis of kingship in 1768. In August of that year, Yi Gŭm (King Yŏngjo) asked Emperor Qianlong to invest his grandson Yi San (later known as Chŏngjo) as the crown successor to the Chosŏn king- ship in the wake of the deaths of Yi Gŭm’s two sons, including the crown prince. Because the Qing court had never before encountered this situation, Emperor Qianlong instructed the Grand Secretariat (Ch., Neige) and the Ministry of Rites to consult Confucian books and historical records in search of appropriate prece- dents for the title of “crown grandson” (Ch., shisun). The ministry cited Confucius’s interpretations in The Book of Rites (Ch., Liji) and historical precedents ranging from the Liu Song Dynasty (420–79) to the Ming Dynasty pertaining to the investment of a vassal’s grandson as crown grandson. Stressing that “the outer fan is fundamentally the same as Zongfan,” the ministry recommended that the emperor invest Yi San as the crown grandson, and the emperor did so.⁷¹ As the Ming had done, the Qing regarded Chosŏn as an extended royal family member of the Middle Kingdom where the patriarch—the Son of Heaven—resided. This ideology continued to exert profound influence over Qing-Chosŏn relations in the nineteenth century. In 1882, under the Qing’s supervision and medi- ation, Chosŏn signed a treaty with the United States that portrayed Chosŏn as an independent state with a sovereign equal to the American president. But regard- less of the treaty’s legal implications based on international law, in 1883 the Chinese official Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), who had negotiated the 1882 treaty with the United States on Chosŏn’s behalf as governor-general of Zhili, superintendent of trade for the northern ports of China (Ch., Beiyang tongshang dachen, here- after “Beiyang superintendent”), and China’s de facto foreign minister, cited the Western Zhou’s Zongfan tenets to declare that the king was an “outer vassal” (Ch., wai zhuhou) of the Son of Heaven in China. Li further pointed out that the king was equal to China’s governors-general and provincial governors, who were “inner vassals” (Ch., nei zhuhou), while the status of lower-ranking Korean officials corresponded to that of their Chinese counterparts.⁷² In 1886, when Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), Li’s protégé, who resided in Chosŏn as the Chinese imperial resident, asked Li what level of ritual he should perform in front of the king, Li replied that it would be courteous enough for Yuan to follow the rituals used by Chinese provincial officials when visiting first-degree princes (Ch., qinjunwang).⁷³ On the Korean side, the king, in a pre-1894 humble memorial to Emperor Guangxu, still referred to Chosŏn as China’s “princely submission.”⁷⁴ In their dealings with each other in the late nineteenth century, both China and Korea looked to Zongfan precedents from the Western Zhou down through the Ming, and their country-to-country contacts were subordinate to their familistic court-to-court hierarchy. All of these stories started in 1637, when the Qing formalized its Zongfan relationship with Chosŏn. At this point it is necessary to explain further why this book prefers the Chinese term “Zongfan” over the oft-used English renderings “tribute system” or “trib- utary system.” In the twentieth century, the promulgation of the term “tribute system,” together with the concepts “suzerain” and “vassal,” owed a great debt to the popularity of a more neutral phrase, “Chinese world order,” proposed by the American historian John King Fairbank. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, Fair- bank prompted a constellation of historians and political scientists to explore the rationale behind China’s foreign relations in the late imperial period. Although Fairbank was aware of the complexity of Sinocentric cosmopolitanism, or “Sinocentrism,” the term “Chinese world order,” which he used broadly to denote this system and to highlight its diversity, became a rough equivalent of “tribute system.” Acceptance of this English rendering has allowed scholars in a variety of fields to treat it as a counterpart to “treaty system” or “treaty port system.” Some scholars have questioned the appositeness of the terms “tributary system” and “suzerain-vassal relations” and criticized them as “a nineteenth- and twentieth-century reinterpretation of an older form of symbolically asymmetric interstate rela- tions,” while others, likewise seeking to avoid the possible misunderstandings caused by English terminology, have proposed new terms, such as “Pax Sinica,” in a world history context.⁷⁵ But their combined efforts have not changed the entrenched renderings or paradigm, and the conventional English parlance still
profoundly influences scholars’ understanding of late imperial China’s foreign relations.⁷⁶ An underlying problem with the term “tribute system,” as chapter 2 shows, is that it can convey only some of the connotations of the comprehensive Zongfan system—namely, chaogong, or sending emissaries to pay tribute to China, the perennial activity that was the most sensational and visible part of the regular ritual contacts between Qing China and its fan. The term “tribute system” thus trims the entire mechanism down to a Sinocentric trade structure. As Peter C. Perdue points out in his study of Qing-Zunghar relations, “Overly simplistic generalizations about the Qing ‘tribute system’ tend to single out one trading relationship as the orthodox, normative one, neglecting the great diversity of ritual, economic, and diplomatic conditions found in the Qing trading regime as a whole.”⁷⁷ The submission of tribute should not be used loosely as a master concept to represent the entire structure and its core nature. This is not to suggest, however, that the term “tribute system” has no analytical utility as a conceptual interpretive tool. This is clear in the debate over the question of when the practices of the Sinocentric order became as mature, institutional, and systematic as they were in the Ming and Qing periods.⁷⁸ Cherishing the Small Country: The Qing’s Construction of Its Zhongguo Identity The Qing’s Transformation into the “Big Country” Within the new Zongfan relationship, the Qing was Chosŏn’s monarch and the patriarch of the big family principally consisting of the Qing, Chosŏn, and the Mongol states. Given its supreme authority, the Qing could use the subordination of Chosŏn to its advantage. The first and most direct effect of the relationship was the formation of a new military alliance between the two countries. By conquering Chosŏn, the Qing reinforced its home front in the war with the Ming by eliminating the potential military threat on its eastern flank. It also gained material assistance from Chosŏn in the form of warhorses, grain, warships, cannons, and soldiers. Two months after Chosŏn’s subordination, the Manchu forces conquered Ka Island, destroying the last Ming military base in Chosŏn. In the next few years, a number of Korean soldiers, particularly gunners, were forced to join the Manchus in their fight against the Ming and to garrison Jinzhou and other cities newly conquered by the Qing in Manchuria.⁷⁹ By transforming its relationship with Chosŏn into one between a monarch and a subordinate, or between a father and a son, the Qing obtained political legit- imacy from Chosŏn, a Confucian country beyond the Qing’s geographical borders but within its political and cultural realm. Given that the Chinese perceived their Zongfan relationships with other countries or political entities within a model centered on China as the Middle Kingdom, the establishment of the Qing- Chosŏn Zongfan relationship defined the Qing as the Middle Kingdom. In other words, the identities of both China and the countries on its periphery within the Zongfan framework were mutually dependent and constitutive. This rationale provided the Qing with the political and cultural foundations that it desperately needed to legitimize its centrality in the Chinese world. In practice, the change of the Qing’s position was materially corroborated by the intensive bilateral exchange of missions between 1637 and 1643. On May 13, 1637, Chosŏn sent its first tributary mission to Mukden, and in the documents submitted to the Qing the Korean side called the city “capital” (K., Kyŏngsa), a term previously reserved for Beijing. This terminological choice indicated that, at least on the surface, Chosŏn acknowledged Mukden as the new political center of the world.⁸⁰ The mission had 315 members, including three primary members: an envoy, an associate envoy, and a secretary. After traveling 517 miles along the con- ventional overland tributary route between Hansŏng and Beijing, the mission arrived in Mukden on July 8.⁸¹ The next day the Korean officials appeared before Hongtaiji to perform the highest level of kowtow. During the imperial audience, the Qing’s officials read the king’s humble memorials, written in the hierarchical format once used for the Ming emperor. By praising the admirable virtues of the “big country” that “brought Chosŏn to life again,” the text of the humble
memorials endowed the Qing with the position of the Middle Kingdom, adding that “all far countries on the periphery [of the Qing] have willingly subordinated themselves” (K., hwangbok hambin) and lauding the Qing for its virtuous act of “cherishing the small.” The Qing’s position was confirmed by the Qing itself in the emperor’s edict to the king, which defined the relationship clearly with reference to orthodox Zongfan principles such as “serving the great” and “cherishing the small.” Chosŏn became a “far country,” a “small country,” and the “remote land” on the periphery of the new civilized center.⁸² This framing of the two coun- tries’ mutually constitutive identities consigned Chosŏn to the category of barbarians surrounding the civilized Middle Kingdom of the Qing. At the same time, the frequent visits to Mukden by tributary emissaries from the Mongols and other ethnic-minority polities whose affairs were under the man- agement of the Mongolian Superintendency highlighted the spread of the Qing-centric Zongfan circle. For the previous two decades, the Manchu regime had gradually eroded the Ming’s Zongfan network at the periphery and used the dislodged parts to construct a similar model with itself at the center. After establishing the Zongfan relationship with Chosŏn, the Qing sought to institutionalize its Zongfan mechanism by imitating the Ming’s policies and improving them to meet the Qing’s needs. The institutionalization of the system took place through the Ministry of Rites. Although the Ministries of Revenue, War, and Justice also ex- changed official notes with the king over cases involving financial and military assistance or illegal border crossings, the Ministry of Rites constituted the most important channel between the emissaries and the Qing court. It forwarded the king’s humble memorials to the emperor, directed the emissaries’ visits, treated the emissaries to banquets, accommodated them at a dedicated residence in Mukden for forty days, forwarded imperial edicts to them, and issued official re- sponse notes to the king. With the ministry’s guidance, the Korean emissaries performed the highest level of kowtow to the emperor, presented tributes, and re- ceived imperial edicts and gifts. These highly programmed ritual practices demonstrated, institutionalized, and consolidated the two sides’ bilateral relationship and strict hierarchy. To formalize the Zongfan relationship, the Qing sent ethnic Manchu emissaries to Chosŏn to invest the king and other core members of the royal family with certain titles. On January 4, 1638, the first imperial mission led by Inggūldai, Mafuta, and Daiyun arrived in Hansŏng to officially invest the king. The king greeted the envoys at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country outside the West Gate of the capital.⁸³ Later, in the palace, the king received the imperial edicts of investiture, a gold seal, and gifts, and performed established rituals for the occasion. The edicts stated that, with the establishment of “investiture-subordinate” (Ch., fanfeng) relations between the Qing and Chosŏn, the latter was expected to serve as a “ fan and fence” (Ch., fanping) of the Great Qing “until the Yellow River becomes as narrow as a belt and Mount Tai becomes as small as a grindstone” (Ch., daihe lishan). The emperor’s mandate noted that both sides “have an estab- lished name and status, which will regulate the relationship and hierarchy for ten thousand years” (Ch., li yishi zhi mingfen, ding wanzai zhi gangchang).⁸⁴ Fol- lowing the ceremony, the king visited the envoys at their residence, the South Palace Annex (K., Nambyŏl gung), where he treated them to banquets. All of these ritual procedures were identical to those that had been performed between Chosŏn and the Ming. The Qing’s investiture legitimatized the bilateral Zongfan rela- tionship between the two countries, an arrangement that would last for 258 years. The Establishment of the Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing In the precise spot in Samjŏndo where the Korean king had subordinated himself to Hongtaiji in 1637, the Qing forced Chosŏn to erect a stele to commemorate Hongtaiji’s achievements. Despite the Koreans’ reluctance to memorialize the humiliating invasion, the Qing continued to advance the project, and the Korean official Yi Kyŏng-sŏk (1595–1671) eventually drafted a Chinese-language inscription based on the Korean letters to the Qing side during the war.⁸⁵ After the Chinese official Fan Wencheng approved the inscription, the Qing sent interpreters to Hansŏng to translate it into Manchu and Mongolian. In 1639 the stele, inscribed in three languages, was erected as the Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing (Ma., Daicing gurun i enduringge han i gung erdemui bei; Ch.,
Da Qing huangdi gongde bei) (see figure 1.6). The inscription reviewed the history between the two countries from 1619 to 1637 from Chosŏn’s perspective and exalted the Qing’s great virtues in “bringing Chosŏn to life again.” It claimed that the king had surrendered in 1637 “not to[the Qing’s] might but to [its] virtues” (Ma., horon de gelere teile waka, erdemu de dahahangge kai), given that those virtues made “all the far [people] subordinate themselves willingly” (Ma., goroki ci aname gemu dahambi). The stele also stated that the bilateral relationship would last for ten thousand years under “the emperor’s goodness.” The most significant aspect was the official transformation of the identity of the Manchu regime as manifested in certain terms. The inscription called the Qing the “big country” (Ch., dabang, dachao; Ma., amba gurun) or the “upper country” (Ch., shangguo; Ma., dergi gurun), while terming Chosŏn the “small country” (Ch., xiaobang; Ma., ajige gurun) as well as “a faraway country.” The fact that the two countries geographically bordered each other did not prevent the Qing from redefining Chosŏn as “faraway” in the politico-cultural sense.
FIGURE 1.6. The Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing. The stele is now located in a small park next to Lotte World in Seoul. Photo taken by the author in 2015. Among these terms, which had been used between Chosŏn and the Ming and were now grafted onto the Qing-Chosŏn relationship, the Manchu phrase amba gurun (big country) was particularly significant. As a literal translation of the Chinese dabang or dachao, the term had once referred exclusively to the Ming. More importantly, as chapter 2 shows, after 1644 the Qing adopted amba gurun as a key equivalent of the Chinese terms Zhongguo (Ma., Dulimbai gurun) and Tianchao (“the Heavenly Dynasty”; Ma., abkai gurun). The inscription of the Samjŏndo stele was probably the first instance in which the Qing publicly and officially called itself amba gurun; over the following two and a half centuries, this term would refer solely to Qing China. “Cherishing Men from Afar”: Publicizing Qing Centrality, 1637–43 The Manchu invasion of 1636 and the king’s surrender to Hongtaiji, known in Chosŏn as Pyŏngja horan (lit. “the invasion of the northern barbarians in the year of Pyŏngja”), were humiliating to the Koreans and stimulated widespread anti-Manchu feeling in the country. Korean resentment is evident, for example, in an inci- dent that took place in December 1637, when the Manchu envoys visiting Chosŏn asked Korean local officials to procure courtesans (K., panggi), but the women “killed themselves to show their resistance” (K., yisa kŏchi).⁸⁶ In order to win Chosŏn’s loyalty beyond mere lip service, the Qing quickly adopted the traditional Chinese policies of “cherishing the small” and “cherishing men from afar” (Ch., huairou yuanren; Ma., goroki niyalma be bilume gosimbi).⁸⁷ In addition to providing Chosŏn’s delegation with better accommodations in Mukden and bestowing more gifts on the king and his emissaries, the Qing pro- gressively reduced the tribute required of Chosŏn beginning in the early 1640s, when the Qing controlled more resources as a result of its military triumphs over the Ming. In 1640, for instance, the Qing lowered the number of sacks of rice that Chosŏn was expected to offer as tribute from ten thousand to just one thou- sand. In 1643 the Qing further reduced the annual tribute and furthermore cut by more than half the gifts that Chosŏn gave to the Manchu envoys. Proclaiming that “the two countries have become one family,” the Shunzhi emperor also permanently abolished many tributary conventions, such as the requirement that Chosŏn provide the imperial envoys with official courtesans. These exemptions, the emperor suggested, embodied the Qing policy of “cherishing the small with benevolence.”⁸⁸ Compared with the late Ming, which tried to extract the maximum economic and military benefits from Chosŏn, the Qing took a deliberately placatory approach toward its outer fan, represented by the many exemptions. This benign policy substantially facilitated the Qing’s historical transformation into Zhongguo. The Qing was characterized more by its actions than by its pronouncements. Its policy of appealing to the subordinate country was manifested above all in its frequent contacts with Chosŏn. From 1637 to 1643, the Qing sent twelve missions and twenty-eight emissaries to Chosŏn, an average of one and a half missions per year, while Chosŏn sent fifty-six missions and 102 emissaries to the Qing, an average of seven missions per year.⁸⁹ In this context, some Koreans changed their established understandings of the Qing. In the spring of 1643, for example, Yi Chŏng-hae from Kyŏngsang Province submitted a letter to the Qing envoys in Hansŏng, volunteering to go to Mukden to serve the Qing and “our emperor” (K., a hwangje).⁹⁰ The Qing used its intensive contacts with Chosŏn as a powerful tool to manage its relations with other political entities. In 1638, a year after it converted Chosŏn from a younger brother into an outer fan, the Qing changed the Chinese name of the Mongolian Superintendency from Menggu yamen to Lifan yuan, applying the Chosŏn precedent to add the Mongols, too, to the Qing-centric family of nations as a fan. This move was part of the Manchu leaders’ project of steadily transforming Mongol conceptualizations of their position in the Qing-dominated world.⁹¹ In this sense, it could be argued that the dramatic change in the
Manchu-Mongol relationship had deep roots in the Zongfan concepts promulgated by Han Chinese officials of the Manchu regime since the early 1630s. This shift could also indicate that the Qing was streamlining the administration of its outer fan in order to strengthen its centrality and pursue an imperial enterprise beyond Manchuria.
1
CONQUERING CHOSŎN
The Rise of the Manchu Regime as the Middle Kingdom, 1616–43
As the Manchu regime consolidated its power in Manchuria between the late 1610s and the early 1640s, it reshaped the perceptions of other polities and eradicated its longstanding barbarian image. The regime derived its political and cultural resources in large part from its relations with Chosŏn, which validated and reinforced the Manchu dynasty’s position as the Middle Kingdom within the newly established multistate hierarchical system. In this process, the Manchus appropriated the Ming’s Zongfan discourse to designate other political entities as barbarians, initiating a prolonged process that I call the barbarianization of others. By crossing the Great Wall in 1644, the Manchu regime had fundamentally reconceptualized its own identity and position in the Chinese world.
Barbarians, Rebellions, and Wars
The Jurchen Uprising in Manchuria
On February 17, 1616, the lunar New Year and the first day of the Forty-Fourth Year of Wanli of the Ming Dynasty, a number of high-ranking Chinese officials assembled at the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City with tributary emissaries from Chosŏn and China’s other outer fan. They waited to enter the imperial hall to present the emperor with their congratulations on the New Year. Finally, realizing the emperor had no desire to grant them an audience, the officials and emissaries carried out their ceremonies in front of the gate.¹ This scene was not surprising, as the emperor had long been uninterested in such ceremonies. Many high-ranking officials in Beijing had not seen the hermit-like Son of Heaven for almost thirty years.² The Middle Kingdom and its lethargic human agent seemed to have fallen asleep.
The day was significant, however, in Hetuala, a small Manchurian town about seven hundred miles northeast of Beijing, where a tribe called the Jianzhou Jurchens announced the establishment of its own country under the leadership of Nurhaci (1559–1626; r. 1616–26). Proclaiming himself the brilliant khan caring for all countries/peoples (Ma., abka geren gurun be ujikini seme sindaha genggiyen han), Nurhaci accepted the congratulations of Jurchen and Mongol officials and generals, took the regnal title of Tianming (mandate of Heaven; Ma., Abkai fulingga), and named his country Houjin (the later Jin).³ He thus defined his regime as the successor to the Jin Dynasty established by the Jurchen ancestors.⁴
Nurhaci’s political ambitions extended far beyond unifying the local tribes. In May 1618 he attacked the Ming forces after announcing the Seven Grievances (Ma., Nadan amba koro; Ch., Qi dahen). Nurhaci had visited Beijing three times to present tribute and had been appointed by the Ming court to govern the Jianzhou Jurchens, whom the Ming considered northeastern barbarians (Ch., dongbei yi).⁵ In the Seven Grievances, Nurhaci identified the Jianzhou as a subordinate that had guarded the Ming’s border for generations, and declared that various conflicts between his tribe, other tribes, and the Ming’s local leaders had led to his rebellion.
The Ming was confident about suppressing Nurhaci. To do so it enlisted the aid of the tribe of Yehe, an old and powerful enemy of the Jurchens, as well as the support of Chosŏn. As a loyal fan, Chosŏn had followed the policy of serving the great (K., sadae) for more than two centuries. It regarded Nurhaci’s rebellion as intolerable and its military assistance to the Ming as a legal and moral duty (K., ŭibun). Although the king, Yi Hon (Kwanghaegun), was worried that his men would be defeated, he nonetheless ordered Gen. Kang Hong-rip in early 1619 to lead thirteen thousand soldiers across the Yalu River to join forces with the Ming
army in Manchuria.⁶
In the battle of Sarhū on April 17, 1619, more than six thousand Korean soldiers were killed, and General Kang surrendered to Nurhaci. Ending Chosŏn’s military engagement in the war, the surrender provided Nurhaci with a golden opportunity to open an official channel of communication with the Korean sovereign. In addition to seeking a peace agreement with Chosŏn to reduce the military threat on his eastern flank, Nurhaci wanted to change his relationship with Chosŏn by identifying his newly founded regime as a state equal to Chosŏn rather than as a state of lower status, as presupposed by the longstanding framework of Jurchen-Chosŏn relations.⁷ This political ambition posed a grave challenge to Chosŏn in the context of the civilized–barbarian distinction and initiated an invisible but intensive struggle of political discourse between the two sides.
Chosŏn’s Role in the Jurchen-Ming War
The bilateral communications between the Jurchens and Chosŏn started with an exchange of letters. In May 1619 Nurhaci sent a captured officer to Chosŏn to present a sovereign letter (Ch., guoshu; K., kuksŏ) and a copy of the Seven Grievances to the king. After explaining why he fought against the big country (Ch., daguo; Ma., amba gurun), that is, the Ming, Nurhaci asked the king to make common cause with him against the Ming. Chosŏn had contacted Nurhaci by letter in the 1600s through a local officer in the town of Manpo on the northern border, but now Nurhaci’s barbarian letter (K., hosŏ) reached the court directly and posed a thorny problem for the king.⁸
After fierce debate among officials, the king appointed Pak Yŏp, governor of P’yŏngan Province, to write back to Nurhaci, but the format of the reply, and in particular the question of how to address Nurhaci, remained a challenge. In Nurhaci’s letter, the Mongolian characters of his stamp read Emperor Tianming of the Houjin (K., Hugŭm ch’ŏnmyŏng hwangje), which greatly shocked the king and the Border Defense Council (K., Pibyŏnsa) because they believed the Ming emperor to be the sole emperor in the known universe. It was highly likely that the characters defined Nurhaci as a khan in the Mongol sense, rather than as an emperor (Ch., huangdi; K., hwangje) in the Chinese and Korean sense. Chosŏn had always called Nurhaci old chieftain (K., roch’u), barbarian chieftain (K., ich’u), chieftain of slaves (K., noch’u), or chieftain of thieves (K., chŏkch’u), so endorsing Nurhaci’s self-proclaimed imperial title was out of the question. The king, pretending he could not understand the characters on Nurhaci’s seal, instructed Pak to send a letter to the assistant general of the Jianzhou garrison (K., Kŏnjuwi mabŏp; Ch., Jianzhouwei mafa).⁹ The Border Defense Council had learned the word mabŏp from previous letters sent by the Jurchens and assumed that it referred to an assistant general (K., p’ŏnbi). In fact, it came from the Manchu word mafa, which means grandfather. In addition, the letter addressed its recipient in the second person using the form of you (K., chokha) that officials who were equal to each other used among themselves, not for sovereigns.¹⁰ Finally, the letter bore Pak’s official stamp instead of the king’s. In this way, the king downgraded the communication with the Houjin to a provincial level and sidestepped the sensitive issue of the political legitimacy of the Jurchen regime.
The Korean letter noted that Chosŏn and the Houjin had been subjects (K., sin) of the Heavenly Dynasty for two hundred years and suggested that Nurhaci pledge allegiance to the Imperial Ming, an action that would also yield reconciliation between Chosŏn and Nurhaci. This strong pro-Ming stance made the Houjin bristle.¹¹ In his reply, calling himself gu, a Chinese term used only by a sovereign to refer to himself, Nurhaci inferred that the Heavenly Dynasty to which Chosŏn referred must be the southern dynasty—the Jurchen appellation for the Ming, which indicated that the Houjin no longer endorsed the divine position of the Ming. Nurhaci clearly asked the king to form an alliance with him and suggested that the two countries kill a white horse and a black bull to offer to Heaven and Earth and burn incense to swear an oath.¹² Nurhaci had conducted this ritual with the Yehe, Hada, Ula, and Hūifa tribes in 1597 and with the Ming in 1608 and later started wars with these entities on account of their reneging on the oath.
Chosŏn was uninterested in Nurhaci’s offer, particularly in light of the Ming’s potential reaction to Korean-Jurchen contacts. Ming officials such as Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), a close friend of the Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), suspected that Chosŏn would join the Jurchen rebellion against the Ming and considered it advisable to rein Chosŏn in. In August 1619 he proposed a new policy toward Chosŏn in a memorial to Emperor Wanli. Xu argued that Beijing should follow historical precedents set by the Zhou and Han Dynasties by sending a commissioner to Chosŏn to supervise and protect (Ch., jianhu) the country. Xu enthusiastically volunteered to take up this position, but the emperor, who had sent Chinese forces to Chosŏn to defend the country against Japanese invasions in the 1590s, did not grant his request.¹³ As a matter of fact, Chosŏn was not collaborating with the Jurchens, whom it still called barbarians (K., orangk’ae), but maintaining its political and moral allegiance to Beijing would not alleviate the risk of a Jurchen attack. Under the circumstances, the king took a practical approach by tactically maintaining connections with the Houjin but confining them to the local level.
In the meantime, the outlook for the Ming-Chosŏn alliance was not sanguine. Two Ming emperors died within two months in 1620, and the new emperor, Tianqi, showed more interest in carpentry than he did in statecraft. On the battlefield, the Ming was losing more lands to the Houjin. In May 1621 the Jurchens occupied Liaoyang, a key military fortress in Manchuria, and made it the Houjin’s new capital, cutting off the overland route of communications between Chosŏn and the Ming. Facing a series of dramatic changes, the king made the risky move of sending Nurhaci his first sovereign letter in October 1622 through a civil official of the Ministry of Rites in Hansŏng (today’s Seoul). In the letter, he referred to Houjin as a neighboring country and Nurhaci as khan of the Houjin country (K., Hugŭmguk kahan). The letter adopted the same format as letters sent to Japan in accordance with Chosŏn’s policy of kyorin, communicating with a neighboring country.¹⁴ By acknowledging the statehood of the Jurchen regime, the king elevated his communications with Nurhaci to the level of a sovereign addressing another sovereign.
The pragmatism of this policy called into question the king’s loyalty to the Ming, which the king’s nephew, Yi Chong, used to justify a bloody coup that he launched in May 1623 to dethrone the king. Assuming power as the new king (King Injo), Yi Chong blamed his uncle for failing to embrace his monarch-subordinate and father-son relationship with the Ming. He himself took a different tack: in addition to ending the exchange of messengers with Nurhaci and imposing trade sanctions on the Houjin, Yi Chong mobilized his followers to prepare for a war with the Houjin and even planned to lead an army himself to attack the Jurchens.¹⁵ Being a usurper, Yi Chong used his fervent pro-Ming attitude to obtain the Ming investiture that legitimized his rulership. The new king also helped Mao Wenlong (1576–1629), a Ming general who had escaped to Chosŏn after the Jurchens’ occupation of Liaoyang and had stationed his forces on Ka Island, close to mainland Chosŏn, carry out a guerrilla war to prevent the Jurchens from entering Shanhai Pass. Chosŏn’s new policy posed a considerable military and economic threat to the Jurchens, but it did not stop the Jurchen expansion. In 1625 the Jurchens occupied Shenyang, the political heart and economic center of Manchuria, and made it their new capital. After Nurhaci died in 1626, his son Hongtaiji became the new khan with the regnal title Tiancong (Heavenly wisdom; Ma., Abkai sure) and quickly decided to invade Chosŏn.
Becoming the Elder Brother of Chosŏn: The Jin and the First Manchu Invasion
In the spring of 1627 Hongtaiji launched an attack on Chosŏn. The forces of the Jin, as the Jurchen regime now styled itself, swept into northern Chosŏn and captured P’yŏngyang within two weeks, forcing the king, who had escaped to Kanghwa Island, to sue for peace. As a precondition of withdrawal, the Jin commander, Amin (?–1640), required the king to swear an oath to Heaven to sever Chosŏn’s relations with the Ming and establish an elder brother–younger brother relationship with the Jin, the latter taking on the dominant role. In Chosŏn, many Confucian officials and students pleaded with the king to stop negotiating with the barbarous invaders, kill their messengers, and fight to the death. Although the king told his subjects that the peace talks with the Jurchen clowns were only a
stalling tactic, or a conventional loose rein (K., kimi) policy, he had no choice but to continue the negotiations.
In his letters to Hongtaiji, the king endorsed Hongtaiji’s political position by addressing him as Khan of the Country of the Jin, but he purposely selected neutral terms for the Jin and Chosŏn. While he called the Jin your honorable country, the king referred to Chosŏn as our country, instead of our humble country or our small country, as he would say in his palace memorials to the Ming. No honorific expressions for Hongtaiji appeared at the beginning of the letter.¹⁶ The king conveyed that Chosŏn would follow the policy of communicating with a neighboring country vis-à-vis the Jin and that of serving the great country vis-à-vis the Ming. By deliberately using the Ming regnal title Tianqi to express the date in his letter, the king implied that he would not betray the Ming. This act of adhering to Ming time led to a deadlock in the negotiations. The king later switched to a notice format for his communications, since this format did not require a regnal title. The new format helped the two sides reach an agreement regarding Chosŏn’s oath.
The oath-swearing ceremony occurred at the palace on Kanghwa Island on April 18, 1627. The king burned incense and swore the oaths to Heaven after one of his officials read them aloud. Despite the king’s reluctance, the substance of oaths was what Hongtaiji had demanded. The nine highest Chosŏn officials and eight high-ranking Jin officials also read their own oaths. However, the performance of these ceremonies between the king and the Jurchen officials was not mentioned in either Manchu or Korean records.¹⁷ Another oath-swearing ceremony took place later in P’yŏngyang between Amin and a brother of the king. The P’yŏngyang oath included several additional terms imposed by the Jurchen invaders, emphasizing that the king should present gifts to the khan, host the Jin’s emissaries as he did those of the Ming, and not reinforce the city walls or conduct military drills.¹⁸ The two ceremonies ushered in a decade of peace between the two countries.
In political and ideological terms the Jurchens benefited substantially from their invasion of Chosŏn. Chosŏn officially endorsed the Jurchen regime as a country with a supreme sovereign, helping to foster the regime’s political legitimacy in the geopolitical arena. With the support of Chosŏn, the Little China that now regarded the Jin as its elder brother, the Jin’s politico-cultural self-identity changed from that of a barbarian, imposed by the discourse of the Ming-centered cosmopolitan order, to that of the civilized. Although resentment of the Jurchen barbarians soared in Chosŏn after the war, the Korean court was unable to escape the newly established brotherhood. Economically, too, Chosŏn yielded to the Jurchens’ terms by opening markets in several towns on its northern border and paying annual tribute (K., sep’ye) to the Jurchen court.
Constructing a Jin-Centric, Quasi-Zongfan System: The Jin’s New Position
The Rise of the Jin-Chosŏn Quasi-Zongfan Order
As he withdrew from Chosŏn, Hongtaiji sent the king a letter, explaining why he fought with the southern dynasty—the Ming—and attacked Chosŏn. He said, The southern dynasty regards only itself as Son of Heaven and views people of other countries as inferior servants. … The Mandate of Heaven is truly righteous by assisting us with punishing the southern dynasty…. In the future, our two countries should be brothers forever and never bully others as the southern dynasty does.¹⁹ By quoting the theory of the Mandate of Heaven, the khan challenged the Ming’s centrality in the universe and justified his war with the Ming. Over the following decade, his construction of a Jin-centric, quasi-Zongfan system in the Jin’s contacts with Chosŏn and other neighboring entities gradually changed the Jin’s position.
In the face of serious economic difficulties brought on by the war, the Jin required Chosŏn to open markets for trade in a border city, Ŭiju. Chosŏn yielded to the Jin’s pressure but agreed to hold the markets only twice a year, in the spring and the autumn, rather than three times per year, as the Jin had wished. On March
31, 1628, the Ŭiju market opened for the first time, and the Jin emissary Inggūldai (1596–1648) came to Ŭiju accompanied by eight generals and more than a thousand people. As the Ŭiju market fell short of the Jin’s needs, Hongtaiji urged Chosŏn to open another one in Hoeryŏng, a northeastern border city.²⁰ In the midst of the shortage, the Jin relied heavily on the yearly gifts provided by Chosŏn and conveyed to Shenyang by one emissary in the spring and another in the autumn. From 1627 to 1636, the required gift comprised up to eighty-five categories of goods, but the amounts in each category kept changing to reflect the Jin’s needs or Chosŏn’s concerns, becoming a barometer of their relations.²¹ The Korean emissaries brought commercial opportunities to Shenyang. In 1631 the Border Defense Council of Chosŏn complained to the king that the dispatch of emissaries to Shenyang was no different from opening markets there.²² On the other hand, the development of the market in Shenyang, like that of the markets in Ŭiju and Hoeryŏng, suffered from significant differentials in the prices of the consumer products offered by the two sides. The black cotton cloth and ginseng sold by the Koreans were expensive, whereas the animal skins and furs that the Jurchens traded were not. This difference made it difficult for the Jurchen side to turn a profit. The Jin’s military hegemony could not subordinate Korean capital, which contributed to the Jin’s second invasion of Chosŏn.
Given the military and economic situation, the Jin did not force Chosŏn to end its contacts with Beijing. Hongtaiji had the option of concluding a peace agreement with the Ming through which he could win the latter’s political endorsement. In a memorial to Hongtaiji in 1630, Gao Hongzhong, a Han Chinese scholar serving the Jin, suggested that the Jin follow the Chosŏn model to receive the [Ming] investiture with kingship and to use the regnal title [of the Ming] to count the date (Ch., bi Chaoxian shili, qingfeng wangwei, cong zhengshuo).²³ This proposal reflected a popular perception among the Chinese about Chosŏn’s exemplary tributary position in the Ming-centric world. Had the Ming agreed to negotiate for a Chosŏn-like status for the Jurchen regime, the Jin could have followed Chosŏn to become an outer fan of the Ming. Nevertheless, the war persisted, and the Jin moved toward a broader objective of replacing the Ming. For that purpose, the Jin started to transform its hierarchical relationship with Chosŏn.
After 1627 Chosŏn continued to embrace the centrality of the Ming in its contacts with the Jin by applying its kyorin policy to the Jin; this put the Jin on an equal footing with Chosŏn. The king called his emissaries to the Jin messengers (K., sinsa), not tributary emissaries (K., kongsa), as he did those dispatched to Beijing. The goods brought annually to Shenyang were gifts (K., yemul) rather than tributes (K., kongmul) like those presented to Beijing. As the king noted in 1633 to Hongtaiji, "It is the proper principle [K., ye; Ch., li] that our two countries give each other local products in communications via emissaries."²⁴ These terms reflected befitting modesty and suggested that Chosŏn treated the Jin as a country lower than the Ming.
In stark contrast, the Jin developed a new discourse to nourish its self-identity as a political entity superior to Chosŏn. In documents written in the Manchu language beginning in 1627, the Jin downgraded the Korean monarch from khan of Chosŏn (Ma., Solgoi kan) to king of Chosŏn (Ma., Solgo i wang, or Coohiyan gurun i wang).²⁵ With the steady rise of the Jin’s military power, especially after its triumph in the battle at Dalinghe in late 1631 and early 1632, Hongtaiji enacted considerable reforms to the Jin political structure, abolishing the power-sharing system at the highest level of the court and making himself the exclusive sovereign.²⁶ From 1632, in his letters to the Ming and Chosŏn, Hongtaiji began to call himself brilliant khan of the Manchu country (Ma., Manju gurun i sure han) rather than khan of the Jin country (Ma., Aisin gurun i han), the title he had used before.²⁷ More importantly, he imitated the Ming bureaucracy by establishing a six-ministry system in Shenyang and instructing Manchu officials such as Dahai (1595– 1632) to translate Chinese classics into the Manchu language.²⁸ From then on, the regime substantially accelerated the Sinicization of its imperial norms from the top down, a process carried out through the institution-building efforts of a group of Han Chinese officials and scholars such as Ning Wanwo (1593–1665), Fan Wencheng (1597–1666), Gao Hongzhong, and Bao Chengxian (?–1645). One of the most significant acts of these elites was to persuade Hongtaiji to produce the annals of the monarch and the regime in both the Chinese and
Manchu languages.
The Chinese terms that these Han Chinese savants adopted to describe the exchanges of emissaries and diplomatic relations between the Jin and Chosŏn were crucial to revising the Jin’s political identity. According to the Manchu-language records written by the Manchu scholars, the emissaries of Chosŏn (Ma., Solho i elcin) arrived and delivered the local products as gifts (Ma., baci tucire doroi jaka benjime isinjiha) in Shenyang. When they left, the khan gave (Ma., unggihe) or awarded (Ma., šangnaha) them and the king gifts.²⁹ Although these Manchu terms were largely vernacular and had no strong political meaning, their counterparts in the Chinese-language records offered a very different portrayal. The visit of the tributary emissaries (Ch., gongshi), who brought tribute (Ch., gongwu) or local products (Ch., fangwu), was described as the coming to the court to present themselves before the sovereign (Ch., laichao), suggesting that the emissaries’ visit was prompted not by the Jin’s formidable military might but by its outstanding merits.³⁰ These terms invoked a hierarchical relationship between the sovereign—an emperor in the Chinese sense—and his subjects, which in this case included Chosŏn, Vietnam, Ryukyu, other fan of the Ming, and the Central Asian political entities.³¹ Meanwhile, the Jin applied the political and diplomatic discourse it had developed toward Chosŏn to forces and political entities that sought shelter with or surrendered to the Jin, such as Bar Baturu, Nomun Dalai, Coir Jamsu from Alakcot of Cahar, and the Ming general Kong Youde (?–1652).³²
In 1634 Hongtaiji changed the name of Shenyang to Mukden in Manchu and Shengjing (lit. prosperous capital) in Chinese, and the following year he instructed his people to call the country Manzhou (M., Manju; the Manchu state), not Jurchen or other names. The regime’s institutional construction was thus facilitated by a clear ethnic identification, but the rationale behind this framework focused more on politico-cultural factors than on ethnic ones. In this period, Jin officials, particularly those who were Han Chinese, started to address Hongtaiji as emperor (Ch., huangshang, or huangdi). Some suggested that Hongtaiji perform conventional rituals established by the Han Dynasty, through which he would claim to be the Son of Heaven in the Chinese sense. More significantly, these officials invoked the principles of the civilized–barbarian distinction to brand the Ming southern barbarians (Ch., manzi) and those Chinese who surrendered to the Jin Han Chinese barbarians (Ch., hanyi), thereby appropriating and completely reversing the Ming’s language regarding the center of the world.³³
With this change in its worldview, the Manchu regime began to play the role of the exclusive institutional agent of the Mandate of Heaven, to which all barbarians in the four quarters of the world willingly come in submission (Ch., siyi xianfu). When the Ming generals Kong Youde and Geng Zhongming (1604–49) surrendered to Hongtaiji in 1633, the Jin jubilantly described the event as people from afar willingly coming to our court for civilization (Ch., yuanren laigui).³⁴ The euphoric adoption of this phrase demonstrated that the Manchu regime was purposely constructing its identity as the center of the world, with cultural superiority over barbarians from afar or on its periphery, which now included the Ming.³⁵ These momentous changes in the Jin’s political discourse were rooted in orthodox Chinese political theory as articulated in Confucian classics, such as Analects of Confucius (Ch., Lunyu) and Doctrine of the Mean (Ch., Zhongyong), and they demonstrate the deep significance of both the Sinicization of the Manchu regime and the barbarianization of others by the regime. The use of Chinese political rhetoric of this sort was no mere imitation of the Ming’s discourse to please Hongtaiji. Rather, it was aimed at achieving a political goal by transforming the regime into a new center of gravity in a Jin-dominated world, a goal that the young and vernacular Manchu language—including the New Manchu (Ma., ice manju hergen) developed in 1632—was incapable of securing.
The Manchu regime conducted its relations with Chosŏn in accordance with hierarchical principles within a quasi-Zongfan system. Some historians have argued that at this time the Manchus derived their political concepts of imperial rule mainly from their Mongol allies rather than from the Chinese.³⁶
Yet the transformation of the Manchu regime’s understanding of its relations with neighboring nomadic and Confucian states, which took place concurrently
with the transformation of the Manchu-Chosŏn relationship, indicates that the regime was enthusiastically constructing a new politico-cultural self-identity by appropriating and exploiting the Chinese politico-cultural discourse. Scholars have also long debated the theory of the Sinicization or Sinification of the Manchus. The mainstream explorations of this issue so far have focused either on how the Han Chinese culturally assimilated the Manchus or on how the Manchus tried to retain their ethnic identity.³⁷ What this chapter explores is how the Manchu regime, rather than the ethnic Manchus, promoted itself as the exclusively civilized Middle Kingdom—Zhongguo—and it is in this sense that I use the term Sinicization in this book.
The Manchu Regime’s Strategic Goal of Transforming into Zhongguo
While the quasi-Zongfan discourse helped to refashion the self-image of the Manchu regime along Chinese lines, the Manchu language offered an international setting for this reconstruction by framing the Jin’s relations with other political entities as state-to-state interactions. In Manchu records the Jin, the Ming, Chosŏn, and such Mongol polities as Korcin were all defined as gurun. The term gurun has several meanings, including country, tribe, people of a tribe, and race. Two of these meanings are primary: people and country. For instance, amba gurun could mean big country or adults, and ajige gurun could mean small country or children, while haha gurun refers to men and hehe gurun refers to women.³⁸ In political contexts, gurun denoted primarily country, as in Aisin gurun (the country of the Jin), Nikan gurun (the country of the Han Chinese, that is, the Ming), Daiming gurun (the country of the Great Ming), Solho gurun or Coohiyan gurun (the country of Chosŏn), Korcin gurun (the country of the Korcin Mongols), and Cahar gurun (the country of the Cahar Mongols).³⁹ The Mongolian equivalent of the term in the Mongol records of the day is ulus (country).⁴⁰
The Manchu rulers drew clear geographical, social, and cultural lines between the Manchu regime and other countries, even as they emphasized commonalities. Nurhaci underlined to the Kalka Mongols in 1619 that the Ming and Chosŏn have different languages, but they share the same styles in clothing and hair, so the two countries look like a single country; similarly, our two countries look like a single country.⁴¹ The consciousness of being a state became progressively more transparent in the regime’s political norms, in particular in the Chinese-language records. In 1628, for instance, Hongtaiji called the Cahar Mongols a different country (Ma., encu gurun; Ch., yiguo) and a far country (Ch., yuanguo).⁴² The following year Hongtaiji treated the prince of the country of Korcin to the music and dances of four countries, including the Jin, the Korcin Mongols, the Ming, and Chosŏn.⁴³ In a letter to Ming officials in 1632, Hongtaiji named his country and the Cahar Mongols as two countries outside of the border [of the Ming] (Ma., jasei tulergi gurun; Ch., bianwai zhi guo).⁴⁴
The new political discourse fundamentally transformed the worldview of the Manchu regime from within by representing the regime as a state at the center of a multistate community. The strategic goal of this transformation, as Ning Wanwo indicated in 1633 when he suggested that the Jin compose an institutional code (Ch., Jindian) by modifying that of the Ming, was to break with Ming conventions and gradually develop the institutions of Zhongguo (Ch., jianjiu Zhongguo zhi zhi). In other words, the Jin intended to develop its own institutions of Zhongguo to replace those of the Ming. According to Ning, only in this way could the regime manage its great enterprise after conquering the place of the southern barbarians (Ch., manzi difang), that is, the Ming. Ning justified his proposal by stressing that a new monarch and his officials must have their own institutional works.⁴⁵ This strategic plan shows that Zhongguo, as a politico-cultural identity, was available for the Manchu regime to embrace and claim. What is more, it suggests that control over the central plain (Ch., Zhongyuan) was not necessarily a prerequisite for a regime to claim to be Zhongguo, as has been assumed.
Nurhaci wished to preserve the ways of his ethnic nation, or Manchuness, by enshrining Shanhai Pass and the Liao River as the border between the Chinese and Jurchen countries (Ma., nikan, jušen meni meni gurun). He tried to avoid turning to the Chinese way (Ma., nikan i doro de dosimbi; Ch., xiao hansu)—or becoming Sinicized—as the Liao, the Jin, and the Yuan Dynasties had done after their founders left their own homelands for the Chinese inner land (Ma., nikan
i dorgi bade; Ch., handi); they had changed ways and all became Chinese (Ma., doro forgošoro jakade, gemu nikan ohobi).⁴⁶ Although the Manchu leaders exhorted their ethnic cohorts to keep to the old way (Ma., fe doro) in daily life by wearing traditional garb and practicing Manchu archery and horseback riding, the regime was unavoidably following the Chinese way in its rapid transformation in the 1630s. The Manchu regime could have become Zhongguo even if it had remained in Manchuria and not crossed the Great Wall in 1644.
By employing the newly adopted Chinese political discourse, the Manchu regime gradually absorbed the Chinese political philosophy of the Zongfan order into its understanding of its place within the constellation of polities. Aside from the Ming, other countries served as the Jin’s outer fan by presenting tribute to the khan, who occupied a position akin to that of a Chinese emperor. This quasi-Zongfan system matured to the point that in 1636, in their Chinese letter to Chosŏn, forty-nine princes of sixteen countries of Mongols under the Jin’s leadership termed themselves "Mongols as the outer fan of the Jin" (Ch., Jinguo waifan menggu), equivalent to the Manchu term tulergi goloi monggo ("Mongols as the outer fan ").⁴⁷ In the same year, the Jin founded Menggu yamen (M., Monggo jurgan, lit. the ministry of Mongolian affairs) on the basis of Chinese civil administrational concepts. As an institution parallel to the Ministry of Rites, this ministry enabled the regime to transform its relations with the Mongols and to build and govern an emerging empire.
The construction of this quasi-Zongfan discourse occurred primarily within the Jin’s borders, but the Jin found Chosŏn the best external resource to support its discursive revolution. Within the bilateral relationship, the Jin held the role of the supreme power, and it converted Chosŏn from a younger brother into a subordinate or outer fan. Students of Sino-Korean relations tend to assume that the Manchus adopted hierarchical discourse in 1637 after the second Manchu invasion, when the Manchu side imposed clear Zongfan terms on Chosŏn. However, in practice the process had begun much earlier. In the 1630s the scholars of the Jin had mined Chinese history for intellectual resources with which to manipulate the civilized–barbarian distinction in order to establish the centrality of the Jin.
Within the Zongfan framework, the central civilized country (Ch., Huaxia) and its counterpart, barbarians, were the two key concepts addressing the status of the Middle Kingdom and that of its outer fan. The two terms were derived from the notion of all-under-Heaven, developed in the Xia (ca. 2070–1600 BC), Shang (1600–1046 BC), and Zhou periods, through which the three dynasties sought to legitimize their rule as divine. At the same time, the political entities spanning China’s lands identified xia (referring not to the Xia Dynasty but to a larger area in which the regime once resided) as the symbol of a civilized community possessing the Mandate of Heaven, namely, Zhongguo, Zhongyuan (the central plain), or Zhongtu (the central lands). At that time, the term barbarians referred primarily to groups that resided along the periphery of the central plain and were reluctant to identify and embrace the concept of civilized China, as exemplified by the state relationship between the Qin and the Chu in the third century BC.⁴⁸ The originally geographic notion of barbarian became an instrument used by political forces to deprecate their antagonists during the movement of revering the court of the Zhou and expelling the barbarians (Ch., zunzhou rangyi) in the Eastern Zhou (770–256 BC), a chaotic time that led Confucius (551–479 BC) to call for restoring the ideal order of proper conduct (Ch., li) of the Western Zhou. Due to the fierce interstate rivalries, the civilized– barbarian distinction evolved into a politico-cultural ideology that the dynastic regimes of China continuously reinterpreted for the next two thousand years, until 1911.
After the Han Dynasty, with the official institutionalization of Confucianism and the expansion of the concept of all-under-Heaven, the civilized–barbarian distinction became a critical theoretical framework for the Chinese court’s management of its foreign relations. As northern barbarians gained ascendancy in the Northern Song (960–1127), the distinction presented itself as an essential cultural instrument with which Chinese elites endowed certain regimes with the pedigree of legitimate historical narratives (Ch., zhengshi) by expelling competing polities from these narratives.⁴⁹ Some scholars, such as Shi Jie (1005–45), the author of A Treatise on the Middle Kingdom (Ch., Zhongguo lun), and Ouyang Xiu (1007–72), the author of A Treatise on Orthodox Legitimacy (Ch., Zhengtong lun),
depicted the Song as the exclusive civilized center of the world and the polities on the Song’s northern border as uncivilized. One of the most influential histories, A Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government (Ch., Zizhi tongjian), edited by Sima Guang (1019–86), drew a clear lineage connecting states identified as China from 403 BC to AD 959. The efforts of these scholars to conceptualize the narrative of orthodox legitimacy eventually paid off, for their rhetoric triumphed over that of the northern regimes, especially when Neo-Confucianism, created and elaborated by such Song intellectual vanguards as Cheng Hao (1032–85), Cheng Yi (1033–1107), and Zhu Xi (1130–1200), became China’s official ideology under the Yuan Dynasty.
This intellectual history can help explain why the official historical narrative of the People’s Republic of China still celebrates the Song for its legitimate status as Zhongguo and marginalizes the Liao, the Xixia, and the Jin as regimes established by ethnic minorities (Ch., shaoshu minzu). It was against this historical backdrop that the scholars of the Manchu regime in the 1630s began to construct the regime’s orthodox legitimacy, which laid the foundation for the Manchu enterprise of governing a vast empire as the legitimate Middle Kingdom, Zhongguo.
The Practices of the Manchu-Chosŏn Quasi-Zongfan Order
The Manchu regime implemented its quasi-Zongfan discourse through the rituals that accompanied the exchange of emissaries with Chosŏn by imitating Ming-Chosŏn contacts. In Mukden, the Korean emissaries kowtowed five times to Hongtaiji. They were comfortably lodged in the city and enjoyed a welcome banquet (K., hama yŏn, lit. banquet for getting off a horse) and a farewell banquet (K., sangma yŏn, lit. banquet for getting on a horse). Hongtaiji dispensed gifts to the Korean king, emissaries, interpreters, and servants.⁵⁰ In exchange, the Jin sent Manchu emissaries to Hansŏng in the spring and autumn of every year. Before they entered the Korean capital, the Manchu emissaries were housed at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country (K., Mohwa gwan), a place that had previously accommodated Ming emissaries. The emissaries also had an audience with the king in the palace and were treated to official welcome and farewell banquets. Although Chosŏn did not want to treat the Manchu representatives like those of the Ming, the general ritual procedures of greeting were practically identical. The Manchu emissaries lacked only their Ming counterparts’ standing as imperial envoy or Heavenly envoy.
This de facto Zongfan relationship conflicted with the de jure one of equality between the two brothers, a contradiction strikingly manifested in the different formats of their sovereign letters to each other. In its letters to the Jin, Chosŏn placed the two sides on a fully equal political plane, which was hierarchically lower than the status of the Ming. According to the Chinese convention, whenever the characters for Heaven or the Ming emperor appeared, they were placed at the top of a new line, two character spaces higher than the characters for Chosŏn and the first characters of other lines. This honorific elevation acknowledged the emperor as the supreme human agent of Heaven with the highest spiritual position in the world. Hongtaiji also used honorific elevation in his letters, but he adopted a different arrangement of the hierarchy, as shown by his letters to the Ming general Yuan Chonghuan (1584–1630). Hongtaiji divided the hierarchy into four levels, among which his position was lower than that of Heaven and the Ming emperor but higher than that of Ming officials (see figure 1.1). For his part, General Yuan followed Ming custom in his letters to Hongtaiji (see figure 1.2). Frustrated by Yuan’s usage, Hongtaiji exclaimed that he was the monarch or the khan of another country (Ma., encu gurun i ejen han) and son of Heaven and the Buddha (Ma., abka fucihi i jui). He declared that he would not accept any letters from the Ming that addressed him with a status lower than or even equal to that of the Ming officials.⁵¹ Nevertheless, in his communications with the king of Chosŏn, Hongtaiji was more pragmatic, addressing the king as a near equal in order to avoid offending the Korean monarch (see figure 1.3).
The king followed the same format in his responses to Hongtaiji but avoided mention of the imposed brotherhood (see figure 1.4). Although Hongtaiji called the king younger brother, the king never referred to Hongtaiji as elder brother. When Hongtaiji questioned the king about this discrepancy in 1629, the king shifted to friend-to-friend expressions: The king of the country of Chosŏn, he wrote, presents this letter to the khan of the country of the Jin (K., Chosŏn
kugwang pongsŏ Kŭmguk han; Ma., Coohiyan gurun i wang ni bithe, Aisin gurun i han de unggimbi). This usage matched Hongtaiji’s wording: The khan of the country of the Jin sends this letter to the king of the country of Chosŏn (Ma., Aisin gurun i han i bithe, Coohiyan gurun i wang de unggimbi). Later, the king changed the verb present (K., pong; Ma., jafambi) to send (K., ch’i; Ma., unggimbi), eliminating the hierarchical connotations of the former term. This subtle change provoked the Jin, but Chosŏn explained that both terms were used between neighboring countries.⁵² To the Jin, Chosŏn’s pronounced pro-Ming attitude meant that the brotherhood was unstable. The Jin’s security would not be guaranteed so long as Chosŏn was a loyal subject of the Ming. The only way to solve this problem, the Jin believed, was with another war against Chosŏn.
FIGURE 1.1. The format of Hongtaiji’s letters to Yuan Chonghuan in 1627. In this and the three figures that follow, the Arabic numerals represent horizontal lines from the top down, the English letters represent vertical lines, and the direction of the writing is from right to left. X represents a Chinese character. MWLD, 821, 847; MBRT, 4:28, 72.
FIGURE 1.2. The format of Yuan Chonghuan’s letters to Hongtaiji in 1627. MWLD, 821; MBRT, 4:28.
FIGURE 1.3. The format of Hongtaiji’s letters to the king of Chosŏn, 1627–36. Kakyu gobu .
FIGURE 1.4. The format of the letters of the king of Chosŏn to Hongtaiji, 1627–36. Chosŏnguk raesoȈ bu, vol. 1.
From Elder Brother to Father of Chosŏn: The Second Manchu Invasion
Manchu-Chosŏn Conflicts over Orthodox Legitimacy
In the middle of the 1630s, many Han Chinese and Manchu officials of the Jin sought to persuade Hongtaiji to take the title of emperor. On February 4, 1636, these officials presented memorials to prompt Hongtaiji to follow the Mandate of Heaven by claiming the emperorship. Following Chinese ritual conventions, Hongtaiji ostensibly declined and suggested his officials send emissaries to Chosŏn to discuss the matter with the king, his younger brother.⁵³ Hongtaiji’s true motivation, as the Korean official Hong Ik-han (1586–1637) shrewdly recognized, was to use Chosŏn’s identity as Little China to assert before other countries that Chosŏn revered him as the Son of Heaven.
The Manchu officials Inggūldai and Mafuta (?–1640) arrived in Hansŏng on March 30, along with forty-seven Mongol princes, thirty generals, and ninety-eight soldiers. They brought with them five letters. The first three letters extended Hongtaiji’s condolences on the death of the queen of Chosŏn. The fourth letter, written by eight Manchu princes (Ma., hošoi beile) and seventeen high-ranking Manchu ministers (Ma., gūsai amban), and the fifth letter, by forty-nine Mongol princes under the Chinese name Jinguo waifan menggu (Mongols as the outer fan of the Jin), aimed to persuade the king to submit a memorial urging Hongtaiji to follow the Mandate of Heaven (Ma., Abkai gūnin) and to claim the great title (Ma., amba gebu)—namely, that of emperor. The letters emphasized that the Jin now possessed virtues (Ma., erdemu) that enabled it to manage the world.⁵⁴ But on March 31, 139 Korean Confucian students presented the king with a petition, calling
on him to kill the barbarian emissaries and burn the barbarian letters. Inggūldai and his followers were thrown into panic and fled the city.⁵⁵
Chosŏn’s stance was strengthened when the king dispatched Na Tŏk-hŏn as the spring emissary and Yi Kwak as the response emissary to Mukden in late April. On May 15 the Jin held a grand ceremony in which Hongtaiji assumed the title emperor of lenience, kindheartedness, beneficence, and brilliance (Ma., gosin onco huwaliyasun enduringge han; Ch., kuan wen ren sheng huangdi) and adopted the regnal title Chongde (Ma., Wesihun erdemungge, lit. worshiping virtues). The Jin renamed itself the Country of the Great Qing (Ma., Daicing gurun; Ch., Da Qing guo). Gathering on Hongtaiji’s left and right flanks, the Jin’s Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese officials knelt down three times, each time making three prostrations (Ma., ilan jergi niyakūrafi uyun jergi hengkilembi; Ch., san gui jiu koutou)—the highest level of kowtow during the Qing period. Although Na and Yi had performed a ceremony of four kowtows before Hongtaiji upon their arrival, they called this second ceremony a usurpation of the imperial title (K., ch’amho) and refused to perform it, expressing their strong opposition to Hongtaiji’s political ambitions.⁵⁶ Chosŏn was the only Confucian country that lay beyond the Manchu regime’s political control but maintained regular and official diplomatic communications with it. Since Hongtaiji had made his claim to be the Son of Heaven in observance of proper Chinese conduct, he desperately needed the support of Chosŏn to counteract the designation of the Manchus as barbarians and to legitimize his emperorship in the Chinese sense. The ritual conflict with the Korean emissaries thus posed a grave identity crisis for him. Without endorsement from Chosŏn, the Manchu regime’s political transformation would remain largely confined to its borders and would not significantly influence regional politics.
Hongtaiji sent Na and Yi back to Chosŏn with two Chinese-language letters to the king. In the letters Hongtaiji called himself emperor of the country of the Great Qing (Ch., Da Qing guo huangdi) rather than khan of the Jin and referred to Chosŏn as your country (Ch., erguo) instead of your honorable country (Ch., guiguo), signaling the end of the bilateral brotherly relationship. Invoking the time-honored notion that the Heaven does not belong to one person, but to all people under the Heaven (Ma., abkai fejergi emu niyalmai abkai fejergi waka, abkai fejergi niyalmai abkai fejergi), Hongtaiji sought to demonstrate that his regime could govern the space of all-under-Heaven (Ch., tianxia; Ma., abkai fejergi) by following the precedent set by previous dynasties: namely, the Liao, which had been founded by the northeastern barbarians (Ch., dongbei yi; Ma., dergi amargi jušen); the Jin, founded by the eastern barbarians (Ch., dongyi; Ma., dergi jušen); and the Yuan, established by the northern barbarians (Ch., beiyi; Ma., amargi monggo, northern Mongols). By chronicling the rise and fall of these dynasties, Hongtaiji located the Qing, the dynasty of the Manchu barbarians, within this lineage of rulership, with himself as the Son of Heaven. The Qing’s rule was justified, he argued, because the Qing possessed the virtue that the Ming had lost.⁵⁷ This assertion was based on the Chinese political view that the Great Heaven has no partial affections and it helps only the virtuous (Ch., huangtian wu qin, wei de shi fu), a theory articulated in The Classic of History (Ch., Shangshu), which had endowed more than thirty dynasties with legitimacy. In short, Hongtaiji hoped that Chosŏn would become the Great Qing’s outer fan, just as it had served the previous dynasties of China.
Chosŏn became the first external target of the Qing’s new, Qing-centric Zongfan doctrine. Yet Hongtaiji’s position was unpopular in Chosŏn because it conflicted with the orthodox legitimacy on which the Confucian country based its political and social principles. With the exception of several high-ranking officials who preferred the Manchus, the majority of the ruling elite resolutely called for revering China and expelling the barbarians (K., chon Chungguk, yang yichŏk) in accordance with the doctrine of revering the Zhou Dynasty (K., chonju ŭiri).⁵⁸ In the face of tremendous pressure, the king reaffirmed that Chosŏn would not endorse Hongtaiji’s emperorship. The Qing thus declared war for the sake of its name and legitimacy.
The Establishment of Manchu-Chosŏn Zongfan Relations
On December 28, 1636, Qing troops attacked Chosŏn. They captured Hansŏng on January 9, 1637, without encountering strong resistance. The king had escaped
to Namhan Mountain Fortress with the crown prince (K., seja; Ch., shizi; Ma., šidz) and some officials, while the remaining royal family members and other officials fled to Kanghwa Island. The Qing forces surrounded the Namhan Fortress and, as their precondition for negotiations, demanded that the king send the crown prince as hostage. The king refused and mobilized his forces to resist the invasion and protect the great justice under Heaven (K., ch’ŏnha taeŭi). While Hongtaiji marched on the fortress with reinforcements on January 19, the king and his officials performed ceremonies to celebrate the birthday of Emperor Chongzhen of the Ming. Yet the king realized that Chosŏn’s fate was now at a crossroads. Ch’oe Myŏng-gil (1586–1647), a minister who had assisted the king in assuming the throne in the coup of 1623 and served as the king’s close adviser since that time, argued for peaceful negotiation with the Qing as he had done in 1627, when the Manchus invaded Chosŏn for the first time. Ch’oe’s approach was not welcomed by the majority of his colleagues, but it was undeniably pragmatic. On January 26, the lunar New Year, the king, fulfilling Chosŏn’s duty as a subject of the Ming, performed vested rituals in the direction of Beijing. Once the ceremony was over, the king sent two officials to negotiate with the Qing.
Two days later the king presented a letter to Hongtaiji in which he called Hongtaiji the emperor of lenience, kindheartedness, beneficence, and brilliance of the country of the Great Qing and referred to the Qing as the big country (K., taeguk) and to Chosŏn as the small country (K., sobang). The presentation of the letter was defined as submitting the letter to the higher authority (K., songsŏ).⁵⁹ Hongtaiji insisted that the king should surrender to him in person, so the two sides negotiated for two more weeks, during which the Qing troops shelled the fortress and defeated Chosŏn reinforcements sent from provinces. On February 15 the king presented another letter, in which he called Hongtaiji Your Majesty and himself a subordinate (see figure 1.5). He dated the letter using the Qing regnal title Chongde.⁶⁰ His letter suggested that the king had decided to surrender before Kanghwa Island was conquered.⁶¹ On February 17 the king submitted a sovereign letter to Hongtaiji, declaring that Chosŏn would "present the humble palace memorial [K., p’yo; Ch., biao] as the subordinate and serve as a fan [K., pŏnbang; Ch., fanbang] of the Great Qing forever, while all rituals about serving the big country would be performed in the vested format."⁶²
On February 22, 1637, Inggūldai brought an imperial edict to the king and asked the Korean officials to perform the same rituals that they had done when receiving edicts from the southern dynasty (the Ming). This occasion marked the first time that the Qing replaced the Ming in ritual exchanges with Chosŏn on Korean territory. In his edict, Hongtaiji listed ten terms of submission, among which two stood out. First, the king had to surrender to the Qing the book of imperial investiture and the seal that he had received from the Ming, stop communicating with the Ming, and begin to use the regnal title of the Qing instead of that of the Ming to indicate dates in all documents. Second, the king had to dispatch officials to the Qing every year to bring humble palace memorials, present gifts, and perform rituals to celebrate occasions such as the winter solstice, the New Year, the birthdays of the emperor, empress, and crown prince, and any good news for the Qing, and to extend condolences on the loss of members of the Qing’s royal house. The format of these memorials was required to follow the established format of Chosŏn’s memorials to the Ming. The rituals of receiving imperial decrees, accommodating imperial envoys in Chosŏn, and paying formal visits to the Qing emperor through tributary emissaries were to dovetail precisely with the established way of the Ming country (Ch., Mingguo jiuli). Hongtaiji also listed the items and amounts of the tributes required of Chosŏn and specified that tribute submissions ought to begin in 1639.⁶³
FIGURE 1.5. The format of the king’s letters to Hongtaiji in February 1637. The Arabic numerals represent horizontal lines from the top down, the English letters represent vertical lines, and the direction of the writing is from right to left. X represents a Chinese character. Chosŏnguk raesoȈ bu, 2:26–38.
The king unconditionally accepted all of Hongtaiji’s terms. On February 24, 1637, he presented himself before Hongtaiji at Samjŏndo (lit. three fields ferry), near the Hangang River, where the Qing had built a massive altar for Hongtaiji to receive the king’s surrender. During the ceremony, presided over by the Qing’s Ministry of Rites, the king knelt down three times, each time bowing his head three times before the emperor, after which he handed in his seal issued by the Ming. This ceremony marked the official establishment of the Zongfan relationship between the Qing and Chosŏn, as the king confirmed in his palace memorial to Hongtaiji on December 16, 1637.⁶⁴ The Qing’s forces soon returned to Mukden, taking the crown prince of Chosŏn, Yi Wang (1612–45), and the king’s second son, Yi Ho (King Hyojong, 1619–59), as hostages. Beginning on March 24, 1637, Chosŏn used the regnal title of the Qing to express the date, thus incorporating the country into the Qing’s temporal realm.⁶⁵ Chosŏn became the Qing’s outer fan .
The establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship, which replaced the Ming-Chosŏn relationship that had been officially institutionalized in 1401, was extremely significant for the Qing. The Ming’s passionate endorsement of the Zhou Zongfan system meant that under the Qing, the system was likewise directly connected with the classical and ideal tenets of the Zhou. As its political rhetoric developed after 1644, the Manchu court began to define its relationship with Chosŏn’s court by using more sophisticated terms that were associated with the Zhou Zongfan system. As early as 1649, Emperor Shunzhi, in his imperial mandate to invest King Hyojong, emphasized that Chosŏn served as an "outer fan for the central court" (Ch., wangshi).⁶⁶ In 1659 Emperor Shunzhi began his imperial mandate to invest King Hyŏngjong with the traditional term dividing cogongrass (Ch., fenmao), a metaphor for the Zhou’s Zongfan investiture.⁶⁷ Meanwhile, the Manchu court came to define Chosŏn as a princely submission (Ch., houfu; Ma., jecen i golo) according to the conventional theory of the five submissions (Ch., wufu) of the Zhou.⁶⁸ This definition equated the status of the king with that of China’s princely minister, governor-general, and governor.⁶⁹
Along the same lines, the Qing side, emperors and officials alike, regarded Korean emissaries as "ministers of ministers of the outer fan " (Ch., waifan peichen).⁷⁰
These established Zongfan tenets determined the familistic nature of the Qing-Chosŏn relationship, which crystallized in a crisis of kingship in 1768. In August of that year, Yi Gŭm (King Yŏngjo) asked Emperor Qianlong to invest his grandson Yi San (later known as Chŏngjo) as the crown successor to the Chosŏn kingship in the wake of the deaths of Yi Gŭm’s two sons, including the crown prince. Because the Qing court had never before encountered this situation, Emperor Qianlong instructed the Grand Secretariat (Ch., Neige) and the Ministry of Rites to consult Confucian books and historical records in search of appropriate precedents for the title of crown grandson (Ch., shisun). The ministry cited Confucius’s interpretations in The Book of Rites (Ch., Liji) and historical precedents ranging from the Liu Song Dynasty (420–79) to the Ming Dynasty pertaining to the investment of a vassal’s grandson as crown grandson. Stressing that "the outer fan is fundamentally the same as Zongfan," the ministry recommended that the emperor invest Yi San as the crown grandson, and the emperor did so.⁷¹ As the Ming had done, the Qing regarded Chosŏn as an extended royal family member of the Middle Kingdom where the patriarch—the Son of Heaven—resided.
This ideology continued to exert profound influence over Qing-Chosŏn relations in the nineteenth century. In 1882, under the Qing’s supervision and mediation, Chosŏn signed a treaty with the United States that portrayed Chosŏn as an independent state with a sovereign equal to the American president. But regardless of the treaty’s legal implications based on international law, in 1883 the Chinese official Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), who had negotiated the 1882 treaty with the United States on Chosŏn’s behalf as governor-general of Zhili, superintendent of trade for the northern ports of China (Ch., Beiyang tongshang dachen, hereafter Beiyang superintendent), and China’s de facto foreign minister, cited the Western Zhou’s Zongfan tenets to declare that the king was an outer vassal (Ch., wai zhuhou) of the Son of Heaven in China. Li further pointed out that the king was equal to China’s governors-general and provincial governors, who were inner vassals (Ch., nei zhuhou), while the status of lower-ranking Korean officials corresponded to that of their Chinese counterparts.⁷² In 1886, when Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), Li’s protégé, who resided in Chosŏn as the Chinese imperial resident, asked Li what level of ritual he should perform in front of the king, Li replied that it would be courteous enough for Yuan to follow the rituals used by Chinese provincial officials when visiting first-degree princes (Ch., qinjunwang).⁷³ On the Korean side, the king, in a pre-1894 humble memorial to Emperor Guangxu, still referred to Chosŏn as China’s princely submission.⁷⁴ In their dealings with each other in the late nineteenth century, both China and Korea looked to Zongfan precedents from the Western Zhou down through the Ming, and their country-to-country contacts were subordinate to their familistic court-to-court hierarchy. All of these stories started in 1637, when the Qing formalized its Zongfan relationship with Chosŏn.
At this point it is necessary to explain further why this book prefers the Chinese term Zongfan over the oft-used English renderings tribute system or tributary system. In the twentieth century, the promulgation of the term tribute system, together with the concepts suzerain and vassal, owed a great debt to the popularity of a more neutral phrase, Chinese world order, proposed by the American historian John King Fairbank. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, Fairbank prompted a constellation of historians and political scientists to explore the rationale behind China’s foreign relations in the late imperial period. Although Fairbank was aware of the complexity of Sinocentric cosmopolitanism, or Sinocentrism, the term Chinese world order, which he used broadly to denote this system and to highlight its diversity, became a rough equivalent of tribute system. Acceptance of this English rendering has allowed scholars in a variety of fields to treat it as a counterpart to treaty system or treaty port system. Some scholars have questioned the appositeness of the terms tributary system and suzerain-vassal relations and criticized them as a nineteenth- and twentieth-century reinterpretation of an older form of symbolically asymmetric interstate relations, while others, likewise seeking to avoid the possible misunderstandings caused by English terminology, have proposed new terms, such as Pax Sinica, in a world history context.⁷⁵ But their combined efforts have not changed the entrenched renderings or paradigm, and the conventional English parlance still
profoundly influences scholars’ understanding of late imperial China’s foreign relations.⁷⁶
An underlying problem with the term tribute system, as chapter 2 shows, is that it can convey only some of the connotations of the comprehensive Zongfan system—namely, chaogong, or sending emissaries to pay tribute to China, the perennial activity that was the most sensational and visible part of the regular ritual contacts between Qing China and its fan. The term tribute system thus trims the entire mechanism down to a Sinocentric trade structure. As Peter C. Perdue points out in his study of Qing-Zunghar relations, Overly simplistic generalizations about the Qing ‘tribute system’ tend to single out one trading relationship as the orthodox, normative one, neglecting the great diversity of ritual, economic, and diplomatic conditions found in the Qing trading regime as a whole.⁷⁷ The submission of tribute should not be used loosely as a master concept to represent the entire structure and its core nature. This is not to suggest, however, that the term tribute system has no analytical utility as a conceptual interpretive tool. This is clear in the debate over the question of when the practices of the Sinocentric order became as mature, institutional, and systematic as they were in the Ming and Qing periods.⁷⁸
Cherishing the Small Country: The Qing’s Construction of Its Zhongguo Identity
The Qing’s Transformation into the Big Country
Within the new Zongfan relationship, the Qing was Chosŏn’s monarch and the patriarch of the big family principally consisting of the Qing, Chosŏn, and the Mongol states. Given its supreme authority, the Qing could use the subordination of Chosŏn to its advantage. The first and most direct effect of the relationship was the formation of a new military alliance between the two countries. By conquering Chosŏn, the Qing reinforced its home front in the war with the Ming by eliminating the potential military threat on its eastern flank. It also gained material assistance from Chosŏn in the form of warhorses, grain, warships, cannons, and soldiers. Two months after Chosŏn’s subordination, the Manchu forces conquered Ka Island, destroying the last Ming military base in Chosŏn. In the next few years, a number of Korean soldiers, particularly gunners, were forced to join the Manchus in their fight against the Ming and to garrison Jinzhou and other cities newly conquered by the Qing in Manchuria.⁷⁹
By transforming its relationship with Chosŏn into one between a monarch and a subordinate, or between a father and a son, the Qing obtained political legitimacy from Chosŏn, a Confucian country beyond the Qing’s geographical borders but within its political and cultural realm. Given that the Chinese perceived their Zongfan relationships with other countries or political entities within a model centered on China as the Middle Kingdom, the establishment of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship defined the Qing as the Middle Kingdom. In other words, the identities of both China and the countries on its periphery within the Zongfan framework were mutually dependent and constitutive. This rationale provided the Qing with the political and cultural foundations that it desperately needed to legitimize its centrality in the Chinese world.
In practice, the change of the Qing’s position was materially corroborated by the intensive bilateral exchange of missions between 1637 and 1643. On May 13, 1637, Chosŏn sent its first tributary mission to Mukden, and in the documents submitted to the Qing the Korean side called the city capital (K., Kyŏngsa), a term previously reserved for Beijing. This terminological choice indicated that, at least on the surface, Chosŏn acknowledged Mukden as the new political center of the world.⁸⁰ The mission had 315 members, including three primary members: an envoy, an associate envoy, and a secretary. After traveling 517 miles along the conventional overland tributary route between Hansŏng and Beijing, the mission arrived in Mukden on July 8.⁸¹ The next day the Korean officials appeared before Hongtaiji to perform the highest level of kowtow. During the imperial audience, the Qing’s officials read the king’s humble memorials, written in the hierarchical format once used for the Ming emperor. By praising the admirable virtues of the big country that brought Chosŏn to life again, the text of the humble
memorials endowed the Qing with the position of the Middle Kingdom, adding that all far countries on the periphery [of the Qing] have willingly subordinated themselves (K., hwangbok hambin) and lauding the Qing for its virtuous act of cherishing the small. The Qing’s position was confirmed by the Qing itself in the emperor’s edict to the king, which defined the relationship clearly with reference to orthodox Zongfan principles such as serving the great and cherishing the small. Chosŏn became a far country, a small country, and the remote land on the periphery of the new civilized center.⁸² This framing of the two countries’ mutually constitutive identities consigned Chosŏn to the category of barbarians surrounding the civilized Middle Kingdom of the Qing.
At the same time, the frequent visits to Mukden by tributary emissaries from the Mongols and other ethnic-minority polities whose affairs were under the management of the Mongolian Superintendency highlighted the spread of the Qing-centric Zongfan circle. For the previous two decades, the Manchu regime had gradually eroded the Ming’s Zongfan network at the periphery and used the dislodged parts to construct a similar model with itself at the center. After establishing the Zongfan relationship with Chosŏn, the Qing sought to institutionalize its Zongfan mechanism by imitating the Ming’s policies and improving them to meet the Qing’s needs. The institutionalization of the system took place through the Ministry of Rites. Although the Ministries of Revenue, War, and Justice also exchanged official notes with the king over cases involving financial and military assistance or illegal border crossings, the Ministry of Rites constituted the most important channel between the emissaries and the Qing court. It forwarded the king’s humble memorials to the emperor, directed the emissaries’ visits, treated the emissaries to banquets, accommodated them at a dedicated residence in Mukden for forty days, forwarded imperial edicts to them, and issued official response notes to the king. With the ministry’s guidance, the Korean emissaries performed the highest level of kowtow to the emperor, presented tributes, and received imperial edicts and gifts. These highly programmed ritual practices demonstrated, institutionalized, and consolidated the two sides’ bilateral relationship and strict hierarchy.
To formalize the Zongfan relationship, the Qing sent ethnic Manchu emissaries to Chosŏn to invest the king and other core members of the royal family with certain titles. On January 4, 1638, the first imperial mission led by Inggūldai, Mafuta, and Daiyun arrived in Hansŏng to officially invest the king. The king greeted the envoys at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country outside the West Gate of the capital.⁸³ Later, in the palace, the king received the imperial edicts of investiture, a gold seal, and gifts, and performed established rituals for the occasion. The edicts stated that, with the establishment of investiture-subordinate (Ch., fanfeng) relations between the Qing and Chosŏn, the latter was expected to serve as a " fan and fence" (Ch., fanping) of the Great Qing until the Yellow River becomes as narrow as a belt and Mount Tai becomes as small as a grindstone (Ch., daihe lishan). The emperor’s mandate noted that both sides have an established name and status, which will regulate the relationship and hierarchy for ten thousand years (Ch., li yishi zhi mingfen, ding wanzai zhi gangchang).⁸⁴ Following the ceremony, the king visited the envoys at their residence, the South Palace Annex (K., Nambyŏl gung), where he treated them to banquets. All of these ritual procedures were identical to those that had been performed between Chosŏn and the Ming. The Qing’s investiture legitimatized the bilateral Zongfan relationship between the two countries, an arrangement that would last for 258 years.
The Establishment of the Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing
In the precise spot in Samjŏndo where the Korean king had subordinated himself to Hongtaiji in 1637, the Qing forced Chosŏn to erect a stele to commemorate Hongtaiji’s achievements. Despite the Koreans’ reluctance to memorialize the humiliating invasion, the Qing continued to advance the project, and the Korean official Yi Kyŏng-sŏk (1595–1671) eventually drafted a Chinese-language inscription based on the Korean letters to the Qing side during the war.⁸⁵ After the Chinese official Fan Wencheng approved the inscription, the Qing sent interpreters to Hansŏng to translate it into Manchu and Mongolian. In 1639 the stele, inscribed in three languages, was erected as the Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing (Ma., Daicing gurun i enduringge han i gung erdemui bei; Ch.,
Da Qing huangdi gongde bei) (see figure 1.6).
The inscription reviewed the history between the two countries from 1619 to 1637 from Chosŏn’s perspective and exalted the Qing’s great virtues in bringing Chosŏn to life again. It claimed that the king had surrendered in 1637 not to[the Qing’s] might but to [its] virtues (Ma., horon de gelere teile waka, erdemu de dahahangge kai), given that those virtues made all the far [people] subordinate themselves willingly (Ma., goroki ci aname gemu dahambi). The stele also stated that the bilateral relationship would last for ten thousand years under the emperor’s goodness. The most significant aspect was the official transformation of the identity of the Manchu regime as manifested in certain terms. The inscription called the Qing the big country (Ch., dabang, dachao; Ma., amba gurun) or the upper country (Ch., shangguo; Ma., dergi gurun), while terming Chosŏn the small country (Ch., xiaobang; Ma., ajige gurun) as well as a faraway country. The fact that the two countries geographically bordered each other did not prevent the Qing from redefining Chosŏn as faraway in the politico-cultural sense.
FIGURE 1.6. The Stele of the Honors and Virtues of the Emperor of the Great Qing. The stele is now located in a small park next to Lotte World in Seoul. Photo taken by the author in 2015.
Among these terms, which had been used between Chosŏn and the Ming and were now grafted onto the Qing-Chosŏn relationship, the Manchu phrase amba gurun (big country) was particularly significant. As a literal translation of the Chinese dabang or dachao, the term had once referred exclusively to the Ming. More importantly, as chapter 2 shows, after 1644 the Qing adopted amba gurun as a key equivalent of the Chinese terms Zhongguo (Ma., Dulimbai gurun) and Tianchao (the Heavenly Dynasty; Ma., abkai gurun). The inscription of the Samjŏndo stele was probably the first instance in which the Qing publicly and officially called itself amba gurun; over the following two and a half centuries, this term would refer solely to Qing China.
Cherishing Men from Afar: Publicizing Qing Centrality, 1637–43
The Manchu invasion of 1636 and the king’s surrender to Hongtaiji, known in Chosŏn as Pyŏngja horan (lit. the invasion of the northern barbarians in the year of Pyŏngja), were humiliating to the Koreans and stimulated widespread anti-Manchu feeling in the country. Korean resentment is evident, for example, in an incident that took place in December 1637, when the Manchu envoys visiting Chosŏn asked Korean local officials to procure courtesans (K., panggi), but the women killed themselves to show their resistance (K., yisa kŏchi).⁸⁶ In order to win Chosŏn’s loyalty beyond mere lip service, the Qing quickly adopted the traditional Chinese policies of cherishing the small and cherishing men from afar (Ch., huairou yuanren; Ma., goroki niyalma be bilume gosimbi).⁸⁷
In addition to providing Chosŏn’s delegation with better accommodations in Mukden and bestowing more gifts on the king and his emissaries, the Qing progressively reduced the tribute required of Chosŏn beginning in the early 1640s, when the Qing controlled more resources as a result of its military triumphs over the Ming. In 1640, for instance, the Qing lowered the number of sacks of rice that Chosŏn was expected to offer as tribute from ten thousand to just one thousand. In 1643 the Qing further reduced the annual tribute and furthermore cut by more than half the gifts that Chosŏn gave to the Manchu envoys. Proclaiming that the two countries have become one family, the Shunzhi emperor also permanently abolished many tributary conventions, such as the requirement that Chosŏn provide the imperial envoys with official courtesans. These exemptions, the emperor suggested, embodied the Qing policy of cherishing the small with benevolence.⁸⁸ Compared with the late Ming, which tried to extract the maximum economic and military benefits from Chosŏn, the Qing took a deliberately placatory approach toward its outer fan, represented by the many exemptions. This benign policy substantially facilitated the Qing’s historical transformation into Zhongguo.
The Qing was characterized more by its actions than by its pronouncements. Its policy of appealing to the subordinate country was manifested above all in its frequent contacts with Chosŏn. From 1637 to 1643, the Qing sent twelve missions and twenty-eight emissaries to Chosŏn, an average of one and a half missions per year, while Chosŏn sent fifty-six missions and 102 emissaries to the Qing, an average of seven missions per year.⁸⁹ In this context, some Koreans changed their established understandings of the Qing. In the spring of 1643, for example, Yi Chŏng-hae from Kyŏngsang Province submitted a letter to the Qing envoys in Hansŏng, volunteering to go to Mukden to serve the Qing and our emperor (K., a hwangje).⁹⁰
The Qing used its intensive contacts with Chosŏn as a powerful tool to manage its relations with other political entities. In 1638, a year after it converted Chosŏn from a younger brother into an outer fan, the Qing changed the Chinese name of the Mongolian Superintendency from Menggu yamen to Lifan yuan, applying the Chosŏn precedent to add the Mongols, too, to the Qing-centric family of nations as a fan. This move was part of the Manchu leaders’ project of steadily transforming Mongol conceptualizations of their position in the Qing-dominated world.⁹¹ In this sense, it could be argued that the dramatic change in the
Manchu-Mongol relationship had deep roots in the Zongfan concepts promulgated by Han Chinese officials of the Manchu regime since the early 1630s. This shift could also indicate that the Qing was streamlining the administration of its outer fan in order to strengthen its centrality and pursue an imperial enterprise beyond Manchuria.
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2 BARBARIANIZING CHOSŎN The Chosŏn Model and the Chinese Empire, 1644–1761 The year 1644 marked the beginning of a new stage in the Qing’s exploitation of the “Chosŏn model” as an institutionalized policy for constructing a new imperial order within and beyond the Qing’s borders. Informed by Chosŏn’s status as the Qing’s prototypical outer fan, this model manifested itself in well-established and highly programmed formalities in the contacts between the Qing and its outer fan. Through the Chosŏn model, the Qing rulers initiated a twofold transfor- mation by reversing and institutionalizing the discourse of the civilized–barbarian distinction: they enshrined the Qing as the new Heavenly Dynasty at the center of the known universe and converted Chosŏn and other countries into countries of barbarians on its periphery. The Qing accomplished this transformation con- clusively in the middle of the eighteenth century, when the court published the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Ch., Huang Qing zhigong tu). This chapter reveals the prolonged process by which the Qing gradually reconstructed a Chinese empire in the post-Ming world by legitimizing, enhancing, and practicing its new dual identity as China/Zhongguo and the Heavenly Dynasty through the Chosŏn model in its foreign relations from the first half of the seven- teenth century to the second half of the eighteenth century. Over the course of this century and a half, the macrotransformation of the Manchu regime’s identity in the cosmopolitan politico-cultural context was deeply connected with its microtrans-formation in the Manchu-Chosŏn framework. If there was a tendency among China’s neighbors to decenter the Middle Kingdom after the Ming, this chapter brings to light the process of recentering the Middle Kingdom undertaken by the Qing.¹ Establishing a Dual Identity: The Qing as China and the Heavenly Dynasty On October 30, 1644, Emperor Shunzhi offered a grand sacrifice to Heaven and Earth in the Qing’s new capital, Beijing. He asserted that the Qing would “pacify China” (Ch., sui Zhongguo) and “set a good example for ten thousand countries” (Ch., biaozheng wanbang).² For many people, this event marked the rise of the Qing as the equivalent of China/Zhongguo. In 1767, after finding that a magistrate in Yunnan Province had failed to refer to the Qing as the “Heavenly Dynasty” or “China/Zhongguo” in an official note to the “foreign barbarians” of Burma, Emperor Qianlong furiously pointed out that “it is the rule for one to refer to the court as the ‘Heavenly Dynasty’ or ‘China’ when one mentions it to men from afar. Our country has unified the central area and external areas, and even the barbarians know the Great Qing’s virtue and civilization.”³ Emperor Qianlong’s pronouncement indicates that the terms “Heavenly Dynasty” and “Zhongguo” were interchangeable. Historians of the Qing and modern China tend to follow the emperor, or at least the Qing’s political discourse as developed by the emperor, by treating China/Zhongguo and the Heavenly Dynasty as synonymous terms, both referring to the political unit of the Qing. Yet what the emperor did not mention—or was perhaps not able to realize—was that the Qing did not acquire the two titles simultaneously when it replaced the Ming in the early seventeenth century. As the emperor indicated, the two terms were used for the Qing almost exclusively in the context of foreign relations with “men from afar” or “foreign barbarians,” which generally referred to foreigners. In the domestic context, these terms were replaced by others, such as “the Great Qing,” “our dynasty” (Ch., wochao, benchao, or guochao), “our country” (Ch., wo guojia), and “the imperial dynasty” (Ch., huangchao or shengchao). In the first years after 1644, some Qing officials described the new regime as the “Qing Dynasty” (Ch., Qingchao), a successor to the “Ming Dynasty” in the context of foreign communications; this usage is found in correspondence between officials in Guangzhou
(Canton) and Siam in 1653. But Qingchao remains rare in Qing documents.⁴ As the Qing took over Beijing in 1644 and consolidated its rule over inner China afterward, it completed its transformation into Zhongguo, but its refashioning into the Heavenly Dynasty had barely started. In the late 1640s, when the Manchu Eight Banners were marching into South China, Southwest China, and North- west China, the Qing began to use Chosŏn to construct its new image as the Heavenly Dynasty; however, the process turned out to be difficult and even embar- rassing. According to early Qing archives, Qing scholars may have called the Qing the “Heavenly Dynasty” for the first time in a draft imperial edict in 1649 invest- ing Yi Ho (King Hyojong) as the king of Chosŏn. The draft edict was written by Fu Yijian (1609–65), a Han Chinese literatus from Shandong Province who had won first place in the Qing’s first imperial civil-service examination in 1645.⁵ By emphasizing that the king of Chosŏn should be “an important subordinate serving the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., pinghan tianchao) and loyal to the “central civilized country” (Ch., Huaxia), Fu equated the Qing, which had become Zhongguo, with the Heavenly Dynasty and the civilized country. However, the final version of the edict that was sent to Chosŏn omitted the two latter terms and continued to use the term “upper country” to refer to the Qing, suggesting that the Qing was not yet prepared to claim to be the Heavenly Dynasty.⁶ China, or Zhongguo, could be defined in a general geographical sense by the Qing borders, regardless of how the borders were expanded and redrawn, so long as the Qing controlled the Ming’s territory, or at least the central plain (Ch., Zhongyuan).⁷ In fact, after 1644, when the Qing rulers began writing and revising their history, they deliberately deleted some Manchu terms referring to the Ming as Zhongguo. For example, Hongtaiji, in a letter to the Ming on July 29, 1632, had ex- plained that the Jin fought with the Ming because “the Ming officials in Liaodong did not follow the way of China” (Ma., Liyoodung i hafasa Dulimbai gurun i doroi tondoi beiderakū), using the Manchu term Dulimbai gurun in clear reference to China/Zhongguo. Later, the narrative written in Chinese replaced the phrase “the way of China” (Ch., Zhongguo/Zhongyuan zhi dao) with “the way of rightness” (Ch., zhengzhi zhi dao). While Hongtaiji in 1632 had called the Ming “your China” (Ma., suweni Dulimbai gurun), the post-1644 Chinese edition replaced this term with “your country” (Ch., erguo), deleting the word for “China.”⁸ The changing terminology shows that after 1644 the Qing deeply identified itself with China. Given the ethnic background of the ruling house of the Qing, many scholars have been interested in establishing when the Qing court officially used the Manchu term Dulimbai gurun to define itself as China/Zhongguo. Some cite the year 1689 and the Treaty of Nerchinsk that the Qing signed with Russia. In fact, the Qing court had used this Manchu term to represent its identity much earlier in its negotiations with Zheng Jing (1642–81), the eldest son of Zheng Chenggong (1624–62), who occupied Taiwan in 1662. While Zheng Jing never questioned the Qing’s identity as China, he argued that Taiwan was not a part of China in an ef- fort to secure for Taiwan an independent status like that of Chosŏn. Emperor Kangxi, however, reiterated in a decree in 1669 that Zheng belonged to the “people of China” (Ch., Zhongguo zhi ren; Ma., Dulimbai gurun i niyalma).⁹ In the late Kangxi period, the Qing presented itself as China in a favorable and definitive way. For example, in his travelogue, the Manchu official Tulišen, who was dispatched as an envoy to the Turgūt Mongols in Russia in 1712, generally referred to the Qing as Dulimbai gurun (“China”) or meni Dulimbai gurun (“our China”); these terms were rendered into Chinese as Zhongguo or Zhonghua when Tulišen’s jour- nal was published in 1723 in both languages. Tulišen also consistently translated terms such as “our place” (Ma., meni bade) as “our China” (Ch., wo Zhongguo) and referred to all people of the Great Qing, such as the Manchus, Han Chinese, and Mongols, as “people of China.” More importantly, following Emperor Kangx- i’s instructions, Tulišen emphasized China’s Confucian nature to Russia, claiming that “our country takes fidelity, filial piety, benevolence, justice, and sincerity as fundamentals” (Ma., meni gurun i banjire tondo hiyoošun, gosin, jurgan, akdun be fulehe da obumbi; Ch., wo guojia yi zhong xiao ren yi xin wei genben).¹⁰ By contrast, the Heavenly Dynasty, or Tianchao, could not be delineated in the same way, since it was based on the notion of all-under-Heaven—a China- centered politico-cultural term with no connection to borders in the geographical sense. Put another way, the Qing could define itself as China from within, but it
could not identify itself as the Heavenly Dynasty without support from outside the Qing: the new regime would first have to erect a new, Qing-centric, and multi- national Zongfan system. The expectation that the Qing would become a new imperial power required the regime to transform the countries that the Ming had represented as its fan into fan in the Qing’s orbit. The Ming had pursued the same policy when it “became the ruler of China” (Ch., zhu Zhongguo) in 1368, im- mediately sending envoys to the countries that had served as fan of its predecessor, the Yuan Dynasty, with the aim of converting them into fan of the Ming.¹¹ However, unlike the Ming, the Manchu rulers in 1644 faced the tremendous challenge of overcoming their previous status as barbarians, as defined by the civi- lized–bar-bar- distinction. Compared with the mission to identify the Qing as China and as the legitimate successor to the Ming within the Qing’s borders, the quest to construct the Qing as the new Heavenly Dynasty beyond its borders called for extraordinary effort. From the perspective of comparative philology, the Chinese term “Tianchao” was not initially widely adopted in the Manchu language, in which it was literally rendered as abkai gurun (“Heavenly country”).¹² The Manchu rulers had difficulty identifying with this term and the Chinese political concepts behind it. In July 1637, for example, after reviewing the draft edict of investiture to the king of Chosŏn, Hongtaiji commented that he did not like to equate himself with Heaven as the Ming had done, suggesting that his officials must have employed the Chinese word tian (“Heaven”) or the Manchu term abka (“Heaven”) in the draft.¹³ Nevertheless, the task of reconstructing the Qing as the new China in the seventeenth century left the Manchu rulers with no choice but to embrace the term and the rationale behind it. The intellectual transformation of the Qing ruling house is evident in the visit of the fifth Dalai Lama (1617–82) to Beijing in late 1652 and early 1653. The Qing’s Manchu officials supported Emperor Shunzhi’s plan to greet the Dalai Lama in Daiga in Inner Mongolia, arguing that the Ūlet Mongols, who controlled Tibet mili- tarily at the time, would be pacified by the emperor’s gracious behavior. But the Han Chinese officials argued that the emperor was “the ruler of all countries under Heaven” (Ch., tianxia guojia zhi zhu) and should not violate conventions by meeting with a lama, even the Dalai Lama, in person outside the capital. Still hesitant about going to Daiga, the emperor took part in a grand ceremony commemorating Confucius at the Directorate of Education (Ch., Guozi jian) in Beijing, where he knelt down twice, each time making three prostrations. The ceremony, attended by many high-ranking Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese officials and generals, conferred on the emperor the mantle of the supreme agent of Confucianism. Right after the ceremony, two Han Chinese grand secretaries, Hong Cheng- chou (1593–1665) and Chen Zhilin (1605–66), submitted a memorial to the emperor entreating him not to go to Daiga to welcome the Dalai Lama because astro- logical phenomena reported by the Imperial Astronomical Bureau suggested that intruders would threaten the emperorship. The two officials emphasized that “the way of Heaven is infinite” (Ch., tiandao shenyuan) and could not be predicted. After reading the memorial, the emperor immediately abandoned the idea of visiting Daiga. Instead he welcomed the Dalai Lama in the South Garden of Beijing.¹⁴ As this episode suggests, the Manchu emperor had to adjust to his role as the Son of Heaven in the Confucian sense in the post-1644 politico-cultural and ideological contexts, notwithstanding the Qing’s serious religious and military concerns over its western frontier in Inner Asia. Reconstructing the Chinese Empire: The Rise of the Chosŏn Model From East Asia to Southeast and Inner Asia: The Qing’s Presentation of the Chosŏn Model The Qing did not stand alone as it sought to construct its new dual identity. Chosŏn, the first Confucian outer fan of the Qing, played an unparalleled role in pro- viding the Manchu conquerors with resources to form and articulate the Qing’s new identity. As early as 1650, in a palace memorial to Emperor Shunzhi, the king called the Qing the “Heavenly Dynasty,” even though the Qing court itself was still reluctant to use the term.¹⁵ The development of Chosŏn’s essential role in the
Qing-centric Zongfan world can be divided into two historical phases: the seven years from 1637 to 1643 and the 251 years from 1644 to 1894. In the first phase, Chosŏn began serving as the outer fan of the Qing by adhering to the clearly formulated and institutionalized discipline of the Sino-Korean Zongfan system, which had functioned between the Ming and Chosŏn for more than two centuries. As chapter 1 described, the Qing was able to make a significant move toward the transformation of its identity by assuming the place of the Ming in the framework of Sino-Korean relations. The frequent visits of Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries to Mukden provided the Qing with good opportunities to emphasize and practice its centrality in the known world. After 1644, with its dramatic emergence as a Ming-style, nationwide regime and the extensive expansion of its territory, the Qing found itself in the position of having to manage relations with multiple neighboring countries, such as Annam, Ryukyu, Lanchang (Laos), Siam, Sulu (the Philippines), and Burma, that had served as subordinates to the Ming. Having inherited these fan from the Ming, what Qing China now needed to do was to resume and refashion the Zongfan sys- tem according to its own standards. On this front, the Qing had gained valuable experience from its institutionalized communications with Chosŏn since the 1630s and, through these communications, had developed a mature model of a Qing-centric Zongfan arrangement. The Chosŏn model laid out a path whereby a country or a political entity could follow Chosŏn into the Qingcentric system primarily by receiving imperial investitures from the Qing, adopting the regnal titles of the Qing in its calendar, and sending tributary emissaries to the Qing.¹⁶ The Chosŏn model was a pattern centered on rituals.¹⁷ Although the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship had been inaugurated by the Manchu military conquest of 1637, as a result of which the crown prince, another prince, and sons of high- ranking Chosŏn officials were detained in Mukden as hostages, the unpleasant situation began to change when the Qing released the hostages in 1644. The Qing also progressively reduced the tributes required of Chosŏn until, by the late 1730s, they were less than one-tenth of what they had been in the late 1630s and be- came a mere symbol of political subordination.¹⁸ What accompanied the tributes was the performance of a set of highly programmed and increasingly elaborate formalities that demonstrated the hierarchical Zongfan order and the Qing’s new normative identity. In the first years after 1644, the Qing found the Chosŏn model the most powerful and practical way of managing its relations with other countries and of extend- ing its influence and authority. Emperor Shunzhi articulated the importance of Chosŏn’s model role in 1647 after the Qing army conquered Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong Provinces and prepared to establish relations with Ryukyu, Annam, Siam, and Japan. On March 17 and August 25, the emperor announced that the Qing would “give preferential treatment to these countries as to Chosŏn” (Ch., yu Chaoxian yiti youdai) as long as they “subordinated themselves to ‘the civilized’ and paid tribute to the court” (Ch., qingxin xianghua, chengchen rugong).¹⁹ In this way, the Manchu rulers publicized Chosŏn’s prototypical fan status and estab- lished the Qing-Chosŏn relationship as the yardstick for relations between the Qing and other countries or political entities. Rather than adopting the aggressive colonial policy of the Yuan, the Qing learned from the Ming’s Zongfan mechanism, using the sophisticated and markedly Confucian Chosŏn model to maintain stability on its frontiers and to construct a new Chinese empire beyond them.²⁰ As a result of the Qing rulers’ efforts at promoting the Chosŏn model after 1644, political units beyond the Qing’s control also came to regard it as an ideal way of solving conflicts with the Qing while retaining their own privileges. Between 1662 and 1669, for example, when the Qing was trying to persuade Zheng Jing to surrender in Taiwan, Zheng insisted on “following the Chosŏn model” (Ch., zhao Chaoxian shili) into the Qing’s Zongfan system by “proclaiming subordination and paying tribute” (Ch., chengchen nagong) but refraining from cutting his hair in the Qing style.²¹ For Zheng, the Chosŏn model appeared to offer the most favorable and promising way to resolve the standoff with the Qing. Emperor Kangxi refused this proposal on the grounds that Chosŏn had been “always a foreign country” (Ch., conglai suoyou zhi waiguo; Ma., daci bihe encu gurun), whereas Zheng belonged to the “people of China.”²² These negotiations show the perceived broad applicability and coverage of the Chosŏn model in situations in which neither independence nor complete annexation was an immediate and acceptable
solution. The Chosŏn model provided the Manchu ruling house with a general blueprint for dealing with other political entities. Over the Qing period, two parallel central institutions were responsible for the affairs of outer fan : the Mongolian Superintendency mainly managed outer fan located to the north and west of Qing China, while the Ministry of Rites was in charge of fan in the east, the south, and the west. This book focuses on the outer fan under the management of the Ministry of Rites rather than those under the Mongolian Superintendency, although the two types of outer fan may have been associated through the Chosŏn model in the early years of the Qing’s expansion to Inner Asia and the development of its Eurasian empire. This inconspicuous connection between the eastern and western frontiers of the Qing empire had manifested itself at least by 1653, when the Qing invested the fifth Dalai Lama and the Gusi Khan of the Ūlet Mongols by incorporating them into the Qing-dominated extended family and placing them under the Qing’s juris- diction. At the time, the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites were administratively still closely connected with one another: it was a Manchu min- ister (Ch., shangshu; Ma., aliha amban) from the Ministry of Rites, Langkio, and a vice minister (Ch., shilang; Ma., ashan i amban) from the Mongolian Superin- tendency, Sidali, who together gave the Dalai Lama and the Gusi Khan the books of investiture. The imperial statement in the khan’s investiture book bore a re- markable resemblance to that issued to the new king of Chosŏn in 1649. It declared that the recipient must serve as the Qing’s “subordinate” or “fence” (Ch., pingfu) “until the Yellow River becomes as narrow as a belt and Mount Tai becomes as small as a grindstone” (Ch., daili shanhe).²³ In addition, the mechanism governing the “local products” and tributes that the lama and the khan presented to the emperor and the empress dowager in 1654 and the imperial gifts the lama and the khan received in return was much like that used between the Qing and Chosŏn.²⁴ Finally, the imperial mandates of investiture (Ch., gaoming; Ma., g’aoming) that the Qing issued to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni bore the same imperial seal—“Seal of declaring imperial mandate” (Ch., zhigao zhi bao; Ma., hese wasimbure boobai)—as had the mandate investing the new king of Chosŏn.²⁵ If we compare the imperial codes of the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites, it seems that the former borrowed institutional regulations from the latter to formalize the communications between the Manchu rulers and the Mongol fan in Inner Asia. The prototypical role of Chosŏn in the Qingcentric Zong- fan system may have contributed to the Qing’s policy of integrating the Inner Asian political and military entities into the Qing’s extended family.²⁶ On the surface, the geographical responsibilities of the Ministry of Rites did not overlap with those of the Mongolian Superintendency, as Qing officials confirmed in 1743, so Qing-Chosŏn contacts were ostensibly unrelated to Qing– Inner Asian contacts.²⁷ But on the political level, soon after 1644 the Qing rulers began to apply the Zongfan rationale behind the Chosŏn model to Inner Asia, along with the Manchu court’s promulgation of the discourse of “all-under-Heaven” and “people with- out difference between the outside and the inside,” as part of the long process of subordinating the Zunghar Mongols, whom the Qing rulers treated as people “beyond virtue and civilization.”²⁸ Administratively, the Ministry of Rites was also in charge of the affairs of some lamas in Gansu and Shaanxi until the 1740s, when it transferred this jurisdiction to the Mongolian Superintendency.²⁹ The Chosŏn model, in this sense, gradually became a normative, standard, and powerful soft weapon in the repertoire of the Qing. It allowed the Manchu rulers to govern the areas conquered by the formidable Eight Banners in Inner Asia, which ar- guably smoothed the way for the Qing to insert its civil administrative system into these areas during the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods. Who Were the Barbarians? The Imperial Code and the Qing’s Reforms Under the Qing, the Zongfan order was maintained and embodied by the exchange of emissaries between the Qing and its “subordinate countries” (Ch., shuguo; Ma., tulergi gurun or harangga gurun), which were generally described as “subordinate countries of foreign barbarians” (Ch., waiyi shuguo). All exchanges were conducted in accordance with The Universal Tributary Regulations (Ch., Chaogong tongli) codified by the Ministry of Rites, and the performance of the exchanges
was supervised by the Host-Guest Office (Ch., Zhuke qingli si) of the Ministry of Rites. These regulations primarily consisted of the following seven mandates:
1.Investiture (Ch., cefeng): The Qing emperor gave the new king of each fan a patent of appointment through an imperial mandate of investiture along with a decree (Ch., chiyu) and an official seal for use in correspondence.
2.Regnal titles (Ch., nianhao): The fan adopted the Qing’s regnal titles as the way to enumerate years.
3.Calendar (Ch., shuoli): The fan used the Qing’s calendar and celebrated Chinese festivals.
4.The dispatch of emissaries to pay tribute to the Qing (Ch., chaogong), with a frequency individually determined by the Qing.
5.The conferral of noble rank on a deceased king or privileged members of the royal house of the fan (Ch., fengshi).
6.Reporting events to the Qing (Ch., zoushi): Each fan informed the emperor of important domestic events but did not need to ask for instructions and could assume that the Qing would not intervene in its domestic affairs.
7.Trade (Ch., maoyi or hushi), including trade at the frontiers and at the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations (Ch., Huitong siyi guan; Ma., Acan- jime isanjire tulergi gurun i bithe ubaliyambure kuren) in Beijing.³⁰ The Qing made considerable changes to the Zongfan system that it inherited from the Ming. The Ming had also relied on The Universal Tributary Regulations, by which the Ministry of Rites managed routine exchanges between China and the “subordinate barbarian countries in the four quarters” (Ch., fanguo or siyi)—Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, the Jurchens, Mongolia, and other countries and political entities—as well as interactions between the Ming and “indigenous chieftains” (Ch., tuguan or tusi), including local chieftains in Yunnan, Guangxi, Guizhou, Sichuan, Hunan, and Hubei.³¹ But two significant changes distinguished the list of “foreign barbarian countries” in the new Qing regulations from the Ming’s list. First, the Qing excluded “indigenous chieftains” from its list of tribu- taries because of its policy toward “barbarian chieftains” (Ch., yimu) in southwestern China. Known as “replacing the hereditary indigenous chieftains with rotat- ing officials” (Ch., gaitu guiliu), the policy had been inaugurated by the Yuan and the Ming, but only in the Yongzheng period of the Qing was it carried out on a truly large scale.³² The areas and populations under the chieftains’ control were integrated simultaneously into the Qing’s territory and into its household regis- tration system.³³ The indigenous chieftains were thus outside the supervision of the Ministry of Rites. The line between barbarians belonging to these political units and barbarians from other countries was clear in the minds of the Manchu rulers at court and their deputies in the provinces.³⁴ Second, the Western coun- tries gradually disappeared from the list of foreign barbarians in the tributary regulations. By the late fourteenth century, the Ming had fifteen outer fan countries, and the majority of these became the Qing’s outer fan, including Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, Lanchang, Siam, Sulu, and Burma.³⁵ From the 1760s to the 1840s dur- ing the Qing period, the list also included the Netherlands and the countries of the Western Ocean (Ch., Xiyang), but by the 1890s only these seven Asian coun- tries remained on the list.³⁶ Whereas in the Qianlong period the Mongolian, Tibetan, and Muslim areas under the management of the Mongolian Superintendency had “all entered [the Qing’s] map and registers” (Ch., xianru bantu) and were presented “like prefectures and counties” (Ch., youru junxian),³⁷ the “subordinate countries of foreign bar- barians” under the supervision of the Ministry of Rites were not integrated into the Qing’s core territory. Nor would these countries be treated as parts of the Republic or the People’s Republic of China in the twentieth century. By the same token, the dual management system for the outer fan—the Mongolian Superin- tendency and the Ministry of Rites—under the Qing made it difficult for people outside this institutional mechanism to draw a clear line between them. This might explain why, as discussed in chapter 5, some Qing officials in the late nineteenth century responded to complications involving Chosŏn by suggesting that
Beijing apply its policy vis-à-vis Mongolia and Tibet to Chosŏn by converting Chosŏn into prefectures and counties, as they supposed Chosŏn had been in the Qianlong period. The rationale behind this suggestion applied the basic structure of the Qing empire on its western frontier to the management of its eastern one, highlighting Chosŏn’s prominent subordinate position within the empire. The role of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship is thus significant. This relationship should not be treated simply as a specific instance of the Zongfan sys- tem, as scholars have typically done. Rather, it is best understood as a prototype that shaped the formation of the Qing’s Zongfan system and helped the Manchu regime transform its political identity for the purpose of claiming centrality and accessing orthodox legitimacy in the process of reshuffling the Chinese world. In short, the Qing-Chosŏn relationship was the seedbed of the Qing’s entire Zongfan arrangement, from which the political legitimacy of both sides—the Qing and its outer fan—sprang. Civilizing the Center: The Practice of the Chosŏn Model Five aspects of the Qing’s practice of the Chosŏn model, aspects embodied in and undergirded by ritual practices and documentary discourse, showcased the Qing’s identity as the civilized center. These aspects concern the frequency and composition of missions; the overland route and the Sino-Korean geographical boundaries; humble palace memorials, imperial mandates and decrees, and orthodox legitimacy; tributes, gifts, and court-to-court interactions; and receptions and rituals. The Frequency and Composition of Imperial and Tributary Missions The exchange of missions between the Qing and Chosŏn started in 1637 and continued without interruption until the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. The fre- quency of Chosŏn’s missions to the Qing was higher than that of any other country. Whereas other subordinate countries sent tributary missions to Beijing every other year (Ryukyu), every three years (Siam), every four years (Annam), every five years (Sulu), or every ten years (Lanchang and Burma), Chosŏn dispatched sev- eral missions every year.³⁸ Although the imperial code required Chosŏn to send an annual tributary mission at the end of each year that would simultaneously serve as the mission for the winter solstice, the imperial birthday, and the lunar New Year, Chosŏn never hesitated to send more emissaries under different names, dispatching a new mission before the previous one had even returned in order to nourish its relationship with the Qing.³⁹ From 1637 to 1894, Chosŏn sent about 698 official missions to the Qing for twenty-six different purposes, an average of 2.71 missions per year.⁴⁰ In 1784 and 1788, Emperor Qianlong commented jubilantly that in this respect Chosŏn was a peer of the Qing’s inner fan.⁴¹ According to the imperial regulations, a Korean mission was to have thirty members: an envoy, an associate envoy, a secretary, three interpreters, and twenty- four tribute guard officers. The envoy, associate envoy, and secretary were the three key members. As a special privilege to Chosŏn, the number of attendants and servants attached to the mission was not limited. By contrast, the missions from Ryukyu, Lanchang, Burma, and the Netherlands were not to exceed twenty mem- bers; those from other Western countries were limited to twenty-two, those from Siam to twenty-six, and those from Annam to thirty.⁴² Many Korean scholars and businessmen visited Beijing as mission attendants or servants in order to experience Chinese culture or to seek their fortunes, so a Korean mission often num- bered several hundred people. For example, the annual tributary mission of 1653 had a total of 225 members, the gratitude mission of 1777 a total of 310, the grat- itude mission of 1803 a total of 213, and the congratulatory mission of 1889 a total of 311.⁴³ In 1829, two missions with more than six hundred people combined ar- rived in Beijing at the same time, forcing the Ministry of Rites and the Ministry of Works to borrow twenty large tents from the Imperial Household Department (Ch., Neiwu fu) to house the additional visitors. Until the late nineteenth century, the legions of Chosŏn’s missions continued their pilgrimages to Beijing every
year with a large number of tributes and horses.⁴⁴ By contrast, the Qing sent far fewer and smaller imperial missions to Chosŏn. From 1637 to 1894, the Qing undertook 172 missions to Hansŏng, an average of 0.67 missions per year. In the early Qing, the Manchu court frequently dispatched emissaries to investigate cases of homicide and smuggling at the border, to negotiate resolutions to these cases with the king, and sometimes to discuss the punishment of Korean officials who failed to satisfy the Qing. As early as the Shunzhi period, the Manchu court began to reduce the number of its envoys, the rationale behind the change being the Zongfan idea of “cherishing the small.” In May 1653, for example, in the course of investigating a cross-border case of homicide, the Ministry of Rites proposed to ask the Korean emissary in Beijing to carry the imperial documents to the king instead of dispatching an imperial envoy for the purpose, given that “Chosŏn is a country of men from afar” (Ch., Chaoxian guo xi yuanren). Emperor Shunzhi endorsed this proposal, declaring that “hereafter, do not propose to send envoys to disturb the fan [Ch., fanbang] with minor matters.”⁴⁵ By the middle period of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, such envoys to Hansŏng disappeared entirely.⁴⁶ From this point on, imperial missions to Chosŏn were of two primary types: missions for investiture and missions to confer noble rank, both relating to power shifts that required the Chinese emperor’s bestowal of legitimacy. In the early period, an imperial mission contained around a hundred men, many of whom were Manchu bannermen of the Eight Banners who joined the mission for the purpose of trade. In 1658 Emperor Shunzhi significantly trimmed the size of the mis- sions by calling for the end of Manchu trade in Hansŏng. After that, a mission comprised an envoy, an associate envoy, four interpreters, and eighteen attendants.⁴⁷ In 1845 and 1846, Emperor Daoguang further reduced the number of core members to four.⁴⁸ Taking attendants into account, after the early nine- teenth century an imperial mission had fewer than thirty members in total. The mission in 1876 comprised twenty members, and the last mission, in 1890, had twenty-eight.⁴⁹ All imperial envoys to Chosŏn—from the first envoy in 1637, Inggūldai, to the last one in 1890, Xuchang (1838–92)—were Manchu officials. They included some members of the Mongol and Han Chinese Eight Banners but no non-banner Han Chinese, whereas envoys to Annam and Ryukyu were mainly non-banner Han Chinese rather than Manchus. By at least the 1760s, Han Chinese scholars were fully aware of this ethnic discrepancy, though some of their Korean counterparts were not.⁵⁰ The door was never opened for Han Chinese to participate in tributary affairs in Korea. The exclusion was perhaps rooted in the implicit demands of the civilized–barbarian distinction and the Qing’s need to transcend the pre-1644 Manchu-Korean relationship: the Manchu court had to demonstrate, maintain, and consolidate its legitimacy as the human and institutional agent of the Mandate of Heaven and to strengthen its claim to civilized centrality and Chineseness through the hierarchical relationship. Still, some Manchu envoys, such as Akdun (1685–1756) in 1717, broadly identified themselves from a cultural perspective as “Han envoys” (Ch., hanjie) from the “central civilized country” (Ch., Zhonghua, Zhongxia).⁵¹ The Overland Route, the Willow Palisade, and Geographical Boundaries In the post-1644 period, the emissaries of the two countries traveled on an overland route, which was about 950 miles (3,000 Chinese li) long and linked Han- sŏng and Beijing via around eighty-two stations. The route passed through P’yŏngyang, Ŭiju, the Yalu River, Fenghuang City, Mukden, Shanhai Pass, Fengrun, and Tongzhou (see map 2.1). From 1644 to 1894, both Korean and Manchu emissaries were required to follow the overland route, the sole exception being the last imperial mission in 1890, which took a maritime route due to exceptional circumstances. In general, a mission took forty to sixty days to reach Beijing from Hansŏng, and an imperial mission from Beijing faced the same trudge to Hansŏng.⁵² In Manchuria the overland route skirted the long Willow Palisade (Ch., Liutiao bian)—a system of levees and trenches planted with willow trees, their branches tied together—from Fenghuang City to Shanhai Pass, where it almost connected with the Great Wall. The Manchu rulers built the palisade from the late 1630s to
the 1680s in order to preserve their economic privileges by demarcating domestic boundaries between Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese regions. In the early period of Kangxi’s reign, the palisade connecting Shanhai Pass in the west and Fenghuang City in the east, known as the Old Fence, was around 590 miles (1,900 li) long and had sixteen fence gates, while in the north the New Fence between Weiyuan Village and Fateha Mountain was 215 miles (690 li) with four gates.⁵³ Fenghuang City, located at the southeastern corner of the east wing of the Old Fence, was under the supervision of the Manchu General of Mukden (Ch., Shengjing jiangjun) and had a gate (K., ch’akmun; Ch., zhamen), known as Feng huang Gate, about three miles (eight li) to the southeast of the city.⁵⁴ The Qing built Fenghuang Gate between 1638 and 1639 and extended it southeast toward the Yalu River between 1685 and 1690 up to a location about nine miles (thirty li) from the city.⁵⁵ The gate was the only pass through which Korean emissaries could enter the Qing’s “ancestral territory” (Ch., genben zhongdi) in Manchuria.
Map 2.1 The overland route between Beijing and Ŭiju in the late eighteenth century. The line connecting points A, B, C, and D on the map marks the Willow Pal- isade, which started at Fenghuang City (A) and ended near the Great Wall (the line connecting points D, E, and F). The line connecting points A, G (Mukden), H (Shanhai Pass), I (Fengrun), and J (Tongzhou) forms the overland route that Chosŏn’s emissaries took to Beijing after crossing the Yalu River. Yŏji to, hand- written map, preserved at the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University. Copyright Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies. Between the gate and the boundary river lay a Qing-controlled area in which no one was allowed to live. In the late seventeenth century, this area spanned about thirty-four miles.⁵⁶ The Korean emissaries could pass through this area freely and were not subjected to security checks until they reached Fenghuang Gate. The garrison major of the Manchu bannermen at Fenghuang City did not welcome, check, or send off the missions beyond the gate, which may help explain why Ko- rean emissaries were occasionally robbed by Chinese bandits outside the gate.⁵⁷ For the Korean visitors, Fenghuang Gate was thus more like a borderline than the Yalu River was, although the geographical borderline ran along the middle course of the river. After entering Fenghuang Gate, the Koreans were to proceed to Beijing within twenty-eight days under the escort of Qing soldiers, passing through thirty-nine transfer stations (Ch., gongshi guanshe; Ma., alban jafara elcin i tatara guwan i boo). In fact, however, the visitors were so familiar with the route that generally no Chinese soldiers accompanied them to Beijing. The absence of Chinese monitors endowed the Koreans with fair freedom to visit places along their route and interview local people, enriching their travel journals, which eventually constituted a voluminous collection known as Yŏnhaengnok (The records of the journey to Beijing). All emissaries of the Qing’s fan were required to follow specific tributary routes and dared not deviate from them. For example, Ryukyu’s emissaries were instructed to arrive at Min’an in Fujian, Sulu’s at Xiamen in Fujian, those of Western countries at Macau in Guangdong, Siam’s at Humen in Guangdong, An- nam’s at Taiping in Guangxi, and Burma’s at Yongchang in Yunnan. After the emissaries reached the designated places, the governor-general and the governor of the province would report their arrival to the Ministry of Rites and instruct subordinate officials to send them on to Beijing. Chosŏn’s emissaries had no such rela- tions with officials in the provinces through which they passed, and they communicated directly with the Ministry of Rites. In other words, Chosŏn’s contacts with the Qing were under Beijing’s direct control, which enabled Beijing to use Chosŏn to portray the harmony of its Zongfan system whenever necessary. Along the overland route, the high frequency and large size of Chosŏn’s missions produced considerable and lucrative commercial opportunities for merchants from both countries. What flowed into the Qing realm in massive quantities, in addition to Korean and Japanese goods, was silver. The mission of 1712, for in- stance, carried more than two hundred thousand taels of silver to Beijing, while the one in 1777 brought more than ninety-three thousand taels. The bulk of the sil- ver was originally from Japan, acquired through trade between Tsushima and Chosŏn. The Hansŏng–Fenghuang City–Mukden–Beijing overland trade route was an extension of the Kyoto–Osaka–Tsushima–Pusan–Hansŏng overland and maritime trade route, with Hansŏng and Beijing the two major entrepôts on the com- bined route. Financially, the three nations made up an integrated international silver network, and in the eighteenth century the amount of silver that poured into the Qing from Chosŏn annually could reach five hundred thousand to six hundred thousand taels, which contributed to the Qing’s prosperity but aroused serious concerns among Korean officials.⁵⁸ In this sense, it is not an exaggeration to say that the Beijing–Hansŏng overland route was the most prosperous and most lucrative long-distance and international trade route in East Asia before Chosŏn opened treaty ports in the 1870s and 1880s. Humble Palace Memorials, Imperial Mandates and Decrees, and Orthodox Legitimacy The imperial court in Beijing and the royal court in Hansŏng interacted through meticulously formatted court documents written in accordance with highly institu- tionalized hierarchical norms. From 1637 on, the most important category among the documents that Chosŏn submitted to the Qing was the king’s humble
palace memorials (K., p’yo; Ch., biao). In 1705 the Ministry of Rites in Beijing laid down a set of new criteria for the syntax of these memorials that Chosŏn adhered to for the next 190 years, but the king was still free to use his own terms in composing other kinds of palace memorials.⁵⁹ The humble memorials were aimed at strengthening the Qing’s authority by reiterating and affirming the reciprocal and hierarchical relationship between the emperor and the king. The memorial sub- mitted by the crown prince and deputy king of Chosŏn, Yi Yun (King Gyŏngjong), on April 14, 1721, in the sixtieth year of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, to congratulate the emperor on his birthday, is a typical example. The memorial was written on a sheet of well-made Korean paper in tiny, narrow Chinese characters evenly ar- ranged in twenty-three vertical lines from right to left—although a memorial could, on occasion, exceed fifty lines—and it carefully followed the rules of honorific elevation, exactly as the Qing had mandated in 1705.⁶⁰ Refer ring to himself as “your minister” (K., sin; Ch., chen) of a vassal (Ch., fanfu), who could hardly bear his separation from the court (Ch., queting), Yi proclaimed that “Your Majesty raises all people of the world by assuming the Mandate of Heaven. The world is peaceful and imperial civilization extends to all places. Your Majesty has pacified the four seas, and ten thousand countries have come to revere Your Majesty [Ch., sihai yi er wanguo laiwang].”⁶¹ In such highly formalized memorials, the king frequently called himself “subordinate” or “minister,” Chosŏn the “small country,” and the Qing the “big coun- try,” the “upper country,” the “big dynasty,” the “central dynasty,” or the “Heavenly Dynasty.”⁶² These Qing-mandated terms exploited Chosŏn’s subordinate sta- tus to highlight the Qing’s centrality in the early eighteenth century. Year after year, Chosŏn, as the representative of the others, helped consolidate the Qing’s supreme cultural identity as well as Qing hegemony through its performance of such written subservience. Upon receipt of the king’s humble memorials, the em- peror generally wrote on the cover in red ink, “I have learned of the appreciative memorial that you, the king, respectfully presented. Let the relevant ministry [the Ministry of Rites] know.” The comments were made either in Manchu (“Wang sini kesi de hengkileme wesimbuhe be saha, harangga jurgan sa.”) or Chinese (“Lanwang zouxie. Zhidao liao. Gaibu zhidao.”). On the Qing side, the imperial decrees granting a deceased king noble rank or investing a new king with a patent of appointment also served to consolidate the hierarchy. The special terms used in these edicts had their own rules, which underwent a process of institutionalization after 1644. When the Qing invested Yi Chong as king in January 1638 (the first investiture that the Qing performed), the decree stated only that Chosŏn would be recognized as fan to the Qing forever.⁶³ But after 1644 the Manchu court began to include additional terms with strong political meanings in the Zongfan context. For example, the decree of investiture in 1649 clearly defined Chosŏn as an outer fan in a “remote area” (Ch., xiahuang) that submitted itself to the Qing’s virtues and civilization. In 1675 the phrase “cher- ishing the eastern country” (Ch., huairou dongtu) appeared in the decrees.⁶⁴ These terms substantially broadened the scope of the Qing’s political and cultural ide- ology and transformed its identity in the context of the civilized–barbarian dichotomy. On March 6, 1725, Emperor Yongzheng issued a mandate and a decree to Yi Gŭm to invest him as the king and his wife as the queen. The mandate of investi- ture (Ch., fengtian gaoming; Ma., abkai hesei g’aoming) consisted of five connected pieces of dyed ramie cloth in red, blue, black, white, and yellow from right to left. Each of the five sections was surrounded by a pattern of flying dragons (see figures 2.1 and 2.2). In the mandate Emperor Yongzheng stated, “The great strat- egy is simply to extend civilization [Ch., jiaohua; Ma., tacihiyan wen] to the countries from afar [Ch., haibang; Ma., goroki gurun]…. Generations of your court have been sincerely loyal and trustworthy and have been paying tribute diligently [Ch., zhigong qinxiu; Ma., tušan alban be kiceme faššambi].” In investing Yi Gŭm the “king of Chosŏn” (Ch., Chaoxian guowang; Ma., Coohiyan gurun i wang), the emperor emphasized that the king “shall serve as the fence on the eastern land [Ch., pinghan dongfan; Ma., dergi bade fiyanji dalikū], devoutly use the imperial calendar [Ch., qiangong zhengshuo; Ma., forgon ton be olhošome ginggulembi], pacify the land, and assist the imperial house forever [Ch., jiafu yu huangjia; Ma., ejen i boode aisilame wehiyembi].” The emperor advised the king to “use a pure and genuine
mind to serve the Heavenly court [Ch., tianshi; Ma., abkai gurun].”⁶⁵ A decree to the king articulated this point again by stating, “You should be loyal forever and efficiently govern the land as a minister from afar [Ch., houfu; Ma., jecen i golo], while you should be loyal and obedient and serve as a fence [Ch., pinghan; Ma., fiyanji dalikū] for the Heavenly house [Ch., tianjia; Ma., gurun boo].”⁶⁶ The Chinese and Manchu terms of the imperial edicts portrayed the king as a family member of the Qing court, and they became more sophisticated in the Qianlong period. The imperial edicts to the king in 1757, for instance, referred to Chosŏn as a “fence,” a “subordinate country” (Ch., shuguo; Ma., harangga gurun), a “remote submission” (Ch., yuanfu; Ma., goroki i jecen), and a “lower country” (Ch., xiaguo; Ma., fejergi gurun) of the “Middle Kingdom” (Ch., Zhongchao, Z hongbang; M., Dulimbai gurun). The edicts also emphasized that the king’s court (M., wang ni boo) had been loyal to and received special rewards from the “Heav- enly court” (Ch., tianshi; Ma., han i hargašan).⁶⁷ By invoking these norms, the Qing explicitly presented itself as the civilized center—China and the Heavenly Dy- nasty—in both Chinese and Manchu terms. In his memorials to the emperor, the king used a gold seal received from the Qing. From early 1637 to early 1653, the seal had only Manchu characters, which read Coohiyan gurun i wang ni doron (seal of the king of the country of Chosŏn). On April 22, 1653, Emperor Shunzhi, evidently displeased by the absence of Chi- nese script from the seal, instructed the Ministry of Rites to make a new seal that included “Chinese characters” (Ch., hanzi). As a result, the words Chaoxian guowang zhi yin (seal of the king of the country of Chosŏn) were added to the seal.⁶⁸ The emperor did not explain his rationale for the change, but his decision underscored the new dynasty’s Chineseness. On the Qing side, the emperors, in their mandates to Chosŏn, always used the “seal of declaring imperial mandate,” which carried both a Chinese text, Zhigao zhi bao, and a Manchu one, Hese wasimbure boobai, exactly the same text that appeared on the imperial mandates issued to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni in Tibet. The combination of languages reflected the polyglot politics of a multiethnic empire.⁶⁹
FIGURE 2.1. The Manchu section of the imperial mandate to invest the king of Chosŏn in 1725. Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, preserved at Jangseogak, the Academy of Korean Studies, Korea. Copyright Academy of Korean Studies.
FIGURE 2.2. The Chinese section of the imperial mandate to invest the king of Chosŏn in 1725. Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, preserved at Jangseogak, the Academy of Korean Studies, Korea. Copyright Academy of Korean Studies. The imperial investiture of the king helps explain a paradox in the Qing period: certain Confucian countries, in particular Chosŏn and Annam, were privately reluctant to identify the Qing as the supreme representative of Chinese culture, but in practice they never challenged its status as the superior country and fre- quently sent tributary missions to Beijing to display their deference. The explanation for the apparent paradox lies in the fact that the missions fulfilled a dual pur- pose in establishing not only the legitimacy of the Qing but also that of the monarchs of the fan. The Zongfan relationship between the Qing and its fan was an incarnation of this symbiotic and synergistic legitimacy, namely, the orthodox legitimacy embodied in the highly programmed rituals involved in the exchange of emissaries. This orthodox legitimacy was the goal for which King Taksin (r. 1767–82) of the Thonburi regime of Siam sent tributary missions to Beijing to pursue investiture after the fall of the Ayutthaya regime (1350–1767), even though King Taksin’s understanding of “paying tribute” (Ch., jingong) was very different from that of the Qing.⁷⁰ The need for legitimacy could also explain why Nguyễn Huệ, the leader of the peasant rebellion against the Lê Dynasty (1428–1788) of Annam, defeated the Qing army in 1789 but nonetheless accepted the Qing’s investiture in 1790. It was also in 1790 that Burma accepted the Qing investiture after winning the Burmese-Qing War in the early 1770s.⁷¹ In addition to pragmatic concerns reflecting geopolitics and China’s military might, securing political legit- imacy from China proved crucial for these regimes’ own rule. Tributes, Gifts, and Court-to-Court Interactions The Qing ritual code clearly listed the types and quantities of tribute that Chosŏn had to present for different purposes. After 1644, these fell into eight major cate- gories. Beyond the most official category of annual tribute, designated as “standard tribute” (Ch., zhenggong), the king generally referred to the items in the other seven categories, such as those marking the imperial birthday, the lunar New Year, and the winter solstice, as “gifts” or “local products.” The Qing accepted all of the submitted items and did not challenge the king’s choice of terms, although it preferred to refer to the items as “tribute.”⁷² While the annual tribute marked a country-to-country relationship, all other categories of tribute, which were presented specifically to the emperor, the empress, and the dowager empress, suggested a strong court-to-court connection. The Ministry of Rites accepted the annual tribute as a routine matter, but it had to sub- mit memorials to the emperor for instructions on how to handle tribute in other categories. In the early Qing, the Ministry of Rites forwarded all tribute items to the Ministry of Revenue and later to the Imperial Household Department, which was in charge of the affairs of the Manchu royal house and had its own financial system independent of the one managed by the Ministry of Revenue.⁷³ Therefore, although the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship seemed to manifest itself main- ly in hierarchical country-to-country interactions, in reality it was a dual system involving the two countries and the two courts. The gifts that the imperial envoys carried to Chosŏn were directed at specific members of the royal family, including the king, the queen, the crown prince, and the dowager queen. Usually the envoys brought first-rate silk for official robes. When imperial missions were dispatched to extend the emperor’s condolences on the deaths of core royalty, some gifts were consumed at the funeral ceremonies, while others were converted into 150 to 300 taels of silver by the Ministry of Rev- enue and delivered to the Korean royal house. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, imperial envoys followed a precise routine to deliver their condolences and gifts. The last such mission occurred in 1890, and it is explored in detail in chapter 5. Receptions, Ritual Performances, and the Civilized Qing Chosŏn’s emissaries were well accommodated at each transfer station after they entered China, but they had to prepare food for themselves until they arrived in
Beijing. Upon reaching their residence in Beijing, the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations, the emissaries first visited the Ministry of Rites to present the king’s memorials and the list of tribute items. All emissaries from Chosŏn and from other countries, as well as the kings they represented, had to submit their documents to the emperor through the ministry, with which they could communicate via official notes (Ch., ziwen). In the main hall of the ministry, the emis- saries would pass the memorials to the head officials, who would place the memorials in front of the imperial tablet on a table in the middle of the hall. The emis- saries would then kneel down once to make three prostrations toward the head officials, who would in turn bow three times to the emissaries with their hands folded in front (Ch., zuoyi, a ritual practiced between officials of equal ranks). Once they had finished, the emissaries would kneel down three times, each time making three prostrations toward the tablet.⁷⁴ The ministry would submit the documents to the emperor the next day, while the emissaries returned to their resi- dence to wait for the imperial audience. The Qing’s commander general of the Metropolitan Infantry Brigade Yamen (Ch., Bujun tongling yamen) sent soldiers to guard the emissaries’ residence.⁷⁵ Three additional institutions were involved in hosting the guests: the Court of Imperial Entertainments (Ch., Guanglu si) delivered daily food and drink, distrib- uted to each member of the mission according to rank; the Ministry of Revenue brought fodder for the Koreans’ horses; and the Ministry of Works provided char- coal. These meticulous regulations embodied the Qing’s policy of “cherishing men from afar.” During their stay in Beijing, the emissaries had various responsibilities to fulfill. If there was a grand court assembly of officials in the Forbidden City, the emis- saries had to attend and pay homage at the end of the wing of the Qing civil officials. A major task was to pay a formal visit to the emperor at either the Summer Palace in Beijing or the Summer Palace in Rehe (Chengde). After the audience, the emissaries would be invited to attend certain events, such as banquets in the Forbidden City, performances of Chinese operas, or fireworks shows at the Summer Palace.⁷⁶ All ritual procedures, in particular the highest level of kowtow, were minutely regulated and fastidiously practiced. Such rituals between the Chinese emperor and foreign emissaries had been defined and institutionalized at least since the “great rituals” laid out in The Rituals of the Great Tang (Ch., Da Tang Kaiyuan li), compiled in the eighth century.⁷⁷ In the Ming and the Qing, the rituals became extremely elaborate, and the Korean emissaries were required to rehearse the complicated ceremonies in advance as a sign of their loyalty and as part of the process that would “civilize the barbarians in the four quarters” (Ch., feng siyi).⁷⁸ Rituals helped maintain the political arrangement and strengthen the iden- tities of all participants.⁷⁹ In grand court gatherings, emissaries from Chosŏn were usually the first representatives of the outer fan to perform the rituals for the emperor, as on February 9, 1675, at the Lantern Festival, where the Chosŏn emissaries congratulated Kangxi ahead of their Russian, Kalka Mongol, and Ūlet Mon- gol counterparts.⁸⁰ Chosŏn’s role as an exemplar was particularly prominent in the late eighteenth century during the Qianlong period, when the Qing in many cases “followed the model for Chosŏn” (Ch., zhao Chaoxian zhi li) in managing its bilateral exchanges with Annam, Ryukyu, and Siam.⁸¹ Chinese scholars at the time also widely regarded Chosŏn as the “model for other countries” (Ch., zhuguo zhi zhang).⁸² The emissaries also attended two major official banquets, one held at the Ministry of Rites and the other at the emissaries’ residence. An astonishing number of institutions were involved in their organization: the Court of Imperial Entertainments; the Food Supply Office (Ch., Jingshan qingli si) of the Ministry of Rites; the Ministries of Revenue, Works, and War; Shuntian Prefecture; and the Revenue Superintendent of Chongwen Gate (Ch., Liangyi shuiwu jiandu). Royal contractors (Ch., hanghu) were also assigned specific tasks. Each of the three key members of the mission was treated to what was known as a fifth-level Manchu banquet and the other members to a sixth-level one, preferential treatment not afforded to emissaries from any other country. The high cost of the banquets was fully covered by the Qing and, not surprisingly, the banquets were replete with ritual performances reinforcing the bilateral hierarchical order.⁸³ The imperial code included an “illustration of the banquets for Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries” (Ch., Chaoxian gongshi yantu) and specified that the seating arrangements for banquets held for
emissaries from other countries should follow the Chosŏn pattern (Ch., geguo gongshi fangci).⁸⁴ During their sojourn in Beijing, the emissaries, particularly scholars without official status or responsibilities, were enthusiastic about socializing with Qing literati. The tradition of such interactions had started in Ming times but had been suspended in the Ming-Qing transition period because of the anti-Manchu atti- tudes that were prevalent in Chosŏn. Indeed, before the eighteenth century, the three key members of the tributary mission barely left their residence to meet with Chinese officials or scholars because many Korean scholars embracing Neo-Confucianism saw the Qing as a barbarous country and regarded the tributary mis- sion as a humiliation.⁸⁵ In the 1760s, however, literary social gatherings involving Korean emissaries again became frequent and continued until the 1890s. In the 1860s, many Chinese officials, such as Dong Wenhuan (1833–77) of the Imperial Academy (Ch., Hanlin yuan), who was known for calligraphy and epigraphy, ac- tively socialized with Koreans.⁸⁶ On the Korean side, Pak Kyusu (1807–76), an emissary who visited Beijing in 1872, befriended more than a hundred famous Chi- nese scholars through social gatherings.⁸⁷ Versed in the same Confucian classics, adhering to the same Neo-Confucianism, and using the same Chinese characters, the Qing and Chosŏn scholars could easily identify one another as men of the same caliber. They met for drinks, composed poems, and exchanged their own compositions and calligraphy. That Chosŏn was known as “Little China” might also have lent these transnational literary social gatherings a homogenous cultural identity. These savants formed an informal perennial club in which they exchanged ideas about history and literature and improved their perceptions of each other’s countries. According to Key- hiuk Kim, their communications also “assured Korea of a constant stream of information and knowledge concerning the latest intellectual trends in China.”⁸⁸ When they gathered with their Han Chinese friends, the Korean guests usually showed an aversion to Manchu customs, such as the Manchu-style official robe and hairstyle, and were very proud of their Ming-style robes and hats, in keeping with the civilized–barbarian dichotomy. But in 1766, when Hong Tae-yong (1731– 83) expressed contempt for the Manchus’ control of China, he found to his surprise that his Han Chinese counterparts, such as Yan Cheng (1733–67), did not appreciate his anti-Manchu sentiments; instead, Yan and his colleagues applauded the Qing’s support for civilization. After intensive conversation with his Chi- nese friends, Hong conceded that Koreans on a fundamental level still belonged to the “barbarians by the sea” (K., haesang chi iin). By concluding that “the civi- lized and the barbarians are the same” (K., Hwa–I il ya), he acknowledged the Qing’s civilized status.⁸⁹ Through such interactions, many Korean and Chinese scholars became close friends and continued to correspond even after the emissaries returned to Chosŏn. When Yan Cheng was on the brink of death, he laid a letter from Hong on his abdomen to indicate how deeply he treasured their friendship. When news of Yan’s death reached Hansŏng, Hong burst into tears and commented that he had lost a brother to whom he was as attached as he was to his right arm.⁹⁰ Like the emissaries from Hansŏng who experienced a combination of hardship and comfort as they made their way to Beijing, Qing imperial envoys also had to endure discomfort until they passed through Fenghuang Gate on their journey toward Ŭiju. There they were welcomed and treated well by the Korean side. Al- though the land between the gate and the Yalu River was Qing territory, the Korean prefect of Ŭiju was able to dispatch Korean officers, Manchu interpreters, and servants to welcome the envoys at the three stations in this area: Congxiu, Mazhuan, and Sanjiang. At each station the Koreans would set up temporary houses for the envoys and provide hearty meals that could feature more than thirty different dishes. In Ŭiju the prefect treated each envoy to a banquet with more than 130 kinds of food.⁹¹ Receptions along the way from Ŭiju to P’yŏngyang and then to Hansŏng were even more luxurious, and the cost was significant.⁹² In contrast to their Korean counterparts in Beijing, the Manchu envoys in Hansŏng confined themselves to ritual exchanges. Beijing-style literary social gath- erings did take place in Shuri, the capital of Ryukyu, but not in Hansŏng, where the envoys, along with their assistants, never left their lodgings to converse with local officials or scholars.⁹³ No transnational literati club like the one in Beijing ever formed in Hansŏng. After 1658, when Emperor Shunzhi put an end to
Manchu trade in Hansŏng, the imperial envoys were always temporary visitors who returned home as soon as their mission was accomplished. In addition, al- most all imperial envoys before the early eighteenth century made a point of visiting the Samjŏndo stele in a southern suburb of Hansŏng. The Koreans regarded the stele, with its inscriptions celebrating the Manchu conquest of Chosŏn, as a humiliation, and some Confucian scholars and students argued that it should be destroyed, so the envoys’ visits were sensitive and made the stele a barometer of the two countries’ relationship. In 1723 the Qing’s two envoys made a formal visit to the stele with a number of Korean officials. At the site, the vice envoy knelt down three times, each time bowing his head three times. In 1724 and 1729, the imperial envoys also paid formal visits to the stele, again accompanied by a group of Koreans. On these occasions both the Manchu envoys and their Korean interpreters kowtowed to the stele. In 1731, however, instead of visiting Samjŏndo, the envoys simply asked for copies of the inscriptions on the stele, and after 1762, they no longer even requested transcripts. By the late nineteenth century, Qing officials had only a vague understanding of the stele and were uncertain whether it featured a Manchu inscription.⁹⁴ During their sojourn in Hansŏng, the Qing envoys performed four major ceremonies in which the king participated. The first was the welcome at the Gate of Receiving Imperial Favors (K., Yŏngŭn mun) outside the West Gate of the city. The king bowed once to the imperial documents, then returned to his palace in the city. The second, conducted inside the king’s palace, was the transfer of the imperial documents and other items to the king. The king kowtowed four times to the imperial edicts. In addition, the king and the envoys bowed once or twice to each other with their hands folded in front. The king, on his own territory, did not need to perform the highest level of kowtow toward the imperial decrees or other documents and gifts, as his ministers would do in Beijing. The third ceremony was the king’s visit to the envoys at their residence, the South Palace Annex, where the Koreans honored the envoys with several tea banquets. Finally, there was the send-off at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country on the city’s outskirts, where the king provided a tea ceremony for the departing envoys. Contact between the two sides was always conducted through the Korean Ministry of Rites. All of the procedures in these ceremonies were regulated by ritual codes and were executed until the early 1890s. The Korean side had no obligation to report any domestic affairs to the envoys, nor would the envoys intervene in such affairs. Rather, this stylized interaction in Hansŏng endowed the monarch of Chosŏn with political legitimacy, continuously consolidating the reciprocal and hierarchical Zongfan relations between the two countries. Celebrating the Relationship: The Qing Emperor’s Roles in the Zongfan System As the institutional agent at the highest level of the Zongfan hierarchy, the emperor could exploit the occasions of imperial audiences and his patriarchal authority to modify and lubricate the mechanism from the top down. As the following sections show, he could freely endow tributary emissaries with various extra gifts, supervise and admonish the Manchu envoys to Chosŏn and the Manchus along the border in Manchuria, and make final decisions about border conflicts. Consolidating the System through Imperial Gifts and Extra Gifts After Chosŏn’s emissaries presented their tribute gifts to the emperor, the sovereign would bestow “routine gifts” (Ch., lishang) on them and the king. At least since the Shunzhi period, the Qing presented the tribute missions with gifts whose value exceeded that of the tribute, based on detailed calculations.⁹⁵ The gifts and their quantities varied according to the category of the mission, and when the Korean envoy was a member of the royal house, the amount and quality of the gifts would increase. The silk and satin among the gifts were taken from the Imperial Household Department, rather than the Ministry of Revenue, in order to show the emperor’s personal favor toward the “king of the fan ” (Ch., fanwang). To mark the imperial birthday and the lunar New Year, the Qing would give the king a second-class horse with bridle and each of the two envoys a third-class horse with bridle, highlighting the Manchu character of the Qing regime. The Qing
would also give the envoys silver in the average amount of at least 680 taels (for annual tributary missions and winter solstice missions) or 850 taels (for imperial birthday missions and lunar New Year missions), along with other gifts.⁹⁶ Some scholars have argued that the routine gifts were an institutionalized part of the overall Zongfan mechanism and hence afforded little flexibility.⁹⁷ Yet the emperor could break this routine at his discretion by awarding the emissaries extra gifts during audiences. For instance, in early 1795 Emperor Qianlong awarded the king a hundred copies of the Chinese character for “happiness” (Ch., fu) that he had written on small squares of red paper.⁹⁸ This sort of largesse was seem- ingly random,⁹⁹ but it did not simply represent imperial prerogative or a deviation from the flowcharts of ritual codes. Rather, the practice of giving supererogatory gifts highlighted the Qing policy of “giving more to the visitors and benefiting less from them” (Ch., houwang bolai), as Emperor Qian-long explained it to Chosŏn in 1736.¹⁰⁰ The emperor thus moderated the system by lending it flexibility and novelty. In the late eighteenth century, Emperor Qianlong disbursed an increasing quantity of extra gifts, while the amount of the tribute sent by Chosŏn remained remarkably stable. The extra imperial gifts reached their peak in the 1790s, a time when Emperor Qianlong was particularly keen to enhance the image of his dynasty as the Heavenly Dynasty. Given these priorities, the Qing court was not con- cerned about maintaining a balance between the value of the tributes and that of the imperial gifts. In 1793 a Korean emissary acknowledged that the Qing treated Chosŏn in such a favorable way that the Qing’s spending on accommodations for the tributary emissaries and the value of the various imperial gifts far exceeded the value of the Korean “local products.”¹⁰¹ Constructing a Positive Image of the Qing and Highlighting the Envoys’ Manchu Identity The Qing emperor sought to further burnish his dynasty’s image in his contacts with Chosŏn by taking steps to prevent the Manchu envoys to Chosŏn and the bannermen who resided along the border in Manchuria from compromising the dignity of the Heavenly Dynasty through open degeneracy. Emperor Qianlong, for example, felt it necessary to extend the Qing’s prolonged campaign to maintain Manchu traditions and identity to the field of the Sino-Korean communications by closely monitoring his envoys’ behavior. His first reform aimed to bolster the Manchu envoys’ integrity by discouraging corruption during their trip to Chosŏn. In 1736, after reducing by half the amount of the gifts the Koreans were expected to provide to the imperial envoys, the emperor punished two envoys who violated the new rules. He decreed that in the fu- ture the garrison generals at Mukden and Shanhai Pass should check the envoys’ luggage when they returned from Hansŏng to make sure they had not received unauthorized gifts.¹⁰² Until the last imperial mission in 1890, subsequent emperors continued to admonish their envoys to Chosŏn to remain upright and honest. Compared with their pre-1637 Ming counterparts, who had exploited Chosŏn for maximum profit, the Manchu envoys, in particular after the Kangxi period, be- haved well on their visits to Chosŏn, which helped reduce the tension between the two countries caused by the Qing invasions in the 1630s. The Korean scholar Hong Tae-yong acknowledged in 1766 that the Qing was much more generous and kind to Chosŏn than the Ming had been.¹⁰³ The Qianlong emperor also believed that the Manchu officers and soldiers in Manchuria should focus on border security. In 1737, under the claim of “giving kindness to the people from afar,” he decided to prohibit the Manchus from trading with Koreans in the Middle River area of the Yalu River and to ask “merchants and commoners of inner China” (Ch., neidi shangmin) to undertake this trade instead. The Middle River market had been established in 1592 between Chosŏn and the Ming; it had barely opened during the Ming-Qing war but was restored as a major trading center between the Qing and Chosŏn after 1646. Manchu ban- nermen and merchants near Fenghuang City had thereafter constituted the Qing’s traders in the market. Now the Qianlong emperor abruptly concluded that the bannermen were “not good at doing business” and sought to direct his Manchu warriors back to the military realm. The king, however, was deeply concerned about the potential arrival of the people of “inner China,” so he petitioned the emperor to maintain the trade with the bannermen. The emperor granted the
petition but explained that by people of “inner China” he meant only those living near the banner garrisons in Manchuria, not those south of the Great Wall or in Beijing.¹⁰⁴ This episode shows that in the border area the Manchu court was concerned more about political consequences and border security than about the economic interests of the local bannermen. It also suggests that at least by the 1730s the Qing had come to integrate Manchuria into its concept of “inner China” (Ch., neidi), further nullifying the border function of the Great Wall within the multiethnic empire. Emperor Qianlong’s more dramatic reform took place in 1763, when he dictated that all Manchu envoys to Chosŏn from that moment onward should ride hors- es instead of taking sedan chairs in Chosŏn. The emperor explained that although Chosŏn had provided sedan chairs for the missions to show its obedience to and respect for the “imperial envoys of the Heavenly Dynasty,” the Manchu officials were expert horsemen and should not ride in sedan chairs. The emperor in- structed the king to end permanently the convention of welcoming the imperial envoys with sedan chairs and to provide only horses instead. The Qing docu- ments do not explain why the emperor suddenly changed this longstanding convention. But according to the first-rank translator of the mission led by Hongying (1707–71), Xu Zongmen, who was a Beijing resident of Korean background, the emperor had originally picked another Manchu official as the envoy but, realizing how obese the chosen official was, asked him how he would make the long trip to Chosŏn. The envoy replied that since he would ride in a sedan chair, his weight would not be a problem. The emperor became angry, and to underline the Manchu martial spirit, he immediately replaced the envoy with Hongying, who was an excellent horseman. The emperor admonished Hongying to display “righteousness” (Ch., zhengda) in the outer fan and to avoid any “wretchedness” (Ch., weisuo). Meanwhile, the Korean emissaries, the emperor said, were exempt from the new rules and could maintain their custom of taking carriages to Beijing.¹⁰⁵ The Qianlong emperor’s quest to maintain and strengthen the Manchuness of the Manchus under his supervision thus helped the Qing improve its image in the eyes of its subordinate and to showcase its virtues in practice. Arbitrating Border Disputes The Qing emperor also served as the highest arbitrator in border conflicts and border-crossing disputes. In each case of border conflict with Chosŏn, it was the emperor—rather than the king, a historical precedent, or a border rule—who made the final decision. The geographical connection between the two countries occasioned a considerable number of illegal border crossings from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. These thorny cases posed a challenge to the Qing, in particular to the emperors, in terms of balancing the Qing’s lofty Zongfan discourse and its practical concerns. This aspect of the Qing’s policy underwent a major change from the Kangxi to the Qianlong period. In the Shunzhi and early Kangxi periods, the Manchu monarchs often doled out severe pun- ishments to the king or his officials over border disputes and often sent special envoys to Chosŏn for in-person investigation. The emperors embraced this ap- proach primarily because the Qing had not yet consolidated its rule in the wake of the Southern Ming (1644–62) and its influences and was worried about the possibility of a Chosŏn rebellion against the Qing. But after the Kangxi emperor suppressed the revolt of the Three Feudatories in the 1680s, the Qing praised Chosŏn for its loyalty and adopted a more relaxed policy on border conflicts with the country, eventually ceasing to send special investigative envoys. The Qing court in the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods following Kangxi governed a country that had been unified to an unprecedented degree since 1644. The court consequently focused on reinforcing the cosmopolitan ideology of all-under-Heaven in the Qing’s foreign relations. Although the emperors had clear views on the Qing’s geographical borders, they preferred to rely on traditional Zongfan norms in settling border disputes with Chosŏn. The Qing’s border policy toward Chosŏn thus became more conservative than aggressive, forming a sharp contrast with the Qing’s contemporary policy in the southwest and northwest, where the new empire continued to expand its territory. On the Chosŏn side, the savvy king and local officials applied the same Zongfan norms in their sophisticated ne- gotiations with their Qing counterparts, leaving the emperor in Beijing with no option but to endorse one Korean proposal after another.
The Mangniushao case provides a good example. In 1745 the Manchu general of Mukden, Daldangga (?–1760), suggested to Emperor Qianlong that the Qing set up a border outpost at Mangniushao near the Yalu River in order to prevent Koreans from illegally crossing the border river to sell or buy grains or to search for ginseng in Manchuria. Although in 1731 Daldangga’s predecessor, Nasutu (?–1749), had likewise proposed an outpost at Mangniushao, Emperor Yongzheng had rejected the proposal because of the king’s opposition and upheld his father’s policy, in place since 1715, of prohibiting all construction in this area.¹⁰⁶ Prompted by an increase in illegal border crossings, Daldangga resurrected Nasutu’s plan and proposed to repair the broken parts of the Willow Palisade and to open lands outside the palisade for cultivation. Emperor Qianlong initially supported Daldangga’s plan and sent a Mongol minister, Bandi (?–1755), to visit the area to confirm that Mangniushao was indeed inside China’s borders and that it would be appropriate for China to establish an outpost there. At the last moment, however, the emperor reversed his stance, invoking the precedents set by the decisions of his grandfather in 1715 and his father in 1731, as well as a decision he himself had made in another case in 1737. To justify his rejection of the proposal, he cited the imperative of “cherishing the small.” Furthermore, the emperor told Daldangga that no further such proposals should be made to the court and that Daldangga and his successors in Mukden should follow established rules in managing border affairs with Chosŏn.¹⁰⁷ In this way, the emperor reduced the possibility of further conflicts in this border area and helped stabilize the two coun- tries’ relationship from the top down. Barbarianizing the Periphery: The Qing’s Institutional Zongfan Discourse The Changing Meaning of Barbarians from Yongzheng to Qianlong The Qing interpretation of the civilized–barbarian distinction underwent a sharp change in the transitional days between the reigns of Yongzheng and Qianlong. In the late 1720s, Emperor Yongzheng had made the putative barbarity of the Qing a public issue among Qing scholars because of his response to the case of Zeng Jing (1679–1735). Encouraged by the civilized–barbarian discourse, Zeng had plotted to rebel against the Manchu “barbarians,” but after he was prosecuted, he re- versed his stance and endorsed the Qing, whereupon the emperor released him from prison. In June 1733, while Zeng was in the provinces giving lectures on the dynasty’s virtues, the emperor issued an edict to prohibit the practice of changing Chinese characters with the meaning of “barbarian” (Ch., hu, lu, yi, di) in books. The Manchu monarch defined the term “barbarian” geographically and confessed that the ancestors of the current dynasty could be called “eastern barbarians,” like ancient Chinese saints. This tone had been set by his great-grandfather Hongtaiji in 1636 in his letter to the king of Chosŏn, and Yongzheng himself had re- peated the same points in his book responding to Zeng, Great Righteousness Resolving Confusion (Ch., Dayi juemi lu) in 1729.¹⁰⁸ By proclaiming that “people living both within and outside China belong to the same family” (Ch., Zhong Wai yijia), Yongzheng insisted that the civilized–barbarian distinction should not be under- stood in a cultural sense, and even if it were, only those who were “beyond civilization” (Ch., wanghua zhi wai), like the Zunghar, might truly be called “barbarians.”¹⁰⁹ Under this definition, the outer fan of the Qing also seemed to be excluded from the category of barbarians. Yongzheng’s statements suggest that the Manchu rulers embraced cultural egalitarianism in order to redistribute cultural resources within the multiethnic empire.¹¹⁰ It is safe to say that the Manchu emperor was trying to overcome the prejudice inherent in the stereotypical civilized–barbarian distinction among Han Chinese intellectuals in the process of consolidating the Manchu regime’s orthodox legitimacy. This sustained effort can also be seen in the move by Yongzheng’s father and grandfather to expand considerably the list of Chinese monarchs who were enshrined in the Temple of Ancient Monarchs (Ch., Lidai di- wang miao), with the goal of establishing the Qing as the legitimate successor to previous dynasties that had likewise been identified as “China.”¹¹¹ With Yongzheng’s policy, the yardstick for judging “barbarians” suddenly snapped, as the ruling dynasty now identified itself both with the ancient rulers and with the
eastern barbarians. After assuming the throne in 1735, the Qianlong emperor not only quickly revoked his father’s pardon and executed Zeng but also reversed Yongzheng’s ap- proach by clearly differentiating the “civilized” Qing from the “barbarian” countries surrounding it. Qianlong thus brought the civilized–barbarian discourse back to its pre-Yongzheng meaning, in which cultural factors played a pivotal role. He exploited his father’s heritage by turning the latter’s policy of permitting the free and public use of all Chinese characters for “barbarian” into a tool for propagating the opposite message in the context of the civilized– barbarian discourse— namely, one that excluded the Qing from this category. No longer would the Great Qing downgrade itself to the rank of barbarian.¹¹² Consequently, in the Qian- long period the use of the term “foreign barbarians” in official documents reached its historical zenith.¹¹³ Through this terminology, the Qing combined its civi- lized centrality with cultural superiority. Qianlong achieved this symbolic goal by formally designating all other countries as barbarians, along with the majority of the ethnic groups under his rule, and one of the most important targets of this barbarianization at the normative level was Chosŏn. At the time when Yongzheng published his book on the definition of “barbarian,” some Manchu envoys to Chosŏn had taken to visiting Jizi Shrine in P’yŏngyang on their way back from Hansŏng.¹¹⁴ As mentioned in the introduction, Jizi was said to be the founding father of the ancient Korean regime, invested by the Chinese monarch of the Zhou Dynasty with the lands of Chosŏn, where he maintained a familistic and tributary relationship with the central court of China. Given the intense debate around ethnicity and the civilized–barbarian dichotomy in the late years of Yongzheng’s reign, the Manchu envoys’ visits to Jizi Shrine could help the Manchu regime bolster its Chineseness and its claims to legitimacy beyond its borders. When the Qing overcame the challenge of the civilized– barbarian distinction within China in the first half of the Qianlong period, visits to Jizi Shrine ceased, although Chinese historical records continued to celebrate the familial relationship between the Chinese and the Koreans. The Qing’s Systematic, Institutional Barbarianization of Chosŏn and Others In June 1751 the Qianlong emperor instructed the governors-general and governors of border provinces to draw and submit pictures of “domestic and foreign bar- barians” (Ch., neiwai miaoyi, waiyi fanzhong) in order to demonstrate the flourishing of the Qing.¹¹⁵ The emperor was following a precedent set by Emperor Taizong (r. 627–49) of the Tang Dynasty, who was believed to have brought China its most prosperous days in the pre-Qing era. Since Tang Taizong had commis- sioned paintings of the barbarians to celebrate the great moment in which “ten thousand countries came to revere the emperor” (Ch., wanguo laichao),¹¹⁶ Qian- long had every reason to commemorate his dynasty’s accomplishments in the same way. Even during the Qing expansion into Central Asia, Qianlong identified “the efforts of the Han and Tang dynasties to extend Chinese power into Central Asia” as “historical milestones” by which to measure his own progress.¹¹⁷ Beyond the obvious political factors, contemporary popular culture may also have motivated Qianlong’s desire for an illustrated record of the Qing’s imperial expansion. As a big fan of Chinese opera who contributed to the birth of Peking opera, Qianlong may have been influenced by popular operas that extolled the virtues of the civilized center of the world. These operas can be dated at least to the Yuan, but in the Ming and early Qing they were still being performed in cities such as Beijing. Their scripts described the Ming as the “Heavenly Dynasty,” the “upper country,” or the “central civilized country,” bordered by “barbarians in four directions” (primarily represented as Chosŏn, Annam, and political units in Inner Asia) who paid tribute and presented palace memorials to the great em- peror of China.¹¹⁸ In 1761, ten years after Qianlong ordered the drawings, the first edition of the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Ch., Huang Qing zhigong tu) was published in four volumes, featuring six hundred pictures of people from the Qing’s outer fan and from “barbarian places” within Qing territory or on its periphery. The first picture in the collection was of a Korean official who wore a Ming-style official robe but was labeled “a barbarian official of the country of
Chosŏn” (Ch., Chaoxian guo yiguan) (see figure 2.3). Once again, Chosŏn served as the model for others in the collection, and its prototypical role was made clear by Qing scholars in the Essentials of Complete Books of the Four Storehouses Catalog (Ch., Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao).¹¹⁹ Chosŏn, “Little China,” was thus institu- tionally converted into a country of barbarians by the Qing’s political discourse and imperial documentary mechanism. Following Chosŏn, other countries, including Ryukyu, Annam, Siam, Sulu, Lanchang, Burma, Britain, France, Japan, the Netherlands, and Russia, likewise be- came barbarians in the Qing nomenclature, as did many of the diverse peoples within Qing territory. In nearly every case, the Qing narrative constructed an impe- rial pedigree by reviewing a long history of Zongfan relations with the foreign “country” (Ch., guo; Ma., gurun) or domestic “tribe” (Ch., buluo; Ma., aiman) from the Zhou to the Ming Dynasties and emphasized that it was the Qing’s merits that prompted the “barbarians” to “send emissaries to come and pay tribute” (Ch., qianshi rugong; Ma., elcin takūrafi albabun jafanjimbi) or “come to kowtow with tribute” (Ch., chaogong; Ma., albabun jafame hengkilenjimbi).¹²⁰ In this way, the Qing systematically assimilated the historical legacies of previous dynasties into its own Zongfan relations with these countries and tribes and consolidated its legitimacy as the civilized center, or Zhongguo (Ma., Dulimbai gurun).¹²¹ Also in 1761, in order to celebrate the empress dowager’s seventieth birthday, the Qing published another magnificent collection, Illustrations of the Great Celebration (Ch., Luhuan huijing tu). The first illustration carried the title “Ten thousand coun- tries came to revere the emperor,” the precise phrase the Tang Dynasty had used, and Chosŏn’s emissaries occupied a distinguished position within it.¹²² If there was a “documentary institutionalization” for the Qing,¹²³ in terms of the Qing’s construction of its civilized identity, this process was substantially accomplished in 1761.
FIGURE 2.3. A Chosŏn official in the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Huang Qing zhigong tu, 33). Behind the cheerful facade of the great multiethnic empire lay the axiom of the Qing’s centrality in the world. And that world, of course, often found its way to the Qing threshold. Britain, which the Qing knew as “the country of Ying ji li” (“Ying ji li” is a transliteration of “England”; Ch., Yingjili guo; Ma., Ing gi lii gurun), was one of the countries portrayed as barbarian in the collection of 1761. At the end of that year, the Qianlong emperor instructed his representatives in Guangzhou to notify the “men from afar” and “foreign barbarians” there—the British merchants—that “the Heavenly Dynasty has everything it needs, so it does not need foreign barbarians to bring trivial goods for trade.”¹²⁴ The edict was a response to petitions from James Flint in 1759 and Nicholas Skottowe in 1761. The two were representatives of the British merchants who wanted to change the Canton system of trade, which channeled all trade with the West through that south- ern port. Their efforts not only were futile but in fact led to stricter regulations on Western traders in China.¹²⁵ In this sense, the rebuff that George Macartney’s mission later received from the emperor in 1793 was merely a repetition of the institutionalized rhetoric that had been directed at the British in China more than three decades earlier. Popularizing Chosŏn’s Status as Foreign Barbarians in Imperial Discourse The prolonged construction of the Qing’s new identity and the reorientation of its political discourse vis-à-vis other countries was not just the result of the emper- or’s personal activities or political motivations, imposed on the administration from the top down. Nor should they be understood purely as the outcome of implementing the political will of the Manchu court. Rather, Qing officials at the local level, from counties to prefectures to provinces, also contributed to this construction from the bottom up. As a result, in the eighteenth century, Chosŏn’s status as foreign barbarians was popularized within the norms of Qing foreign relations. This point is illustrated by the Qing policy toward shipwrecked fishermen from Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, and other countries who were rescued by local Chi- nese officials along the coast. At least from the early Qianlong period, Qing officials called these victims “barbarians who suffered from storms” (Ch., zaofeng nanyi; Ma., edun de lasihibufi jobolon de tušaha i niyalma) and sent them to Beijing or to the nearest provincial capital, from whence they could return home with embassies from their countries. From the 1730s to the 1880s, the Qing archives were full of such reports of local officials looking after shipwrecked fishermen; re- ports concerning fishermen from Chosŏn were particularly prominent.¹²⁶ By accommodating these victims on humanitarian grounds, the Qing sought to high- light its policy of “cherishing men from afar” and to “display the deep and outstanding merits of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., zhao tianchao rouyuan shenren; Ma., abkai gurun i goroki urse be gosire šumin gosin be iletulembi). This sort of rhetoric, aimed at justifying and consolidating the “way of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao tizhi; Ma., abkai gurun i doro yoso), reached its peak in the Qianlong period.¹²⁷ Chosŏn again represented the best example of the “way of the Heavenly Dynasty,” a fact that permeated many aspects of Qing-Chosŏn contacts. For instance, in 1776, one thousand taels of silver belonging to a Korean mission were stolen by Chinese thieves near Mukden. Emperor Qianlong instructed the Manchu gen- eral of Mukden, Hūngšang (1718–81), to compensate the mission for its losses in order to “uphold the way of our Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., he wo tianchao tizhi; Ma. musei amba gurun i doro de acanambi). The emperor emphasized in his Chinese edict that “the Chosŏn are a people of foreign barbarians” (Ch., Chaoxian nai waiyi zhi ren), further elucidating in the Manchu version of the edict that “the people of the country of Chosŏn are a people of foreign barbarians” (Ma., Coohiyan gurun i niyalma serengge, tulergi aiman i niyalma).¹²⁸ This case was not exceptional, and the wealth of similar cases indicates the maturation of the Qing’s Zongfan discourse.¹²⁹ Despite the harmonious imperial picture the Qing painted, its model fan was simultaneously creating an alternate vision. While Chosŏn continued publicly to display its obedience to the Qing, sending tributary missions to Beijing over and above what imperial edicts demanded, in private the Chosŏn king and his
officials, along with Chosŏn intellectuals, were reluctant to identify the Qing as the supreme representative of Chinese culture. This story is explored in the next chapter.
2
BARBARIANIZING CHOSŎN
The Chosŏn Model and the Chinese Empire, 1644–1761
The year 1644 marked the beginning of a new stage in the Qing’s exploitation of the Chosŏn model as an institutionalized policy for constructing a new imperial order within and beyond the Qing’s borders. Informed by Chosŏn’s status as the Qing’s prototypical outer fan, this model manifested itself in well-established and highly programmed formalities in the contacts between the Qing and its outer fan. Through the Chosŏn model, the Qing rulers initiated a twofold transformation by reversing and institutionalizing the discourse of the civilized–barbarian distinction: they enshrined the Qing as the new Heavenly Dynasty at the center of the known universe and converted Chosŏn and other countries into countries of barbarians on its periphery. The Qing accomplished this transformation conclusively in the middle of the eighteenth century, when the court published the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Ch., Huang Qing zhigong tu).
This chapter reveals the prolonged process by which the Qing gradually reconstructed a Chinese empire in the post-Ming world by legitimizing, enhancing, and practicing its new dual identity as China/Zhongguo and the Heavenly Dynasty through the Chosŏn model in its foreign relations from the first half of the seventeenth century to the second half of the eighteenth century. Over the course of this century and a half, the macrotransformation of the Manchu regime’s identity in the cosmopolitan politico-cultural context was deeply connected with its microtrans-formation in the Manchu-Chosŏn framework. If there was a tendency among China’s neighbors to decenter the Middle Kingdom after the Ming, this chapter brings to light the process of recentering the Middle Kingdom undertaken by the Qing.¹
Establishing a Dual Identity: The Qing as China and the Heavenly Dynasty
On October 30, 1644, Emperor Shunzhi offered a grand sacrifice to Heaven and Earth in the Qing’s new capital, Beijing. He asserted that the Qing would pacify China (Ch., sui Zhongguo) and set a good example for ten thousand countries (Ch., biaozheng wanbang).² For many people, this event marked the rise of the Qing as the equivalent of China/Zhongguo. In 1767, after finding that a magistrate in Yunnan Province had failed to refer to the Qing as the Heavenly Dynasty or China/Zhongguo in an official note to the foreign barbarians of Burma, Emperor Qianlong furiously pointed out that it is the rule for one to refer to the court as the ‘Heavenly Dynasty’ or ‘China’ when one mentions it to men from afar. Our country has unified the central area and external areas, and even the barbarians know the Great Qing’s virtue and civilization.³
Emperor Qianlong’s pronouncement indicates that the terms Heavenly Dynasty and Zhongguo were interchangeable. Historians of the Qing and modern China tend to follow the emperor, or at least the Qing’s political discourse as developed by the emperor, by treating China/Zhongguo and the Heavenly Dynasty as synonymous terms, both referring to the political unit of the Qing. Yet what the emperor did not mention—or was perhaps not able to realize—was that the Qing did not acquire the two titles simultaneously when it replaced the Ming in the early seventeenth century. As the emperor indicated, the two terms were used for the Qing almost exclusively in the context of foreign relations with men from afar or foreign barbarians, which generally referred to foreigners. In the domestic context, these terms were replaced by others, such as the Great Qing, our dynasty (Ch., wochao, benchao, or guochao), our country (Ch., wo guojia), and the imperial dynasty (Ch., huangchao or shengchao). In the first years after 1644, some Qing officials described the new regime as the Qing Dynasty (Ch., Qingchao), a successor to the Ming Dynasty in the context of foreign communications; this usage is found in correspondence between officials in Guangzhou
(Canton) and Siam in 1653. But Qingchao remains rare in Qing documents.⁴
As the Qing took over Beijing in 1644 and consolidated its rule over inner China afterward, it completed its transformation into Zhongguo, but its refashioning into the Heavenly Dynasty had barely started. In the late 1640s, when the Manchu Eight Banners were marching into South China, Southwest China, and Northwest China, the Qing began to use Chosŏn to construct its new image as the Heavenly Dynasty; however, the process turned out to be difficult and even embarrassing. According to early Qing archives, Qing scholars may have called the Qing the Heavenly Dynasty for the first time in a draft imperial edict in 1649 investing Yi Ho (King Hyojong) as the king of Chosŏn. The draft edict was written by Fu Yijian (1609–65), a Han Chinese literatus from Shandong Province who had won first place in the Qing’s first imperial civil-service examination in 1645.⁵ By emphasizing that the king of Chosŏn should be an important subordinate serving the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., pinghan tianchao) and loyal to the central civilized country (Ch., Huaxia), Fu equated the Qing, which had become Zhongguo, with the Heavenly Dynasty and the civilized country. However, the final version of the edict that was sent to Chosŏn omitted the two latter terms and continued to use the term upper country to refer to the Qing, suggesting that the Qing was not yet prepared to claim to be the Heavenly Dynasty.⁶
China, or Zhongguo, could be defined in a general geographical sense by the Qing borders, regardless of how the borders were expanded and redrawn, so long as the Qing controlled the Ming’s territory, or at least the central plain (Ch., Zhongyuan).⁷ In fact, after 1644, when the Qing rulers began writing and revising their history, they deliberately deleted some Manchu terms referring to the Ming as Zhongguo. For example, Hongtaiji, in a letter to the Ming on July 29, 1632, had explained that the Jin fought with the Ming because the Ming officials in Liaodong did not follow the way of China (Ma., Liyoodung i hafasa Dulimbai gurun i doroi tondoi beiderakū), using the Manchu term Dulimbai gurun in clear reference to China/Zhongguo. Later, the narrative written in Chinese replaced the phrase the way of China (Ch., Zhongguo/Zhongyuan zhi dao) with the way of rightness (Ch., zhengzhi zhi dao). While Hongtaiji in 1632 had called the Ming your China (Ma., suweni Dulimbai gurun), the post-1644 Chinese edition replaced this term with your country (Ch., erguo), deleting the word for China.⁸ The changing terminology shows that after 1644 the Qing deeply identified itself with China.
Given the ethnic background of the ruling house of the Qing, many scholars have been interested in establishing when the Qing court officially used the Manchu term Dulimbai gurun to define itself as China/Zhongguo. Some cite the year 1689 and the Treaty of Nerchinsk that the Qing signed with Russia. In fact, the Qing court had used this Manchu term to represent its identity much earlier in its negotiations with Zheng Jing (1642–81), the eldest son of Zheng Chenggong (1624–62), who occupied Taiwan in 1662. While Zheng Jing never questioned the Qing’s identity as China, he argued that Taiwan was not a part of China in an effort to secure for Taiwan an independent status like that of Chosŏn. Emperor Kangxi, however, reiterated in a decree in 1669 that Zheng belonged to the people of China (Ch., Zhongguo zhi ren; Ma., Dulimbai gurun i niyalma).⁹ In the late Kangxi period, the Qing presented itself as China in a favorable and definitive way. For example, in his travelogue, the Manchu official Tulišen, who was dispatched as an envoy to the Turgūt Mongols in Russia in 1712, generally referred to the Qing as Dulimbai gurun (China) or meni Dulimbai gurun (our China); these terms were rendered into Chinese as Zhongguo or Zhonghua when Tulišen’s journal was published in 1723 in both languages. Tulišen also consistently translated terms such as our place (Ma., meni bade) as our China (Ch., wo Zhongguo) and referred to all people of the Great Qing, such as the Manchus, Han Chinese, and Mongols, as people of China. More importantly, following Emperor Kangxi’s instructions, Tulišen emphasized China’s Confucian nature to Russia, claiming that our country takes fidelity, filial piety, benevolence, justice, and sincerity as fundamentals (Ma., meni gurun i banjire tondo hiyoošun, gosin, jurgan, akdun be fulehe da obumbi; Ch., wo guojia yi zhong xiao ren yi xin wei genben).¹⁰
By contrast, the Heavenly Dynasty, or Tianchao, could not be delineated in the same way, since it was based on the notion of all-under-Heaven—a China-centered politico-cultural term with no connection to borders in the geographical sense. Put another way, the Qing could define itself as China from within, but it
could not identify itself as the Heavenly Dynasty without support from outside the Qing: the new regime would first have to erect a new, Qing-centric, and multinational Zongfan system. The expectation that the Qing would become a new imperial power required the regime to transform the countries that the Ming had represented as its fan into fan in the Qing’s orbit. The Ming had pursued the same policy when it became the ruler of China (Ch., zhu Zhongguo) in 1368, immediately sending envoys to the countries that had served as fan of its predecessor, the Yuan Dynasty, with the aim of converting them into fan of the Ming.¹¹ However, unlike the Ming, the Manchu rulers in 1644 faced the tremendous challenge of overcoming their previous status as barbarians, as defined by the civilized–barbarian distinction. Compared with the mission to identify the Qing as China and as the legitimate successor to the Ming within the Qing’s borders, the quest to construct the Qing as the new Heavenly Dynasty beyond its borders called for extraordinary effort.
From the perspective of comparative philology, the Chinese term Tianchao was not initially widely adopted in the Manchu language, in which it was literally rendered as abkai gurun (Heavenly country).¹² The Manchu rulers had difficulty identifying with this term and the Chinese political concepts behind it. In July 1637, for example, after reviewing the draft edict of investiture to the king of Chosŏn, Hongtaiji commented that he did not like to equate himself with Heaven as the Ming had done, suggesting that his officials must have employed the Chinese word tian (Heaven) or the Manchu term abka (Heaven) in the draft.¹³ Nevertheless, the task of reconstructing the Qing as the new China in the seventeenth century left the Manchu rulers with no choice but to embrace the term and the rationale behind it.
The intellectual transformation of the Qing ruling house is evident in the visit of the fifth Dalai Lama (1617–82) to Beijing in late 1652 and early 1653. The Qing’s Manchu officials supported Emperor Shunzhi’s plan to greet the Dalai Lama in Daiga in Inner Mongolia, arguing that the Ūlet Mongols, who controlled Tibet militarily at the time, would be pacified by the emperor’s gracious behavior. But the Han Chinese officials argued that the emperor was the ruler of all countries under Heaven (Ch., tianxia guojia zhi zhu) and should not violate conventions by meeting with a lama, even the Dalai Lama, in person outside the capital. Still hesitant about going to Daiga, the emperor took part in a grand ceremony commemorating Confucius at the Directorate of Education (Ch., Guozi jian) in Beijing, where he knelt down twice, each time making three prostrations. The ceremony, attended by many high-ranking Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese officials and generals, conferred on the emperor the mantle of the supreme agent of Confucianism. Right after the ceremony, two Han Chinese grand secretaries, Hong Chengchou (1593–1665) and Chen Zhilin (1605–66), submitted a memorial to the emperor entreating him not to go to Daiga to welcome the Dalai Lama because astrological phenomena reported by the Imperial Astronomical Bureau suggested that intruders would threaten the emperorship. The two officials emphasized that the way of Heaven is infinite (Ch., tiandao shenyuan) and could not be predicted. After reading the memorial, the emperor immediately abandoned the idea of visiting Daiga. Instead he welcomed the Dalai Lama in the South Garden of Beijing.¹⁴ As this episode suggests, the Manchu emperor had to adjust to his role as the Son of Heaven in the Confucian sense in the post-1644 politico-cultural and ideological contexts, notwithstanding the Qing’s serious religious and military concerns over its western frontier in Inner Asia.
Reconstructing the Chinese Empire: The Rise of the Chosŏn Model
From East Asia to Southeast and Inner Asia: The Qing’s Presentation of the Chosŏn Model
The Qing did not stand alone as it sought to construct its new dual identity. Chosŏn, the first Confucian outer fan of the Qing, played an unparalleled role in providing the Manchu conquerors with resources to form and articulate the Qing’s new identity. As early as 1650, in a palace memorial to Emperor Shunzhi, the king called the Qing the Heavenly Dynasty, even though the Qing court itself was still reluctant to use the term.¹⁵ The development of Chosŏn’s essential role in the
Qing-centric Zongfan world can be divided into two historical phases: the seven years from 1637 to 1643 and the 251 years from 1644 to 1894. In the first phase, Chosŏn began serving as the outer fan of the Qing by adhering to the clearly formulated and institutionalized discipline of the Sino-Korean Zongfan system, which had functioned between the Ming and Chosŏn for more than two centuries. As chapter 1 described, the Qing was able to make a significant move toward the transformation of its identity by assuming the place of the Ming in the framework of Sino-Korean relations. The frequent visits of Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries to Mukden provided the Qing with good opportunities to emphasize and practice its centrality in the known world.
After 1644, with its dramatic emergence as a Ming-style, nationwide regime and the extensive expansion of its territory, the Qing found itself in the position of having to manage relations with multiple neighboring countries, such as Annam, Ryukyu, Lanchang (Laos), Siam, Sulu (the Philippines), and Burma, that had served as subordinates to the Ming. Having inherited these fan from the Ming, what Qing China now needed to do was to resume and refashion the Zongfan system according to its own standards. On this front, the Qing had gained valuable experience from its institutionalized communications with Chosŏn since the 1630s and, through these communications, had developed a mature model of a Qing-centric Zongfan arrangement. The Chosŏn model laid out a path whereby a country or a political entity could follow Chosŏn into the Qingcentric system primarily by receiving imperial investitures from the Qing, adopting the regnal titles of the Qing in its calendar, and sending tributary emissaries to the Qing.¹⁶ The Chosŏn model was a pattern centered on rituals.¹⁷ Although the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship had been inaugurated by the Manchu military conquest of 1637, as a result of which the crown prince, another prince, and sons of high-ranking Chosŏn officials were detained in Mukden as hostages, the unpleasant situation began to change when the Qing released the hostages in 1644. The Qing also progressively reduced the tributes required of Chosŏn until, by the late 1730s, they were less than one-tenth of what they had been in the late 1630s and became a mere symbol of political subordination.¹⁸ What accompanied the tributes was the performance of a set of highly programmed and increasingly elaborate formalities that demonstrated the hierarchical Zongfan order and the Qing’s new normative identity.
In the first years after 1644, the Qing found the Chosŏn model the most powerful and practical way of managing its relations with other countries and of extending its influence and authority. Emperor Shunzhi articulated the importance of Chosŏn’s model role in 1647 after the Qing army conquered Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong Provinces and prepared to establish relations with Ryukyu, Annam, Siam, and Japan. On March 17 and August 25, the emperor announced that the Qing would give preferential treatment to these countries as to Chosŏn (Ch., yu Chaoxian yiti youdai) as long as they subordinated themselves to ‘the civilized’ and paid tribute to the court (Ch., qingxin xianghua, chengchen rugong).¹⁹ In this way, the Manchu rulers publicized Chosŏn’s prototypical fan status and established the Qing-Chosŏn relationship as the yardstick for relations between the Qing and other countries or political entities. Rather than adopting the aggressive colonial policy of the Yuan, the Qing learned from the Ming’s Zongfan mechanism, using the sophisticated and markedly Confucian Chosŏn model to maintain stability on its frontiers and to construct a new Chinese empire beyond them.²⁰
As a result of the Qing rulers’ efforts at promoting the Chosŏn model after 1644, political units beyond the Qing’s control also came to regard it as an ideal way of solving conflicts with the Qing while retaining their own privileges. Between 1662 and 1669, for example, when the Qing was trying to persuade Zheng Jing to surrender in Taiwan, Zheng insisted on following the Chosŏn model (Ch., zhao Chaoxian shili) into the Qing’s Zongfan system by proclaiming subordination and paying tribute (Ch., chengchen nagong) but refraining from cutting his hair in the Qing style.²¹ For Zheng, the Chosŏn model appeared to offer the most favorable and promising way to resolve the standoff with the Qing. Emperor Kangxi refused this proposal on the grounds that Chosŏn had been always a foreign country (Ch., conglai suoyou zhi waiguo; Ma., daci bihe encu gurun), whereas Zheng belonged to the people of China.²² These negotiations show the perceived broad applicability and coverage of the Chosŏn model in situations in which neither independence nor complete annexation was an immediate and acceptable
solution.
The Chosŏn model provided the Manchu ruling house with a general blueprint for dealing with other political entities. Over the Qing period, two parallel central institutions were responsible for the affairs of outer fan : the Mongolian Superintendency mainly managed outer fan located to the north and west of Qing China, while the Ministry of Rites was in charge of fan in the east, the south, and the west. This book focuses on the outer fan under the management of the Ministry of Rites rather than those under the Mongolian Superintendency, although the two types of outer fan may have been associated through the Chosŏn model in the early years of the Qing’s expansion to Inner Asia and the development of its Eurasian empire.
This inconspicuous connection between the eastern and western frontiers of the Qing empire had manifested itself at least by 1653, when the Qing invested the fifth Dalai Lama and the Gusi Khan of the Ūlet Mongols by incorporating them into the Qing-dominated extended family and placing them under the Qing’s jurisdiction. At the time, the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites were administratively still closely connected with one another: it was a Manchu minister (Ch., shangshu; Ma., aliha amban) from the Ministry of Rites, Langkio, and a vice minister (Ch., shilang; Ma., ashan i amban) from the Mongolian Superintendency, Sidali, who together gave the Dalai Lama and the Gusi Khan the books of investiture. The imperial statement in the khan’s investiture book bore a remarkable resemblance to that issued to the new king of Chosŏn in 1649. It declared that the recipient must serve as the Qing’s subordinate or fence (Ch., pingfu) until the Yellow River becomes as narrow as a belt and Mount Tai becomes as small as a grindstone (Ch., daili shanhe).²³ In addition, the mechanism governing the local products and tributes that the lama and the khan presented to the emperor and the empress dowager in 1654 and the imperial gifts the lama and the khan received in return was much like that used between the Qing and Chosŏn.²⁴ Finally, the imperial mandates of investiture (Ch., gaoming; Ma., g’aoming) that the Qing issued to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni bore the same imperial seal—Seal of declaring imperial mandate (Ch., zhigao zhi bao; Ma., hese wasimbure boobai)—as had the mandate investing the new king of Chosŏn.²⁵
If we compare the imperial codes of the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites, it seems that the former borrowed institutional regulations from the latter to formalize the communications between the Manchu rulers and the Mongol fan in Inner Asia. The prototypical role of Chosŏn in the Qingcentric Zongfan system may have contributed to the Qing’s policy of integrating the Inner Asian political and military entities into the Qing’s extended family.²⁶ On the surface, the geographical responsibilities of the Ministry of Rites did not overlap with those of the Mongolian Superintendency, as Qing officials confirmed in 1743, so Qing-Chosŏn contacts were ostensibly unrelated to Qing– Inner Asian contacts.²⁷ But on the political level, soon after 1644 the Qing rulers began to apply the Zongfan rationale behind the Chosŏn model to Inner Asia, along with the Manchu court’s promulgation of the discourse of all-under-Heaven and people without difference between the outside and the inside, as part of the long process of subordinating the Zunghar Mongols, whom the Qing rulers treated as people beyond virtue and civilization.²⁸ Administratively, the Ministry of Rites was also in charge of the affairs of some lamas in Gansu and Shaanxi until the 1740s, when it transferred this jurisdiction to the Mongolian Superintendency.²⁹ The Chosŏn model, in this sense, gradually became a normative, standard, and powerful soft weapon in the repertoire of the Qing. It allowed the Manchu rulers to govern the areas conquered by the formidable Eight Banners in Inner Asia, which arguably smoothed the way for the Qing to insert its civil administrative system into these areas during the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods.
Who Were the Barbarians? The Imperial Code and the Qing’s Reforms
Under the Qing, the Zongfan order was maintained and embodied by the exchange of emissaries between the Qing and its subordinate countries (Ch., shuguo; Ma., tulergi gurun or harangga gurun), which were generally described as subordinate countries of foreign barbarians (Ch., waiyi shuguo). All exchanges were conducted in accordance with The Universal Tributary Regulations (Ch., Chaogong tongli) codified by the Ministry of Rites, and the performance of the exchanges
was supervised by the Host-Guest Office (Ch., Zhuke qingli si) of the Ministry of Rites. These regulations primarily consisted of the following seven mandates:
Investiture (Ch., cefeng): The Qing emperor gave the new king of each fan a patent of appointment through an imperial mandate of investiture along with a decree (Ch., chiyu) and an official seal for use in correspondence.
Regnal titles (Ch., nianhao): The fan adopted the Qing’s regnal titles as the way to enumerate years.
Calendar (Ch., shuoli): The fan used the Qing’s calendar and celebrated Chinese festivals.
The dispatch of emissaries to pay tribute to the Qing (Ch., chaogong), with a frequency individually determined by the Qing.
The conferral of noble rank on a deceased king or privileged members of the royal house of the fan (Ch., fengshi).
Reporting events to the Qing (Ch., zoushi): Each fan informed the emperor of important domestic events but did not need to ask for instructions and could assume that the Qing would not intervene in its domestic affairs.
Trade (Ch., maoyi or hushi), including trade at the frontiers and at the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations (Ch., Huitong siyi guan; Ma., Acanjime isanjire tulergi gurun i bithe ubaliyambure kuren) in Beijing.³⁰
The Qing made considerable changes to the Zongfan system that it inherited from the Ming. The Ming had also relied on The Universal Tributary Regulations, by which the Ministry of Rites managed routine exchanges between China and the subordinate barbarian countries in the four quarters (Ch., fanguo or siyi)—Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, the Jurchens, Mongolia, and other countries and political entities—as well as interactions between the Ming and indigenous chieftains (Ch., tuguan or tusi), including local chieftains in Yunnan, Guangxi, Guizhou, Sichuan, Hunan, and Hubei.³¹ But two significant changes distinguished the list of foreign barbarian countries in the new Qing regulations from the Ming’s list. First, the Qing excluded indigenous chieftains from its list of tributaries because of its policy toward barbarian chieftains (Ch., yimu) in southwestern China. Known as replacing the hereditary indigenous chieftains with rotating officials (Ch., gaitu guiliu), the policy had been inaugurated by the Yuan and the Ming, but only in the Yongzheng period of the Qing was it carried out on a truly large scale.³² The areas and populations under the chieftains’ control were integrated simultaneously into the Qing’s territory and into its household registration system.³³ The indigenous chieftains were thus outside the supervision of the Ministry of Rites. The line between barbarians belonging to these political units and barbarians from other countries was clear in the minds of the Manchu rulers at court and their deputies in the provinces.³⁴ Second, the Western countries gradually disappeared from the list of foreign barbarians in the tributary regulations. By the late fourteenth century, the Ming had fifteen outer fan countries, and the majority of these became the Qing’s outer fan, including Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, Lanchang, Siam, Sulu, and Burma.³⁵ From the 1760s to the 1840s during the Qing period, the list also included the Netherlands and the countries of the Western Ocean (Ch., Xiyang), but by the 1890s only these seven Asian countries remained on the list.³⁶
Whereas in the Qianlong period the Mongolian, Tibetan, and Muslim areas under the management of the Mongolian Superintendency had all entered [the Qing’s] map and registers (Ch., xianru bantu) and were presented like prefectures and counties (Ch., youru junxian),³⁷ the subordinate countries of foreign barbarians under the supervision of the Ministry of Rites were not integrated into the Qing’s core territory. Nor would these countries be treated as parts of the Republic or the People’s Republic of China in the twentieth century. By the same token, the dual management system for the outer fan—the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites—under the Qing made it difficult for people outside this institutional mechanism to draw a clear line between them. This might explain why, as discussed in chapter 5, some Qing officials in the late nineteenth century responded to complications involving Chosŏn by suggesting that
Beijing apply its policy vis-à-vis Mongolia and Tibet to Chosŏn by converting Chosŏn into prefectures and counties, as they supposed Chosŏn had been in the Qianlong period. The rationale behind this suggestion applied the basic structure of the Qing empire on its western frontier to the management of its eastern one, highlighting Chosŏn’s prominent subordinate position within the empire.
The role of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship is thus significant. This relationship should not be treated simply as a specific instance of the Zongfan system, as scholars have typically done. Rather, it is best understood as a prototype that shaped the formation of the Qing’s Zongfan system and helped the Manchu regime transform its political identity for the purpose of claiming centrality and accessing orthodox legitimacy in the process of reshuffling the Chinese world. In short, the Qing-Chosŏn relationship was the seedbed of the Qing’s entire Zongfan arrangement, from which the political legitimacy of both sides—the Qing and its outer fan—sprang.
Civilizing the Center: The Practice of the Chosŏn Model
Five aspects of the Qing’s practice of the Chosŏn model, aspects embodied in and undergirded by ritual practices and documentary discourse, showcased the Qing’s identity as the civilized center. These aspects concern the frequency and composition of missions; the overland route and the Sino-Korean geographical boundaries; humble palace memorials, imperial mandates and decrees, and orthodox legitimacy; tributes, gifts, and court-to-court interactions; and receptions and rituals.
The Frequency and Composition of Imperial and Tributary Missions
The exchange of missions between the Qing and Chosŏn started in 1637 and continued without interruption until the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. The frequency of Chosŏn’s missions to the Qing was higher than that of any other country. Whereas other subordinate countries sent tributary missions to Beijing every other year (Ryukyu), every three years (Siam), every four years (Annam), every five years (Sulu), or every ten years (Lanchang and Burma), Chosŏn dispatched several missions every year.³⁸ Although the imperial code required Chosŏn to send an annual tributary mission at the end of each year that would simultaneously serve as the mission for the winter solstice, the imperial birthday, and the lunar New Year, Chosŏn never hesitated to send more emissaries under different names, dispatching a new mission before the previous one had even returned in order to nourish its relationship with the Qing.³⁹ From 1637 to 1894, Chosŏn sent about 698 official missions to the Qing for twenty-six different purposes, an average of 2.71 missions per year.⁴⁰ In 1784 and 1788, Emperor Qianlong commented jubilantly that in this respect Chosŏn was a peer of the Qing’s inner fan.⁴¹
According to the imperial regulations, a Korean mission was to have thirty members: an envoy, an associate envoy, a secretary, three interpreters, and twenty-four tribute guard officers. The envoy, associate envoy, and secretary were the three key members. As a special privilege to Chosŏn, the number of attendants and servants attached to the mission was not limited. By contrast, the missions from Ryukyu, Lanchang, Burma, and the Netherlands were not to exceed twenty members; those from other Western countries were limited to twenty-two, those from Siam to twenty-six, and those from Annam to thirty.⁴² Many Korean scholars and businessmen visited Beijing as mission attendants or servants in order to experience Chinese culture or to seek their fortunes, so a Korean mission often numbered several hundred people. For example, the annual tributary mission of 1653 had a total of 225 members, the gratitude mission of 1777 a total of 310, the gratitude mission of 1803 a total of 213, and the congratulatory mission of 1889 a total of 311.⁴³ In 1829, two missions with more than six hundred people combined arrived in Beijing at the same time, forcing the Ministry of Rites and the Ministry of Works to borrow twenty large tents from the Imperial Household Department (Ch., Neiwu fu) to house the additional visitors. Until the late nineteenth century, the legions of Chosŏn’s missions continued their pilgrimages to Beijing every
year with a large number of tributes and horses.⁴⁴
By contrast, the Qing sent far fewer and smaller imperial missions to Chosŏn. From 1637 to 1894, the Qing undertook 172 missions to Hansŏng, an average of 0.67 missions per year. In the early Qing, the Manchu court frequently dispatched emissaries to investigate cases of homicide and smuggling at the border, to negotiate resolutions to these cases with the king, and sometimes to discuss the punishment of Korean officials who failed to satisfy the Qing. As early as the Shunzhi period, the Manchu court began to reduce the number of its envoys, the rationale behind the change being the Zongfan idea of cherishing the small. In May 1653, for example, in the course of investigating a cross-border case of homicide, the Ministry of Rites proposed to ask the Korean emissary in Beijing to carry the imperial documents to the king instead of dispatching an imperial envoy for the purpose, given that Chosŏn is a country of men from afar (Ch., Chaoxian guo xi yuanren). Emperor Shunzhi endorsed this proposal, declaring that "hereafter, do not propose to send envoys to disturb the fan [Ch., fanbang] with minor matters."⁴⁵ By the middle period of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, such envoys to Hansŏng disappeared entirely.⁴⁶
From this point on, imperial missions to Chosŏn were of two primary types: missions for investiture and missions to confer noble rank, both relating to power shifts that required the Chinese emperor’s bestowal of legitimacy. In the early period, an imperial mission contained around a hundred men, many of whom were Manchu bannermen of the Eight Banners who joined the mission for the purpose of trade. In 1658 Emperor Shunzhi significantly trimmed the size of the missions by calling for the end of Manchu trade in Hansŏng. After that, a mission comprised an envoy, an associate envoy, four interpreters, and eighteen attendants.⁴⁷ In 1845 and 1846, Emperor Daoguang further reduced the number of core members to four.⁴⁸ Taking attendants into account, after the early nineteenth century an imperial mission had fewer than thirty members in total. The mission in 1876 comprised twenty members, and the last mission, in 1890, had twenty-eight.⁴⁹
All imperial envoys to Chosŏn—from the first envoy in 1637, Inggūldai, to the last one in 1890, Xuchang (1838–92)—were Manchu officials. They included some members of the Mongol and Han Chinese Eight Banners but no non-banner Han Chinese, whereas envoys to Annam and Ryukyu were mainly non-banner Han Chinese rather than Manchus. By at least the 1760s, Han Chinese scholars were fully aware of this ethnic discrepancy, though some of their Korean counterparts were not.⁵⁰ The door was never opened for Han Chinese to participate in tributary affairs in Korea. The exclusion was perhaps rooted in the implicit demands of the civilized–barbarian distinction and the Qing’s need to transcend the pre-1644 Manchu-Korean relationship: the Manchu court had to demonstrate, maintain, and consolidate its legitimacy as the human and institutional agent of the Mandate of Heaven and to strengthen its claim to civilized centrality and Chineseness through the hierarchical relationship. Still, some Manchu envoys, such as Akdun (1685–1756) in 1717, broadly identified themselves from a cultural perspective as Han envoys (Ch., hanjie) from the central civilized country (Ch., Zhonghua, Zhongxia).⁵¹
The Overland Route, the Willow Palisade, and Geographical Boundaries
In the post-1644 period, the emissaries of the two countries traveled on an overland route, which was about 950 miles (3,000 Chinese li) long and linked Hansŏng and Beijing via around eighty-two stations. The route passed through P’yŏngyang, Ŭiju, the Yalu River, Fenghuang City, Mukden, Shanhai Pass, Fengrun, and Tongzhou (see map 2.1). From 1644 to 1894, both Korean and Manchu emissaries were required to follow the overland route, the sole exception being the last imperial mission in 1890, which took a maritime route due to exceptional circumstances. In general, a mission took forty to sixty days to reach Beijing from Hansŏng, and an imperial mission from Beijing faced the same trudge to Hansŏng.⁵²
In Manchuria the overland route skirted the long Willow Palisade (Ch., Liutiao bian)—a system of levees and trenches planted with willow trees, their branches tied together—from Fenghuang City to Shanhai Pass, where it almost connected with the Great Wall. The Manchu rulers built the palisade from the late 1630s to
the 1680s in order to preserve their economic privileges by demarcating domestic boundaries between Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese regions. In the early period of Kangxi’s reign, the palisade connecting Shanhai Pass in the west and Fenghuang City in the east, known as the Old Fence, was around 590 miles (1,900 li) long and had sixteen fence gates, while in the north the New Fence between Weiyuan Village and Fateha Mountain was 215 miles (690 li) with four gates.⁵³ Fenghuang City, located at the southeastern corner of the east wing of the Old Fence, was under the supervision of the Manchu General of Mukden (Ch., Shengjing jiangjun) and had a gate (K., ch’akmun; Ch., zhamen), known as Feng huang Gate, about three miles (eight li) to the southeast of the city.⁵⁴ The Qing built Fenghuang Gate between 1638 and 1639 and extended it southeast toward the Yalu River between 1685 and 1690 up to a location about nine miles (thirty li) from the city.⁵⁵ The gate was the only pass through which Korean emissaries could enter the Qing’s ancestral territory (Ch., genben zhongdi) in Manchuria.
Map 2.1 The overland route between Beijing and Ŭiju in the late eighteenth century. The line connecting points A, B, C, and D on the map marks the Willow Palisade, which started at Fenghuang City (A) and ended near the Great Wall (the line connecting points D, E, and F). The line connecting points A, G (Mukden), H (Shanhai Pass), I (Fengrun), and J (Tongzhou) forms the overland route that Chosŏn’s emissaries took to Beijing after crossing the Yalu River. Yŏji to, handwritten map, preserved at the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University. Copyright Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies.
Between the gate and the boundary river lay a Qing-controlled area in which no one was allowed to live. In the late seventeenth century, this area spanned about thirty-four miles.⁵⁶ The Korean emissaries could pass through this area freely and were not subjected to security checks until they reached Fenghuang Gate. The garrison major of the Manchu bannermen at Fenghuang City did not welcome, check, or send off the missions beyond the gate, which may help explain why Korean emissaries were occasionally robbed by Chinese bandits outside the gate.⁵⁷ For the Korean visitors, Fenghuang Gate was thus more like a borderline than the Yalu River was, although the geographical borderline ran along the middle course of the river.
After entering Fenghuang Gate, the Koreans were to proceed to Beijing within twenty-eight days under the escort of Qing soldiers, passing through thirty-nine transfer stations (Ch., gongshi guanshe; Ma., alban jafara elcin i tatara guwan i boo). In fact, however, the visitors were so familiar with the route that generally no Chinese soldiers accompanied them to Beijing. The absence of Chinese monitors endowed the Koreans with fair freedom to visit places along their route and interview local people, enriching their travel journals, which eventually constituted a voluminous collection known as Yŏnhaengnok (The records of the journey to Beijing). All emissaries of the Qing’s fan were required to follow specific tributary routes and dared not deviate from them. For example, Ryukyu’s emissaries were instructed to arrive at Min’an in Fujian, Sulu’s at Xiamen in Fujian, those of Western countries at Macau in Guangdong, Siam’s at Humen in Guangdong, Annam’s at Taiping in Guangxi, and Burma’s at Yongchang in Yunnan. After the emissaries reached the designated places, the governor-general and the governor of the province would report their arrival to the Ministry of Rites and instruct subordinate officials to send them on to Beijing. Chosŏn’s emissaries had no such relations with officials in the provinces through which they passed, and they communicated directly with the Ministry of Rites. In other words, Chosŏn’s contacts with the Qing were under Beijing’s direct control, which enabled Beijing to use Chosŏn to portray the harmony of its Zongfan system whenever necessary.
Along the overland route, the high frequency and large size of Chosŏn’s missions produced considerable and lucrative commercial opportunities for merchants from both countries. What flowed into the Qing realm in massive quantities, in addition to Korean and Japanese goods, was silver. The mission of 1712, for instance, carried more than two hundred thousand taels of silver to Beijing, while the one in 1777 brought more than ninety-three thousand taels. The bulk of the silver was originally from Japan, acquired through trade between Tsushima and Chosŏn. The Hansŏng–Fenghuang City–Mukden–Beijing overland trade route was an extension of the Kyoto–Osaka–Tsushima–Pusan–Hansŏng overland and maritime trade route, with Hansŏng and Beijing the two major entrepôts on the combined route. Financially, the three nations made up an integrated international silver network, and in the eighteenth century the amount of silver that poured into the Qing from Chosŏn annually could reach five hundred thousand to six hundred thousand taels, which contributed to the Qing’s prosperity but aroused serious concerns among Korean officials.⁵⁸ In this sense, it is not an exaggeration to say that the Beijing–Hansŏng overland route was the most prosperous and most lucrative long-distance and international trade route in East Asia before Chosŏn opened treaty ports in the 1870s and 1880s.
Humble Palace Memorials, Imperial Mandates and Decrees, and Orthodox Legitimacy
The imperial court in Beijing and the royal court in Hansŏng interacted through meticulously formatted court documents written in accordance with highly institutionalized hierarchical norms. From 1637 on, the most important category among the documents that Chosŏn submitted to the Qing was the king’s humble
palace memorials (K., p’yo; Ch., biao). In 1705 the Ministry of Rites in Beijing laid down a set of new criteria for the syntax of these memorials that Chosŏn adhered to for the next 190 years, but the king was still free to use his own terms in composing other kinds of palace memorials.⁵⁹ The humble memorials were aimed at strengthening the Qing’s authority by reiterating and affirming the reciprocal and hierarchical relationship between the emperor and the king. The memorial submitted by the crown prince and deputy king of Chosŏn, Yi Yun (King Gyŏngjong), on April 14, 1721, in the sixtieth year of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, to congratulate the emperor on his birthday, is a typical example. The memorial was written on a sheet of well-made Korean paper in tiny, narrow Chinese characters evenly arranged in twenty-three vertical lines from right to left—although a memorial could, on occasion, exceed fifty lines—and it carefully followed the rules of honorific elevation, exactly as the Qing had mandated in 1705.⁶⁰ Refer ring to himself as your minister (K., sin; Ch., chen) of a vassal (Ch., fanfu), who could hardly bear his separation from the court (Ch., queting), Yi proclaimed that "Your Majesty raises all people of the world by assuming the Mandate of Heaven. The world is peaceful and imperial civilization extends to all places. Your Majesty has pacified the four seas, and ten thousand countries have come to revere Your Majesty [Ch., sihai yi er wanguo laiwang]."⁶¹
In such highly formalized memorials, the king frequently called himself subordinate or minister, Chosŏn the small country, and the Qing the big country, the upper country, the big dynasty, the central dynasty, or the Heavenly Dynasty.⁶² These Qing-mandated terms exploited Chosŏn’s subordinate status to highlight the Qing’s centrality in the early eighteenth century. Year after year, Chosŏn, as the representative of the others, helped consolidate the Qing’s supreme cultural identity as well as Qing hegemony through its performance of such written subservience. Upon receipt of the king’s humble memorials, the emperor generally wrote on the cover in red ink, I have learned of the appreciative memorial that you, the king, respectfully presented. Let the relevant ministry [the Ministry of Rites] know. The comments were made either in Manchu (Wang sini kesi de hengkileme wesimbuhe be saha, harangga jurgan sa.) or Chinese (Lanwang zouxie. Zhidao liao. Gaibu zhidao.).
On the Qing side, the imperial decrees granting a deceased king noble rank or investing a new king with a patent of appointment also served to consolidate the hierarchy. The special terms used in these edicts had their own rules, which underwent a process of institutionalization after 1644. When the Qing invested Yi Chong as king in January 1638 (the first investiture that the Qing performed), the decree stated only that Chosŏn would be recognized as fan to the Qing forever.⁶³ But after 1644 the Manchu court began to include additional terms with strong political meanings in the Zongfan context. For example, the decree of investiture in 1649 clearly defined Chosŏn as an outer fan in a remote area (Ch., xiahuang) that submitted itself to the Qing’s virtues and civilization. In 1675 the phrase cherishing the eastern country (Ch., huairou dongtu) appeared in the decrees.⁶⁴ These terms substantially broadened the scope of the Qing’s political and cultural ideology and transformed its identity in the context of the civilized–barbarian dichotomy.
On March 6, 1725, Emperor Yongzheng issued a mandate and a decree to Yi Gŭm to invest him as the king and his wife as the queen. The mandate of investiture (Ch., fengtian gaoming; Ma., abkai hesei g’aoming) consisted of five connected pieces of dyed ramie cloth in red, blue, black, white, and yellow from right to left. Each of the five sections was surrounded by a pattern of flying dragons (see figures 2.1 and 2.2). In the mandate Emperor Yongzheng stated, "The great strategy is simply to extend civilization [Ch., jiaohua; Ma., tacihiyan wen] to the countries from afar [Ch., haibang; Ma., goroki gurun]…. Generations of your court have been sincerely loyal and trustworthy and have been paying tribute diligently [Ch., zhigong qinxiu; Ma., tušan alban be kiceme faššambi]. In investing Yi Gŭm the king of Chosŏn" (Ch., Chaoxian guowang; Ma., Coohiyan gurun i wang), the emperor emphasized that the king "shall serve as the fence on the eastern land [Ch., pinghan dongfan; Ma., dergi bade fiyanji dalikū], devoutly use the imperial calendar [Ch., qiangong zhengshuo; Ma., forgon ton be olhošome ginggulembi], pacify the land, and assist the imperial house forever [Ch., jiafu yu huangjia; Ma., ejen i boode aisilame wehiyembi]. The emperor advised the king to use a pure and genuine
mind to serve the Heavenly court [Ch., tianshi; Ma., abkai gurun]."⁶⁵ A decree to the king articulated this point again by stating, "You should be loyal forever and efficiently govern the land as a minister from afar [Ch., houfu; Ma., jecen i golo], while you should be loyal and obedient and serve as a fence [Ch., pinghan; Ma., fiyanji dalikū] for the Heavenly house [Ch., tianjia; Ma., gurun boo]."⁶⁶
The Chinese and Manchu terms of the imperial edicts portrayed the king as a family member of the Qing court, and they became more sophisticated in the Qianlong period. The imperial edicts to the king in 1757, for instance, referred to Chosŏn as a fence, a subordinate country (Ch., shuguo; Ma., harangga gurun), a remote submission (Ch., yuanfu; Ma., goroki i jecen), and a lower country (Ch., xiaguo; Ma., fejergi gurun) of the Middle Kingdom (Ch., Zhongchao, Z hongbang; M., Dulimbai gurun). The edicts also emphasized that the king’s court (M., wang ni boo) had been loyal to and received special rewards from the Heavenly court (Ch., tianshi; Ma., han i hargašan).⁶⁷ By invoking these norms, the Qing explicitly presented itself as the civilized center—China and the Heavenly Dynasty—in both Chinese and Manchu terms.
In his memorials to the emperor, the king used a gold seal received from the Qing. From early 1637 to early 1653, the seal had only Manchu characters, which read Coohiyan gurun i wang ni doron (seal of the king of the country of Chosŏn). On April 22, 1653, Emperor Shunzhi, evidently displeased by the absence of Chinese script from the seal, instructed the Ministry of Rites to make a new seal that included Chinese characters (Ch., hanzi). As a result, the words Chaoxian guowang zhi yin (seal of the king of the country of Chosŏn) were added to the seal.⁶⁸ The emperor did not explain his rationale for the change, but his decision underscored the new dynasty’s Chineseness. On the Qing side, the emperors, in their mandates to Chosŏn, always used the seal of declaring imperial mandate, which carried both a Chinese text, Zhigao zhi bao, and a Manchu one, Hese wasimbure boobai, exactly the same text that appeared on the imperial mandates issued to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni in Tibet. The combination of languages reflected the polyglot politics of a multiethnic empire.⁶⁹
FIGURE 2.1. The Manchu section of the imperial mandate to invest the king of Chosŏn in 1725. Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, preserved at Jangseogak, the Academy of Korean Studies, Korea. Copyright Academy of Korean Studies.
FIGURE 2.2. The Chinese section of the imperial mandate to invest the king of Chosŏn in 1725. Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, preserved at Jangseogak, the Academy of Korean Studies, Korea. Copyright Academy of Korean Studies.
The imperial investiture of the king helps explain a paradox in the Qing period: certain Confucian countries, in particular Chosŏn and Annam, were privately reluctant to identify the Qing as the supreme representative of Chinese culture, but in practice they never challenged its status as the superior country and frequently sent tributary missions to Beijing to display their deference. The explanation for the apparent paradox lies in the fact that the missions fulfilled a dual purpose in establishing not only the legitimacy of the Qing but also that of the monarchs of the fan. The Zongfan relationship between the Qing and its fan was an incarnation of this symbiotic and synergistic legitimacy, namely, the orthodox legitimacy embodied in the highly programmed rituals involved in the exchange of emissaries. This orthodox legitimacy was the goal for which King Taksin (r. 1767–82) of the Thonburi regime of Siam sent tributary missions to Beijing to pursue investiture after the fall of the Ayutthaya regime (1350–1767), even though King Taksin’s understanding of paying tribute (Ch., jingong) was very different from that of the Qing.⁷⁰ The need for legitimacy could also explain why Nguyễn Huệ, the leader of the peasant rebellion against the Lê Dynasty (1428–1788) of Annam, defeated the Qing army in 1789 but nonetheless accepted the Qing’s investiture in 1790. It was also in 1790 that Burma accepted the Qing investiture after winning the Burmese-Qing War in the early 1770s.⁷¹ In addition to pragmatic concerns reflecting geopolitics and China’s military might, securing political legitimacy from China proved crucial for these regimes’ own rule.
Tributes, Gifts, and Court-to-Court Interactions
The Qing ritual code clearly listed the types and quantities of tribute that Chosŏn had to present for different purposes. After 1644, these fell into eight major categories. Beyond the most official category of annual tribute, designated as standard tribute (Ch., zhenggong), the king generally referred to the items in the other seven categories, such as those marking the imperial birthday, the lunar New Year, and the winter solstice, as gifts or local products. The Qing accepted all of the submitted items and did not challenge the king’s choice of terms, although it preferred to refer to the items as tribute.⁷²
While the annual tribute marked a country-to-country relationship, all other categories of tribute, which were presented specifically to the emperor, the empress, and the dowager empress, suggested a strong court-to-court connection. The Ministry of Rites accepted the annual tribute as a routine matter, but it had to submit memorials to the emperor for instructions on how to handle tribute in other categories. In the early Qing, the Ministry of Rites forwarded all tribute items to the Ministry of Revenue and later to the Imperial Household Department, which was in charge of the affairs of the Manchu royal house and had its own financial system independent of the one managed by the Ministry of Revenue.⁷³ Therefore, although the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship seemed to manifest itself mainly in hierarchical country-to-country interactions, in reality it was a dual system involving the two countries and the two courts.
The gifts that the imperial envoys carried to Chosŏn were directed at specific members of the royal family, including the king, the queen, the crown prince, and the dowager queen. Usually the envoys brought first-rate silk for official robes. When imperial missions were dispatched to extend the emperor’s condolences on the deaths of core royalty, some gifts were consumed at the funeral ceremonies, while others were converted into 150 to 300 taels of silver by the Ministry of Revenue and delivered to the Korean royal house. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, imperial envoys followed a precise routine to deliver their condolences and gifts. The last such mission occurred in 1890, and it is explored in detail in chapter 5.
Receptions, Ritual Performances, and the Civilized Qing
Chosŏn’s emissaries were well accommodated at each transfer station after they entered China, but they had to prepare food for themselves until they arrived in
Beijing. Upon reaching their residence in Beijing, the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations, the emissaries first visited the Ministry of Rites to present the king’s memorials and the list of tribute items. All emissaries from Chosŏn and from other countries, as well as the kings they represented, had to submit their documents to the emperor through the ministry, with which they could communicate via official notes (Ch., ziwen). In the main hall of the ministry, the emissaries would pass the memorials to the head officials, who would place the memorials in front of the imperial tablet on a table in the middle of the hall. The emissaries would then kneel down once to make three prostrations toward the head officials, who would in turn bow three times to the emissaries with their hands folded in front (Ch., zuoyi, a ritual practiced between officials of equal ranks). Once they had finished, the emissaries would kneel down three times, each time making three prostrations toward the tablet.⁷⁴ The ministry would submit the documents to the emperor the next day, while the emissaries returned to their residence to wait for the imperial audience.
The Qing’s commander general of the Metropolitan Infantry Brigade Yamen (Ch., Bujun tongling yamen) sent soldiers to guard the emissaries’ residence.⁷⁵ Three additional institutions were involved in hosting the guests: the Court of Imperial Entertainments (Ch., Guanglu si) delivered daily food and drink, distributed to each member of the mission according to rank; the Ministry of Revenue brought fodder for the Koreans’ horses; and the Ministry of Works provided charcoal. These meticulous regulations embodied the Qing’s policy of cherishing men from afar.
During their stay in Beijing, the emissaries had various responsibilities to fulfill. If there was a grand court assembly of officials in the Forbidden City, the emissaries had to attend and pay homage at the end of the wing of the Qing civil officials. A major task was to pay a formal visit to the emperor at either the Summer Palace in Beijing or the Summer Palace in Rehe (Chengde). After the audience, the emissaries would be invited to attend certain events, such as banquets in the Forbidden City, performances of Chinese operas, or fireworks shows at the Summer Palace.⁷⁶ All ritual procedures, in particular the highest level of kowtow, were minutely regulated and fastidiously practiced. Such rituals between the Chinese emperor and foreign emissaries had been defined and institutionalized at least since the great rituals laid out in The Rituals of the Great Tang (Ch., Da Tang Kaiyuan li), compiled in the eighth century.⁷⁷ In the Ming and the Qing, the rituals became extremely elaborate, and the Korean emissaries were required to rehearse the complicated ceremonies in advance as a sign of their loyalty and as part of the process that would civilize the barbarians in the four quarters (Ch., feng siyi).⁷⁸ Rituals helped maintain the political arrangement and strengthen the identities of all participants.⁷⁹ In grand court gatherings, emissaries from Chosŏn were usually the first representatives of the outer fan to perform the rituals for the emperor, as on February 9, 1675, at the Lantern Festival, where the Chosŏn emissaries congratulated Kangxi ahead of their Russian, Kalka Mongol, and Ūlet Mongol counterparts.⁸⁰ Chosŏn’s role as an exemplar was particularly prominent in the late eighteenth century during the Qianlong period, when the Qing in many cases followed the model for Chosŏn (Ch., zhao Chaoxian zhi li) in managing its bilateral exchanges with Annam, Ryukyu, and Siam.⁸¹ Chinese scholars at the time also widely regarded Chosŏn as the model for other countries (Ch., zhuguo zhi zhang).⁸²
The emissaries also attended two major official banquets, one held at the Ministry of Rites and the other at the emissaries’ residence. An astonishing number of institutions were involved in their organization: the Court of Imperial Entertainments; the Food Supply Office (Ch., Jingshan qingli si) of the Ministry of Rites; the Ministries of Revenue, Works, and War; Shuntian Prefecture; and the Revenue Superintendent of Chongwen Gate (Ch., Liangyi shuiwu jiandu). Royal contractors (Ch., hanghu) were also assigned specific tasks. Each of the three key members of the mission was treated to what was known as a fifth-level Manchu banquet and the other members to a sixth-level one, preferential treatment not afforded to emissaries from any other country. The high cost of the banquets was fully covered by the Qing and, not surprisingly, the banquets were replete with ritual performances reinforcing the bilateral hierarchical order.⁸³ The imperial code included an illustration of the banquets for Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries (Ch., Chaoxian gongshi yantu) and specified that the seating arrangements for banquets held for
emissaries from other countries should follow the Chosŏn pattern (Ch., geguo gongshi fangci).⁸⁴
During their sojourn in Beijing, the emissaries, particularly scholars without official status or responsibilities, were enthusiastic about socializing with Qing literati. The tradition of such interactions had started in Ming times but had been suspended in the Ming-Qing transition period because of the anti-Manchu attitudes that were prevalent in Chosŏn. Indeed, before the eighteenth century, the three key members of the tributary mission barely left their residence to meet with Chinese officials or scholars because many Korean scholars embracing Neo-Confucianism saw the Qing as a barbarous country and regarded the tributary mission as a humiliation.⁸⁵ In the 1760s, however, literary social gatherings involving Korean emissaries again became frequent and continued until the 1890s. In the 1860s, many Chinese officials, such as Dong Wenhuan (1833–77) of the Imperial Academy (Ch., Hanlin yuan), who was known for calligraphy and epigraphy, actively socialized with Koreans.⁸⁶ On the Korean side, Pak Kyusu (1807–76), an emissary who visited Beijing in 1872, befriended more than a hundred famous Chinese scholars through social gatherings.⁸⁷
Versed in the same Confucian classics, adhering to the same Neo-Confucianism, and using the same Chinese characters, the Qing and Chosŏn scholars could easily identify one another as men of the same caliber. They met for drinks, composed poems, and exchanged their own compositions and calligraphy. That Chosŏn was known as Little China might also have lent these transnational literary social gatherings a homogenous cultural identity. These savants formed an informal perennial club in which they exchanged ideas about history and literature and improved their perceptions of each other’s countries. According to Key-hiuk Kim, their communications also assured Korea of a constant stream of information and knowledge concerning the latest intellectual trends in China.⁸⁸
When they gathered with their Han Chinese friends, the Korean guests usually showed an aversion to Manchu customs, such as the Manchu-style official robe and hairstyle, and were very proud of their Ming-style robes and hats, in keeping with the civilized–barbarian dichotomy. But in 1766, when Hong Tae-yong (1731–83) expressed contempt for the Manchus’ control of China, he found to his surprise that his Han Chinese counterparts, such as Yan Cheng (1733–67), did not appreciate his anti-Manchu sentiments; instead, Yan and his colleagues applauded the Qing’s support for civilization. After intensive conversation with his Chinese friends, Hong conceded that Koreans on a fundamental level still belonged to the barbarians by the sea (K., haesang chi iin). By concluding that the civilized and the barbarians are the same (K., Hwa–I il ya), he acknowledged the Qing’s civilized status.⁸⁹ Through such interactions, many Korean and Chinese scholars became close friends and continued to correspond even after the emissaries returned to Chosŏn. When Yan Cheng was on the brink of death, he laid a letter from Hong on his abdomen to indicate how deeply he treasured their friendship. When news of Yan’s death reached Hansŏng, Hong burst into tears and commented that he had lost a brother to whom he was as attached as he was to his right arm.⁹⁰
Like the emissaries from Hansŏng who experienced a combination of hardship and comfort as they made their way to Beijing, Qing imperial envoys also had to endure discomfort until they passed through Fenghuang Gate on their journey toward Ŭiju. There they were welcomed and treated well by the Korean side. Although the land between the gate and the Yalu River was Qing territory, the Korean prefect of Ŭiju was able to dispatch Korean officers, Manchu interpreters, and servants to welcome the envoys at the three stations in this area: Congxiu, Mazhuan, and Sanjiang. At each station the Koreans would set up temporary houses for the envoys and provide hearty meals that could feature more than thirty different dishes. In Ŭiju the prefect treated each envoy to a banquet with more than 130 kinds of food.⁹¹ Receptions along the way from Ŭiju to P’yŏngyang and then to Hansŏng were even more luxurious, and the cost was significant.⁹²
In contrast to their Korean counterparts in Beijing, the Manchu envoys in Hansŏng confined themselves to ritual exchanges. Beijing-style literary social gatherings did take place in Shuri, the capital of Ryukyu, but not in Hansŏng, where the envoys, along with their assistants, never left their lodgings to converse with local officials or scholars.⁹³ No transnational literati club like the one in Beijing ever formed in Hansŏng. After 1658, when Emperor Shunzhi put an end to
Manchu trade in Hansŏng, the imperial envoys were always temporary visitors who returned home as soon as their mission was accomplished. In addition, almost all imperial envoys before the early eighteenth century made a point of visiting the Samjŏndo stele in a southern suburb of Hansŏng. The Koreans regarded the stele, with its inscriptions celebrating the Manchu conquest of Chosŏn, as a humiliation, and some Confucian scholars and students argued that it should be destroyed, so the envoys’ visits were sensitive and made the stele a barometer of the two countries’ relationship. In 1723 the Qing’s two envoys made a formal visit to the stele with a number of Korean officials. At the site, the vice envoy knelt down three times, each time bowing his head three times. In 1724 and 1729, the imperial envoys also paid formal visits to the stele, again accompanied by a group of Koreans. On these occasions both the Manchu envoys and their Korean interpreters kowtowed to the stele. In 1731, however, instead of visiting Samjŏndo, the envoys simply asked for copies of the inscriptions on the stele, and after 1762, they no longer even requested transcripts. By the late nineteenth century, Qing officials had only a vague understanding of the stele and were uncertain whether it featured a Manchu inscription.⁹⁴
During their sojourn in Hansŏng, the Qing envoys performed four major ceremonies in which the king participated. The first was the welcome at the Gate of Receiving Imperial Favors (K., Yŏngŭn mun) outside the West Gate of the city. The king bowed once to the imperial documents, then returned to his palace in the city. The second, conducted inside the king’s palace, was the transfer of the imperial documents and other items to the king. The king kowtowed four times to the imperial edicts. In addition, the king and the envoys bowed once or twice to each other with their hands folded in front. The king, on his own territory, did not need to perform the highest level of kowtow toward the imperial decrees or other documents and gifts, as his ministers would do in Beijing. The third ceremony was the king’s visit to the envoys at their residence, the South Palace Annex, where the Koreans honored the envoys with several tea banquets. Finally, there was the send-off at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country on the city’s outskirts, where the king provided a tea ceremony for the departing envoys. Contact between the two sides was always conducted through the Korean Ministry of Rites. All of the procedures in these ceremonies were regulated by ritual codes and were executed until the early 1890s. The Korean side had no obligation to report any domestic affairs to the envoys, nor would the envoys intervene in such affairs. Rather, this stylized interaction in Hansŏng endowed the monarch of Chosŏn with political legitimacy, continuously consolidating the reciprocal and hierarchical Zongfan relations between the two countries.
Celebrating the Relationship: The Qing Emperor’s Roles in the Zongfan System
As the institutional agent at the highest level of the Zongfan hierarchy, the emperor could exploit the occasions of imperial audiences and his patriarchal authority to modify and lubricate the mechanism from the top down. As the following sections show, he could freely endow tributary emissaries with various extra gifts, supervise and admonish the Manchu envoys to Chosŏn and the Manchus along the border in Manchuria, and make final decisions about border conflicts.
Consolidating the System through Imperial Gifts and Extra Gifts
After Chosŏn’s emissaries presented their tribute gifts to the emperor, the sovereign would bestow routine gifts (Ch., lishang) on them and the king. At least since the Shunzhi period, the Qing presented the tribute missions with gifts whose value exceeded that of the tribute, based on detailed calculations.⁹⁵ The gifts and their quantities varied according to the category of the mission, and when the Korean envoy was a member of the royal house, the amount and quality of the gifts would increase. The silk and satin among the gifts were taken from the Imperial Household Department, rather than the Ministry of Revenue, in order to show the emperor’s personal favor toward the "king of the fan " (Ch., fanwang). To mark the imperial birthday and the lunar New Year, the Qing would give the king a second-class horse with bridle and each of the two envoys a third-class horse with bridle, highlighting the Manchu character of the Qing regime. The Qing
would also give the envoys silver in the average amount of at least 680 taels (for annual tributary missions and winter solstice missions) or 850 taels (for imperial birthday missions and lunar New Year missions), along with other gifts.⁹⁶
Some scholars have argued that the routine gifts were an institutionalized part of the overall Zongfan mechanism and hence afforded little flexibility.⁹⁷ Yet the emperor could break this routine at his discretion by awarding the emissaries extra gifts during audiences. For instance, in early 1795 Emperor Qianlong awarded the king a hundred copies of the Chinese character for happiness (Ch., fu) that he had written on small squares of red paper.⁹⁸ This sort of largesse was seemingly random,⁹⁹ but it did not simply represent imperial prerogative or a deviation from the flowcharts of ritual codes. Rather, the practice of giving supererogatory gifts highlighted the Qing policy of giving more to the visitors and benefiting less from them (Ch., houwang bolai), as Emperor Qian-long explained it to Chosŏn in 1736.¹⁰⁰ The emperor thus moderated the system by lending it flexibility and novelty. In the late eighteenth century, Emperor Qianlong disbursed an increasing quantity of extra gifts, while the amount of the tribute sent by Chosŏn remained remarkably stable. The extra imperial gifts reached their peak in the 1790s, a time when Emperor Qianlong was particularly keen to enhance the image of his dynasty as the Heavenly Dynasty. Given these priorities, the Qing court was not concerned about maintaining a balance between the value of the tributes and that of the imperial gifts. In 1793 a Korean emissary acknowledged that the Qing treated Chosŏn in such a favorable way that the Qing’s spending on accommodations for the tributary emissaries and the value of the various imperial gifts far exceeded the value of the Korean local products.¹⁰¹
Constructing a Positive Image of the Qing and Highlighting the Envoys’ Manchu Identity
The Qing emperor sought to further burnish his dynasty’s image in his contacts with Chosŏn by taking steps to prevent the Manchu envoys to Chosŏn and the bannermen who resided along the border in Manchuria from compromising the dignity of the Heavenly Dynasty through open degeneracy. Emperor Qianlong, for example, felt it necessary to extend the Qing’s prolonged campaign to maintain Manchu traditions and identity to the field of the Sino-Korean communications by closely monitoring his envoys’ behavior.
His first reform aimed to bolster the Manchu envoys’ integrity by discouraging corruption during their trip to Chosŏn. In 1736, after reducing by half the amount of the gifts the Koreans were expected to provide to the imperial envoys, the emperor punished two envoys who violated the new rules. He decreed that in the future the garrison generals at Mukden and Shanhai Pass should check the envoys’ luggage when they returned from Hansŏng to make sure they had not received unauthorized gifts.¹⁰² Until the last imperial mission in 1890, subsequent emperors continued to admonish their envoys to Chosŏn to remain upright and honest. Compared with their pre-1637 Ming counterparts, who had exploited Chosŏn for maximum profit, the Manchu envoys, in particular after the Kangxi period, behaved well on their visits to Chosŏn, which helped reduce the tension between the two countries caused by the Qing invasions in the 1630s. The Korean scholar Hong Tae-yong acknowledged in 1766 that the Qing was much more generous and kind to Chosŏn than the Ming had been.¹⁰³
The Qianlong emperor also believed that the Manchu officers and soldiers in Manchuria should focus on border security. In 1737, under the claim of giving kindness to the people from afar, he decided to prohibit the Manchus from trading with Koreans in the Middle River area of the Yalu River and to ask merchants and commoners of inner China (Ch., neidi shangmin) to undertake this trade instead. The Middle River market had been established in 1592 between Chosŏn and the Ming; it had barely opened during the Ming-Qing war but was restored as a major trading center between the Qing and Chosŏn after 1646. Manchu bannermen and merchants near Fenghuang City had thereafter constituted the Qing’s traders in the market. Now the Qianlong emperor abruptly concluded that the bannermen were not good at doing business and sought to direct his Manchu warriors back to the military realm. The king, however, was deeply concerned about the potential arrival of the people of inner China, so he petitioned the emperor to maintain the trade with the bannermen. The emperor granted the
petition but explained that by people of inner China he meant only those living near the banner garrisons in Manchuria, not those south of the Great Wall or in Beijing.¹⁰⁴ This episode shows that in the border area the Manchu court was concerned more about political consequences and border security than about the economic interests of the local bannermen. It also suggests that at least by the 1730s the Qing had come to integrate Manchuria into its concept of inner China (Ch., neidi), further nullifying the border function of the Great Wall within the multiethnic empire.
Emperor Qianlong’s more dramatic reform took place in 1763, when he dictated that all Manchu envoys to Chosŏn from that moment onward should ride horses instead of taking sedan chairs in Chosŏn. The emperor explained that although Chosŏn had provided sedan chairs for the missions to show its obedience to and respect for the imperial envoys of the Heavenly Dynasty, the Manchu officials were expert horsemen and should not ride in sedan chairs. The emperor instructed the king to end permanently the convention of welcoming the imperial envoys with sedan chairs and to provide only horses instead. The Qing documents do not explain why the emperor suddenly changed this longstanding convention. But according to the first-rank translator of the mission led by Hongying (1707–71), Xu Zongmen, who was a Beijing resident of Korean background, the emperor had originally picked another Manchu official as the envoy but, realizing how obese the chosen official was, asked him how he would make the long trip to Chosŏn. The envoy replied that since he would ride in a sedan chair, his weight would not be a problem. The emperor became angry, and to underline the Manchu martial spirit, he immediately replaced the envoy with Hongying, who was an excellent horseman. The emperor admonished Hongying to display righteousness (Ch., zhengda) in the outer fan and to avoid any wretchedness (Ch., weisuo). Meanwhile, the Korean emissaries, the emperor said, were exempt from the new rules and could maintain their custom of taking carriages to Beijing.¹⁰⁵ The Qianlong emperor’s quest to maintain and strengthen the Manchuness of the Manchus under his supervision thus helped the Qing improve its image in the eyes of its subordinate and to showcase its virtues in practice.
Arbitrating Border Disputes
The Qing emperor also served as the highest arbitrator in border conflicts and border-crossing disputes. In each case of border conflict with Chosŏn, it was the emperor—rather than the king, a historical precedent, or a border rule—who made the final decision. The geographical connection between the two countries occasioned a considerable number of illegal border crossings from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. These thorny cases posed a challenge to the Qing, in particular to the emperors, in terms of balancing the Qing’s lofty Zongfan discourse and its practical concerns. This aspect of the Qing’s policy underwent a major change from the Kangxi to the Qianlong period. In the Shunzhi and early Kangxi periods, the Manchu monarchs often doled out severe punishments to the king or his officials over border disputes and often sent special envoys to Chosŏn for in-person investigation. The emperors embraced this approach primarily because the Qing had not yet consolidated its rule in the wake of the Southern Ming (1644–62) and its influences and was worried about the possibility of a Chosŏn rebellion against the Qing. But after the Kangxi emperor suppressed the revolt of the Three Feudatories in the 1680s, the Qing praised Chosŏn for its loyalty and adopted a more relaxed policy on border conflicts with the country, eventually ceasing to send special investigative envoys.
The Qing court in the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods following Kangxi governed a country that had been unified to an unprecedented degree since 1644. The court consequently focused on reinforcing the cosmopolitan ideology of all-under-Heaven in the Qing’s foreign relations. Although the emperors had clear views on the Qing’s geographical borders, they preferred to rely on traditional Zongfan norms in settling border disputes with Chosŏn. The Qing’s border policy toward Chosŏn thus became more conservative than aggressive, forming a sharp contrast with the Qing’s contemporary policy in the southwest and northwest, where the new empire continued to expand its territory. On the Chosŏn side, the savvy king and local officials applied the same Zongfan norms in their sophisticated negotiations with their Qing counterparts, leaving the emperor in Beijing with no option but to endorse one Korean proposal after another.
The Mangniushao case provides a good example. In 1745 the Manchu general of Mukden, Daldangga (?–1760), suggested to Emperor Qianlong that the Qing set up a border outpost at Mangniushao near the Yalu River in order to prevent Koreans from illegally crossing the border river to sell or buy grains or to search for ginseng in Manchuria. Although in 1731 Daldangga’s predecessor, Nasutu (?–1749), had likewise proposed an outpost at Mangniushao, Emperor Yongzheng had rejected the proposal because of the king’s opposition and upheld his father’s policy, in place since 1715, of prohibiting all construction in this area.¹⁰⁶ Prompted by an increase in illegal border crossings, Daldangga resurrected Nasutu’s plan and proposed to repair the broken parts of the Willow Palisade and to open lands outside the palisade for cultivation. Emperor Qianlong initially supported Daldangga’s plan and sent a Mongol minister, Bandi (?–1755), to visit the area to confirm that Mangniushao was indeed inside China’s borders and that it would be appropriate for China to establish an outpost there. At the last moment, however, the emperor reversed his stance, invoking the precedents set by the decisions of his grandfather in 1715 and his father in 1731, as well as a decision he himself had made in another case in 1737. To justify his rejection of the proposal, he cited the imperative of cherishing the small. Furthermore, the emperor told Daldangga that no further such proposals should be made to the court and that Daldangga and his successors in Mukden should follow established rules in managing border affairs with Chosŏn.¹⁰⁷ In this way, the emperor reduced the possibility of further conflicts in this border area and helped stabilize the two countries’ relationship from the top down.
Barbarianizing the Periphery: The Qing’s Institutional Zongfan Discourse
The Changing Meaning of Barbarians from Yongzheng to Qianlong
The Qing interpretation of the civilized–barbarian distinction underwent a sharp change in the transitional days between the reigns of Yongzheng and Qianlong. In the late 1720s, Emperor Yongzheng had made the putative barbarity of the Qing a public issue among Qing scholars because of his response to the case of Zeng Jing (1679–1735). Encouraged by the civilized–barbarian discourse, Zeng had plotted to rebel against the Manchu barbarians, but after he was prosecuted, he reversed his stance and endorsed the Qing, whereupon the emperor released him from prison. In June 1733, while Zeng was in the provinces giving lectures on the dynasty’s virtues, the emperor issued an edict to prohibit the practice of changing Chinese characters with the meaning of barbarian (Ch., hu, lu, yi, di) in books. The Manchu monarch defined the term barbarian geographically and confessed that the ancestors of the current dynasty could be called eastern barbarians, like ancient Chinese saints. This tone had been set by his great-grandfather Hongtaiji in 1636 in his letter to the king of Chosŏn, and Yongzheng himself had repeated the same points in his book responding to Zeng, Great Righteousness Resolving Confusion (Ch., Dayi juemi lu) in 1729.¹⁰⁸ By proclaiming that people living both within and outside China belong to the same family (Ch., Zhong Wai yijia), Yongzheng insisted that the civilized–barbarian distinction should not be understood in a cultural sense, and even if it were, only those who were beyond civilization (Ch., wanghua zhi wai), like the Zunghar, might truly be called barbarians.¹⁰⁹ Under this definition, the outer fan of the Qing also seemed to be excluded from the category of barbarians.
Yongzheng’s statements suggest that the Manchu rulers embraced cultural egalitarianism in order to redistribute cultural resources within the multiethnic empire.¹¹⁰ It is safe to say that the Manchu emperor was trying to overcome the prejudice inherent in the stereotypical civilized–barbarian distinction among Han Chinese intellectuals in the process of consolidating the Manchu regime’s orthodox legitimacy. This sustained effort can also be seen in the move by Yongzheng’s father and grandfather to expand considerably the list of Chinese monarchs who were enshrined in the Temple of Ancient Monarchs (Ch., Lidai diwang miao), with the goal of establishing the Qing as the legitimate successor to previous dynasties that had likewise been identified as China.¹¹¹ With Yongzheng’s policy, the yardstick for judging barbarians suddenly snapped, as the ruling dynasty now identified itself both with the ancient rulers and with the
eastern barbarians.
After assuming the throne in 1735, the Qianlong emperor not only quickly revoked his father’s pardon and executed Zeng but also reversed Yongzheng’s approach by clearly differentiating the civilized Qing from the barbarian countries surrounding it. Qianlong thus brought the civilized–barbarian discourse back to its pre-Yongzheng meaning, in which cultural factors played a pivotal role. He exploited his father’s heritage by turning the latter’s policy of permitting the free and public use of all Chinese characters for barbarian into a tool for propagating the opposite message in the context of the civilized– barbarian discourse—namely, one that excluded the Qing from this category. No longer would the Great Qing downgrade itself to the rank of barbarian.¹¹² Consequently, in the Qianlong period the use of the term foreign barbarians in official documents reached its historical zenith.¹¹³ Through this terminology, the Qing combined its civilized centrality with cultural superiority. Qianlong achieved this symbolic goal by formally designating all other countries as barbarians, along with the majority of the ethnic groups under his rule, and one of the most important targets of this barbarianization at the normative level was Chosŏn.
At the time when Yongzheng published his book on the definition of barbarian, some Manchu envoys to Chosŏn had taken to visiting Jizi Shrine in P’yŏngyang on their way back from Hansŏng.¹¹⁴ As mentioned in the introduction, Jizi was said to be the founding father of the ancient Korean regime, invested by the Chinese monarch of the Zhou Dynasty with the lands of Chosŏn, where he maintained a familistic and tributary relationship with the central court of China. Given the intense debate around ethnicity and the civilized–barbarian dichotomy in the late years of Yongzheng’s reign, the Manchu envoys’ visits to Jizi Shrine could help the Manchu regime bolster its Chineseness and its claims to legitimacy beyond its borders. When the Qing overcame the challenge of the civilized–barbarian distinction within China in the first half of the Qianlong period, visits to Jizi Shrine ceased, although Chinese historical records continued to celebrate the familial relationship between the Chinese and the Koreans.
The Qing’s Systematic, Institutional Barbarianization of Chosŏn and Others
In June 1751 the Qianlong emperor instructed the governors-general and governors of border provinces to draw and submit pictures of domestic and foreign barbarians (Ch., neiwai miaoyi, waiyi fanzhong) in order to demonstrate the flourishing of the Qing.¹¹⁵ The emperor was following a precedent set by Emperor Taizong (r. 627–49) of the Tang Dynasty, who was believed to have brought China its most prosperous days in the pre-Qing era. Since Tang Taizong had commissioned paintings of the barbarians to celebrate the great moment in which ten thousand countries came to revere the emperor (Ch., wanguo laichao),¹¹⁶ Qianlong had every reason to commemorate his dynasty’s accomplishments in the same way. Even during the Qing expansion into Central Asia, Qianlong identified the efforts of the Han and Tang dynasties to extend Chinese power into Central Asia as historical milestones by which to measure his own progress.¹¹⁷
Beyond the obvious political factors, contemporary popular culture may also have motivated Qianlong’s desire for an illustrated record of the Qing’s imperial expansion. As a big fan of Chinese opera who contributed to the birth of Peking opera, Qianlong may have been influenced by popular operas that extolled the virtues of the civilized center of the world. These operas can be dated at least to the Yuan, but in the Ming and early Qing they were still being performed in cities such as Beijing. Their scripts described the Ming as the Heavenly Dynasty, the upper country, or the central civilized country, bordered by barbarians in four directions (primarily represented as Chosŏn, Annam, and political units in Inner Asia) who paid tribute and presented palace memorials to the great emperor of China.¹¹⁸
In 1761, ten years after Qianlong ordered the drawings, the first edition of the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Ch., Huang Qing zhigong tu) was published in four volumes, featuring six hundred pictures of people from the Qing’s outer fan and from barbarian places within Qing territory or on its periphery. The first picture in the collection was of a Korean official who wore a Ming-style official robe but was labeled "a barbarian official of the country of
Chosŏn" (Ch., Chaoxian guo yiguan) (see figure 2.3). Once again, Chosŏn served as the model for others in the collection, and its prototypical role was made clear by Qing scholars in the Essentials of Complete Books of the Four Storehouses Catalog (Ch., Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao).¹¹⁹ Chosŏn, Little China, was thus institutionally converted into a country of barbarians by the Qing’s political discourse and imperial documentary mechanism.
Following Chosŏn, other countries, including Ryukyu, Annam, Siam, Sulu, Lanchang, Burma, Britain, France, Japan, the Netherlands, and Russia, likewise became barbarians in the Qing nomenclature, as did many of the diverse peoples within Qing territory. In nearly every case, the Qing narrative constructed an imperial pedigree by reviewing a long history of Zongfan relations with the foreign country (Ch., guo; Ma., gurun) or domestic tribe (Ch., buluo; Ma., aiman) from the Zhou to the Ming Dynasties and emphasized that it was the Qing’s merits that prompted the barbarians to send emissaries to come and pay tribute (Ch., qianshi rugong; Ma., elcin takūrafi albabun jafanjimbi) or come to kowtow with tribute (Ch., chaogong; Ma., albabun jafame hengkilenjimbi).¹²⁰ In this way, the Qing systematically assimilated the historical legacies of previous dynasties into its own Zongfan relations with these countries and tribes and consolidated its legitimacy as the civilized center, or Zhongguo (Ma., Dulimbai gurun).¹²¹ Also in 1761, in order to celebrate the empress dowager’s seventieth birthday, the Qing published another magnificent collection, Illustrations of the Great Celebration (Ch., Luhuan huijing tu). The first illustration carried the title Ten thousand countries came to revere the emperor, the precise phrase the Tang Dynasty had used, and Chosŏn’s emissaries occupied a distinguished position within it.¹²² If there was a documentary institutionalization for the Qing,¹²³ in terms of the Qing’s construction of its civilized identity, this process was substantially accomplished in 1761.
FIGURE 2.3. A Chosŏn official in the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Huang Qing zhigong tu, 33).
Behind the cheerful facade of the great multiethnic empire lay the axiom of the Qing’s centrality in the world. And that world, of course, often found its way to the Qing threshold. Britain, which the Qing knew as the country of Ying ji li (Ying ji li is a transliteration of England; Ch., Yingjili guo; Ma., Ing gi lii gurun), was one of the countries portrayed as barbarian in the collection of 1761. At the end of that year, the Qianlong emperor instructed his representatives in Guangzhou to notify the men from afar and foreign barbarians there—the British merchants—that the Heavenly Dynasty has everything it needs, so it does not need foreign barbarians to bring trivial goods for trade.¹²⁴ The edict was a response to petitions from James Flint in 1759 and Nicholas Skottowe in 1761. The two were representatives of the British merchants who wanted to change the Canton system of trade, which channeled all trade with the West through that southern port. Their efforts not only were futile but in fact led to stricter regulations on Western traders in China.¹²⁵ In this sense, the rebuff that George Macartney’s mission later received from the emperor in 1793 was merely a repetition of the institutionalized rhetoric that had been directed at the British in China more than three decades earlier.
Popularizing Chosŏn’s Status as Foreign Barbarians in Imperial Discourse
The prolonged construction of the Qing’s new identity and the reorientation of its political discourse vis-à-vis other countries was not just the result of the emperor’s personal activities or political motivations, imposed on the administration from the top down. Nor should they be understood purely as the outcome of implementing the political will of the Manchu court. Rather, Qing officials at the local level, from counties to prefectures to provinces, also contributed to this construction from the bottom up. As a result, in the eighteenth century, Chosŏn’s status as foreign barbarians was popularized within the norms of Qing foreign relations.
This point is illustrated by the Qing policy toward shipwrecked fishermen from Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, and other countries who were rescued by local Chinese officials along the coast. At least from the early Qianlong period, Qing officials called these victims barbarians who suffered from storms (Ch., zaofeng nanyi; Ma., edun de lasihibufi jobolon de tušaha i niyalma) and sent them to Beijing or to the nearest provincial capital, from whence they could return home with embassies from their countries. From the 1730s to the 1880s, the Qing archives were full of such reports of local officials looking after shipwrecked fishermen; reports concerning fishermen from Chosŏn were particularly prominent.¹²⁶ By accommodating these victims on humanitarian grounds, the Qing sought to highlight its policy of cherishing men from afar and to display the deep and outstanding merits of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., zhao tianchao rouyuan shenren; Ma., abkai gurun i goroki urse be gosire šumin gosin be iletulembi). This sort of rhetoric, aimed at justifying and consolidating the way of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao tizhi; Ma., abkai gurun i doro yoso), reached its peak in the Qianlong period.¹²⁷
Chosŏn again represented the best example of the way of the Heavenly Dynasty, a fact that permeated many aspects of Qing-Chosŏn contacts. For instance, in 1776, one thousand taels of silver belonging to a Korean mission were stolen by Chinese thieves near Mukden. Emperor Qianlong instructed the Manchu general of Mukden, Hūngšang (1718–81), to compensate the mission for its losses in order to uphold the way of our Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., he wo tianchao tizhi; Ma. musei amba gurun i doro de acanambi). The emperor emphasized in his Chinese edict that the Chosŏn are a people of foreign barbarians (Ch., Chaoxian nai waiyi zhi ren), further elucidating in the Manchu version of the edict that the people of the country of Chosŏn are a people of foreign barbarians (Ma., Coohiyan gurun i niyalma serengge, tulergi aiman i niyalma).¹²⁸ This case was not exceptional, and the wealth of similar cases indicates the maturation of the Qing’s Zongfan discourse.¹²⁹
Despite the harmonious imperial picture the Qing painted, its model fan was simultaneously creating an alternate vision. While Chosŏn continued publicly to display its obedience to the Qing, sending tributary missions to Beijing over and above what imperial edicts demanded, in private the Chosŏn king and his
officials, along with Chosŏn intellectuals, were reluctant to identify the Qing as the supreme representative of Chinese culture. This story is explored in the next chapter.
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2 BARBARIANIZING CHOSŎN The Chosŏn Model and the Chinese Empire, 1644–1761 The year 1644 marked the beginning of a new stage in the Qing’s exploitation of the “Chosŏn model” as an institutionalized policy for constructing a new imperial order within and beyond the Qing’s borders. Informed by Chosŏn’s status as the Qing’s prototypical outer fan, this model manifested itself in well-established and highly programmed formalities in the contacts between the Qing and its outer fan. Through the Chosŏn model, the Qing rulers initiated a twofold transfor- mation by reversing and institutionalizing the discourse of the civilized–barbarian distinction: they enshrined the Qing as the new Heavenly Dynasty at the center of the known universe and converted Chosŏn and other countries into countries of barbarians on its periphery. The Qing accomplished this transformation con- clusively in the middle of the eighteenth century, when the court published the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Ch., Huang Qing zhigong tu). This chapter reveals the prolonged process by which the Qing gradually reconstructed a Chinese empire in the post-Ming world by legitimizing, enhancing, and practicing its new dual identity as China/Zhongguo and the Heavenly Dynasty through the Chosŏn model in its foreign relations from the first half of the seven- teenth century to the second half of the eighteenth century. Over the course of this century and a half, the macrotransformation of the Manchu regime’s identity in the cosmopolitan politico-cultural context was deeply connected with its microtrans-formation in the Manchu-Chosŏn framework. If there was a tendency among China’s neighbors to decenter the Middle Kingdom after the Ming, this chapter brings to light the process of recentering the Middle Kingdom undertaken by the Qing.¹ Establishing a Dual Identity: The Qing as China and the Heavenly Dynasty On October 30, 1644, Emperor Shunzhi offered a grand sacrifice to Heaven and Earth in the Qing’s new capital, Beijing. He asserted that the Qing would “pacify China” (Ch., sui Zhongguo) and “set a good example for ten thousand countries” (Ch., biaozheng wanbang).² For many people, this event marked the rise of the Qing as the equivalent of China/Zhongguo. In 1767, after finding that a magistrate in Yunnan Province had failed to refer to the Qing as the “Heavenly Dynasty” or “China/Zhongguo” in an official note to the “foreign barbarians” of Burma, Emperor Qianlong furiously pointed out that “it is the rule for one to refer to the court as the ‘Heavenly Dynasty’ or ‘China’ when one mentions it to men from afar. Our country has unified the central area and external areas, and even the barbarians know the Great Qing’s virtue and civilization.”³ Emperor Qianlong’s pronouncement indicates that the terms “Heavenly Dynasty” and “Zhongguo” were interchangeable. Historians of the Qing and modern China tend to follow the emperor, or at least the Qing’s political discourse as developed by the emperor, by treating China/Zhongguo and the Heavenly Dynasty as synonymous terms, both referring to the political unit of the Qing. Yet what the emperor did not mention—or was perhaps not able to realize—was that the Qing did not acquire the two titles simultaneously when it replaced the Ming in the early seventeenth century. As the emperor indicated, the two terms were used for the Qing almost exclusively in the context of foreign relations with “men from afar” or “foreign barbarians,” which generally referred to foreigners. In the domestic context, these terms were replaced by others, such as “the Great Qing,” “our dynasty” (Ch., wochao, benchao, or guochao), “our country” (Ch., wo guojia), and “the imperial dynasty” (Ch., huangchao or shengchao). In the first years after 1644, some Qing officials described the new regime as the “Qing Dynasty” (Ch., Qingchao), a successor to the “Ming Dynasty” in the context of foreign communications; this usage is found in correspondence between officials in Guangzhou
(Canton) and Siam in 1653. But Qingchao remains rare in Qing documents.⁴ As the Qing took over Beijing in 1644 and consolidated its rule over inner China afterward, it completed its transformation into Zhongguo, but its refashioning into the Heavenly Dynasty had barely started. In the late 1640s, when the Manchu Eight Banners were marching into South China, Southwest China, and North- west China, the Qing began to use Chosŏn to construct its new image as the Heavenly Dynasty; however, the process turned out to be difficult and even embar- rassing. According to early Qing archives, Qing scholars may have called the Qing the “Heavenly Dynasty” for the first time in a draft imperial edict in 1649 invest- ing Yi Ho (King Hyojong) as the king of Chosŏn. The draft edict was written by Fu Yijian (1609–65), a Han Chinese literatus from Shandong Province who had won first place in the Qing’s first imperial civil-service examination in 1645.⁵ By emphasizing that the king of Chosŏn should be “an important subordinate serving the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., pinghan tianchao) and loyal to the “central civilized country” (Ch., Huaxia), Fu equated the Qing, which had become Zhongguo, with the Heavenly Dynasty and the civilized country. However, the final version of the edict that was sent to Chosŏn omitted the two latter terms and continued to use the term “upper country” to refer to the Qing, suggesting that the Qing was not yet prepared to claim to be the Heavenly Dynasty.⁶ China, or Zhongguo, could be defined in a general geographical sense by the Qing borders, regardless of how the borders were expanded and redrawn, so long as the Qing controlled the Ming’s territory, or at least the central plain (Ch., Zhongyuan).⁷ In fact, after 1644, when the Qing rulers began writing and revising their history, they deliberately deleted some Manchu terms referring to the Ming as Zhongguo. For example, Hongtaiji, in a letter to the Ming on July 29, 1632, had ex- plained that the Jin fought with the Ming because “the Ming officials in Liaodong did not follow the way of China” (Ma., Liyoodung i hafasa Dulimbai gurun i doroi tondoi beiderakū), using the Manchu term Dulimbai gurun in clear reference to China/Zhongguo. Later, the narrative written in Chinese replaced the phrase “the way of China” (Ch., Zhongguo/Zhongyuan zhi dao) with “the way of rightness” (Ch., zhengzhi zhi dao). While Hongtaiji in 1632 had called the Ming “your China” (Ma., suweni Dulimbai gurun), the post-1644 Chinese edition replaced this term with “your country” (Ch., erguo), deleting the word for “China.”⁸ The changing terminology shows that after 1644 the Qing deeply identified itself with China. Given the ethnic background of the ruling house of the Qing, many scholars have been interested in establishing when the Qing court officially used the Manchu term Dulimbai gurun to define itself as China/Zhongguo. Some cite the year 1689 and the Treaty of Nerchinsk that the Qing signed with Russia. In fact, the Qing court had used this Manchu term to represent its identity much earlier in its negotiations with Zheng Jing (1642–81), the eldest son of Zheng Chenggong (1624–62), who occupied Taiwan in 1662. While Zheng Jing never questioned the Qing’s identity as China, he argued that Taiwan was not a part of China in an ef- fort to secure for Taiwan an independent status like that of Chosŏn. Emperor Kangxi, however, reiterated in a decree in 1669 that Zheng belonged to the “people of China” (Ch., Zhongguo zhi ren; Ma., Dulimbai gurun i niyalma).⁹ In the late Kangxi period, the Qing presented itself as China in a favorable and definitive way. For example, in his travelogue, the Manchu official Tulišen, who was dispatched as an envoy to the Turgūt Mongols in Russia in 1712, generally referred to the Qing as Dulimbai gurun (“China”) or meni Dulimbai gurun (“our China”); these terms were rendered into Chinese as Zhongguo or Zhonghua when Tulišen’s jour- nal was published in 1723 in both languages. Tulišen also consistently translated terms such as “our place” (Ma., meni bade) as “our China” (Ch., wo Zhongguo) and referred to all people of the Great Qing, such as the Manchus, Han Chinese, and Mongols, as “people of China.” More importantly, following Emperor Kangx- i’s instructions, Tulišen emphasized China’s Confucian nature to Russia, claiming that “our country takes fidelity, filial piety, benevolence, justice, and sincerity as fundamentals” (Ma., meni gurun i banjire tondo hiyoošun, gosin, jurgan, akdun be fulehe da obumbi; Ch., wo guojia yi zhong xiao ren yi xin wei genben).¹⁰ By contrast, the Heavenly Dynasty, or Tianchao, could not be delineated in the same way, since it was based on the notion of all-under-Heaven—a China- centered politico-cultural term with no connection to borders in the geographical sense. Put another way, the Qing could define itself as China from within, but it
could not identify itself as the Heavenly Dynasty without support from outside the Qing: the new regime would first have to erect a new, Qing-centric, and multi- national Zongfan system. The expectation that the Qing would become a new imperial power required the regime to transform the countries that the Ming had represented as its fan into fan in the Qing’s orbit. The Ming had pursued the same policy when it “became the ruler of China” (Ch., zhu Zhongguo) in 1368, im- mediately sending envoys to the countries that had served as fan of its predecessor, the Yuan Dynasty, with the aim of converting them into fan of the Ming.¹¹ However, unlike the Ming, the Manchu rulers in 1644 faced the tremendous challenge of overcoming their previous status as barbarians, as defined by the civi- lized–bar-bar- distinction. Compared with the mission to identify the Qing as China and as the legitimate successor to the Ming within the Qing’s borders, the quest to construct the Qing as the new Heavenly Dynasty beyond its borders called for extraordinary effort. From the perspective of comparative philology, the Chinese term “Tianchao” was not initially widely adopted in the Manchu language, in which it was literally rendered as abkai gurun (“Heavenly country”).¹² The Manchu rulers had difficulty identifying with this term and the Chinese political concepts behind it. In July 1637, for example, after reviewing the draft edict of investiture to the king of Chosŏn, Hongtaiji commented that he did not like to equate himself with Heaven as the Ming had done, suggesting that his officials must have employed the Chinese word tian (“Heaven”) or the Manchu term abka (“Heaven”) in the draft.¹³ Nevertheless, the task of reconstructing the Qing as the new China in the seventeenth century left the Manchu rulers with no choice but to embrace the term and the rationale behind it. The intellectual transformation of the Qing ruling house is evident in the visit of the fifth Dalai Lama (1617–82) to Beijing in late 1652 and early 1653. The Qing’s Manchu officials supported Emperor Shunzhi’s plan to greet the Dalai Lama in Daiga in Inner Mongolia, arguing that the Ūlet Mongols, who controlled Tibet mili- tarily at the time, would be pacified by the emperor’s gracious behavior. But the Han Chinese officials argued that the emperor was “the ruler of all countries under Heaven” (Ch., tianxia guojia zhi zhu) and should not violate conventions by meeting with a lama, even the Dalai Lama, in person outside the capital. Still hesitant about going to Daiga, the emperor took part in a grand ceremony commemorating Confucius at the Directorate of Education (Ch., Guozi jian) in Beijing, where he knelt down twice, each time making three prostrations. The ceremony, attended by many high-ranking Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese officials and generals, conferred on the emperor the mantle of the supreme agent of Confucianism. Right after the ceremony, two Han Chinese grand secretaries, Hong Cheng- chou (1593–1665) and Chen Zhilin (1605–66), submitted a memorial to the emperor entreating him not to go to Daiga to welcome the Dalai Lama because astro- logical phenomena reported by the Imperial Astronomical Bureau suggested that intruders would threaten the emperorship. The two officials emphasized that “the way of Heaven is infinite” (Ch., tiandao shenyuan) and could not be predicted. After reading the memorial, the emperor immediately abandoned the idea of visiting Daiga. Instead he welcomed the Dalai Lama in the South Garden of Beijing.¹⁴ As this episode suggests, the Manchu emperor had to adjust to his role as the Son of Heaven in the Confucian sense in the post-1644 politico-cultural and ideological contexts, notwithstanding the Qing’s serious religious and military concerns over its western frontier in Inner Asia. Reconstructing the Chinese Empire: The Rise of the Chosŏn Model From East Asia to Southeast and Inner Asia: The Qing’s Presentation of the Chosŏn Model The Qing did not stand alone as it sought to construct its new dual identity. Chosŏn, the first Confucian outer fan of the Qing, played an unparalleled role in pro- viding the Manchu conquerors with resources to form and articulate the Qing’s new identity. As early as 1650, in a palace memorial to Emperor Shunzhi, the king called the Qing the “Heavenly Dynasty,” even though the Qing court itself was still reluctant to use the term.¹⁵ The development of Chosŏn’s essential role in the
Qing-centric Zongfan world can be divided into two historical phases: the seven years from 1637 to 1643 and the 251 years from 1644 to 1894. In the first phase, Chosŏn began serving as the outer fan of the Qing by adhering to the clearly formulated and institutionalized discipline of the Sino-Korean Zongfan system, which had functioned between the Ming and Chosŏn for more than two centuries. As chapter 1 described, the Qing was able to make a significant move toward the transformation of its identity by assuming the place of the Ming in the framework of Sino-Korean relations. The frequent visits of Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries to Mukden provided the Qing with good opportunities to emphasize and practice its centrality in the known world. After 1644, with its dramatic emergence as a Ming-style, nationwide regime and the extensive expansion of its territory, the Qing found itself in the position of having to manage relations with multiple neighboring countries, such as Annam, Ryukyu, Lanchang (Laos), Siam, Sulu (the Philippines), and Burma, that had served as subordinates to the Ming. Having inherited these fan from the Ming, what Qing China now needed to do was to resume and refashion the Zongfan sys- tem according to its own standards. On this front, the Qing had gained valuable experience from its institutionalized communications with Chosŏn since the 1630s and, through these communications, had developed a mature model of a Qing-centric Zongfan arrangement. The Chosŏn model laid out a path whereby a country or a political entity could follow Chosŏn into the Qingcentric system primarily by receiving imperial investitures from the Qing, adopting the regnal titles of the Qing in its calendar, and sending tributary emissaries to the Qing.¹⁶ The Chosŏn model was a pattern centered on rituals.¹⁷ Although the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship had been inaugurated by the Manchu military conquest of 1637, as a result of which the crown prince, another prince, and sons of high- ranking Chosŏn officials were detained in Mukden as hostages, the unpleasant situation began to change when the Qing released the hostages in 1644. The Qing also progressively reduced the tributes required of Chosŏn until, by the late 1730s, they were less than one-tenth of what they had been in the late 1630s and be- came a mere symbol of political subordination.¹⁸ What accompanied the tributes was the performance of a set of highly programmed and increasingly elaborate formalities that demonstrated the hierarchical Zongfan order and the Qing’s new normative identity. In the first years after 1644, the Qing found the Chosŏn model the most powerful and practical way of managing its relations with other countries and of extend- ing its influence and authority. Emperor Shunzhi articulated the importance of Chosŏn’s model role in 1647 after the Qing army conquered Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong Provinces and prepared to establish relations with Ryukyu, Annam, Siam, and Japan. On March 17 and August 25, the emperor announced that the Qing would “give preferential treatment to these countries as to Chosŏn” (Ch., yu Chaoxian yiti youdai) as long as they “subordinated themselves to ‘the civilized’ and paid tribute to the court” (Ch., qingxin xianghua, chengchen rugong).¹⁹ In this way, the Manchu rulers publicized Chosŏn’s prototypical fan status and estab- lished the Qing-Chosŏn relationship as the yardstick for relations between the Qing and other countries or political entities. Rather than adopting the aggressive colonial policy of the Yuan, the Qing learned from the Ming’s Zongfan mechanism, using the sophisticated and markedly Confucian Chosŏn model to maintain stability on its frontiers and to construct a new Chinese empire beyond them.²⁰ As a result of the Qing rulers’ efforts at promoting the Chosŏn model after 1644, political units beyond the Qing’s control also came to regard it as an ideal way of solving conflicts with the Qing while retaining their own privileges. Between 1662 and 1669, for example, when the Qing was trying to persuade Zheng Jing to surrender in Taiwan, Zheng insisted on “following the Chosŏn model” (Ch., zhao Chaoxian shili) into the Qing’s Zongfan system by “proclaiming subordination and paying tribute” (Ch., chengchen nagong) but refraining from cutting his hair in the Qing style.²¹ For Zheng, the Chosŏn model appeared to offer the most favorable and promising way to resolve the standoff with the Qing. Emperor Kangxi refused this proposal on the grounds that Chosŏn had been “always a foreign country” (Ch., conglai suoyou zhi waiguo; Ma., daci bihe encu gurun), whereas Zheng belonged to the “people of China.”²² These negotiations show the perceived broad applicability and coverage of the Chosŏn model in situations in which neither independence nor complete annexation was an immediate and acceptable
solution. The Chosŏn model provided the Manchu ruling house with a general blueprint for dealing with other political entities. Over the Qing period, two parallel central institutions were responsible for the affairs of outer fan : the Mongolian Superintendency mainly managed outer fan located to the north and west of Qing China, while the Ministry of Rites was in charge of fan in the east, the south, and the west. This book focuses on the outer fan under the management of the Ministry of Rites rather than those under the Mongolian Superintendency, although the two types of outer fan may have been associated through the Chosŏn model in the early years of the Qing’s expansion to Inner Asia and the development of its Eurasian empire. This inconspicuous connection between the eastern and western frontiers of the Qing empire had manifested itself at least by 1653, when the Qing invested the fifth Dalai Lama and the Gusi Khan of the Ūlet Mongols by incorporating them into the Qing-dominated extended family and placing them under the Qing’s juris- diction. At the time, the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites were administratively still closely connected with one another: it was a Manchu min- ister (Ch., shangshu; Ma., aliha amban) from the Ministry of Rites, Langkio, and a vice minister (Ch., shilang; Ma., ashan i amban) from the Mongolian Superin- tendency, Sidali, who together gave the Dalai Lama and the Gusi Khan the books of investiture. The imperial statement in the khan’s investiture book bore a re- markable resemblance to that issued to the new king of Chosŏn in 1649. It declared that the recipient must serve as the Qing’s “subordinate” or “fence” (Ch., pingfu) “until the Yellow River becomes as narrow as a belt and Mount Tai becomes as small as a grindstone” (Ch., daili shanhe).²³ In addition, the mechanism governing the “local products” and tributes that the lama and the khan presented to the emperor and the empress dowager in 1654 and the imperial gifts the lama and the khan received in return was much like that used between the Qing and Chosŏn.²⁴ Finally, the imperial mandates of investiture (Ch., gaoming; Ma., g’aoming) that the Qing issued to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni bore the same imperial seal—“Seal of declaring imperial mandate” (Ch., zhigao zhi bao; Ma., hese wasimbure boobai)—as had the mandate investing the new king of Chosŏn.²⁵ If we compare the imperial codes of the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites, it seems that the former borrowed institutional regulations from the latter to formalize the communications between the Manchu rulers and the Mongol fan in Inner Asia. The prototypical role of Chosŏn in the Qingcentric Zong- fan system may have contributed to the Qing’s policy of integrating the Inner Asian political and military entities into the Qing’s extended family.²⁶ On the surface, the geographical responsibilities of the Ministry of Rites did not overlap with those of the Mongolian Superintendency, as Qing officials confirmed in 1743, so Qing-Chosŏn contacts were ostensibly unrelated to Qing– Inner Asian contacts.²⁷ But on the political level, soon after 1644 the Qing rulers began to apply the Zongfan rationale behind the Chosŏn model to Inner Asia, along with the Manchu court’s promulgation of the discourse of “all-under-Heaven” and “people with- out difference between the outside and the inside,” as part of the long process of subordinating the Zunghar Mongols, whom the Qing rulers treated as people “beyond virtue and civilization.”²⁸ Administratively, the Ministry of Rites was also in charge of the affairs of some lamas in Gansu and Shaanxi until the 1740s, when it transferred this jurisdiction to the Mongolian Superintendency.²⁹ The Chosŏn model, in this sense, gradually became a normative, standard, and powerful soft weapon in the repertoire of the Qing. It allowed the Manchu rulers to govern the areas conquered by the formidable Eight Banners in Inner Asia, which ar- guably smoothed the way for the Qing to insert its civil administrative system into these areas during the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods. Who Were the Barbarians? The Imperial Code and the Qing’s Reforms Under the Qing, the Zongfan order was maintained and embodied by the exchange of emissaries between the Qing and its “subordinate countries” (Ch., shuguo; Ma., tulergi gurun or harangga gurun), which were generally described as “subordinate countries of foreign barbarians” (Ch., waiyi shuguo). All exchanges were conducted in accordance with The Universal Tributary Regulations (Ch., Chaogong tongli) codified by the Ministry of Rites, and the performance of the exchanges
was supervised by the Host-Guest Office (Ch., Zhuke qingli si) of the Ministry of Rites. These regulations primarily consisted of the following seven mandates:
1.Investiture (Ch., cefeng): The Qing emperor gave the new king of each fan a patent of appointment through an imperial mandate of investiture along with a decree (Ch., chiyu) and an official seal for use in correspondence.
2.Regnal titles (Ch., nianhao): The fan adopted the Qing’s regnal titles as the way to enumerate years.
3.Calendar (Ch., shuoli): The fan used the Qing’s calendar and celebrated Chinese festivals.
4.The dispatch of emissaries to pay tribute to the Qing (Ch., chaogong), with a frequency individually determined by the Qing.
5.The conferral of noble rank on a deceased king or privileged members of the royal house of the fan (Ch., fengshi).
6.Reporting events to the Qing (Ch., zoushi): Each fan informed the emperor of important domestic events but did not need to ask for instructions and could assume that the Qing would not intervene in its domestic affairs.
7.Trade (Ch., maoyi or hushi), including trade at the frontiers and at the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations (Ch., Huitong siyi guan; Ma., Acan- jime isanjire tulergi gurun i bithe ubaliyambure kuren) in Beijing.³⁰ The Qing made considerable changes to the Zongfan system that it inherited from the Ming. The Ming had also relied on The Universal Tributary Regulations, by which the Ministry of Rites managed routine exchanges between China and the “subordinate barbarian countries in the four quarters” (Ch., fanguo or siyi)—Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, the Jurchens, Mongolia, and other countries and political entities—as well as interactions between the Ming and “indigenous chieftains” (Ch., tuguan or tusi), including local chieftains in Yunnan, Guangxi, Guizhou, Sichuan, Hunan, and Hubei.³¹ But two significant changes distinguished the list of “foreign barbarian countries” in the new Qing regulations from the Ming’s list. First, the Qing excluded “indigenous chieftains” from its list of tribu- taries because of its policy toward “barbarian chieftains” (Ch., yimu) in southwestern China. Known as “replacing the hereditary indigenous chieftains with rotat- ing officials” (Ch., gaitu guiliu), the policy had been inaugurated by the Yuan and the Ming, but only in the Yongzheng period of the Qing was it carried out on a truly large scale.³² The areas and populations under the chieftains’ control were integrated simultaneously into the Qing’s territory and into its household regis- tration system.³³ The indigenous chieftains were thus outside the supervision of the Ministry of Rites. The line between barbarians belonging to these political units and barbarians from other countries was clear in the minds of the Manchu rulers at court and their deputies in the provinces.³⁴ Second, the Western coun- tries gradually disappeared from the list of foreign barbarians in the tributary regulations. By the late fourteenth century, the Ming had fifteen outer fan countries, and the majority of these became the Qing’s outer fan, including Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, Lanchang, Siam, Sulu, and Burma.³⁵ From the 1760s to the 1840s dur- ing the Qing period, the list also included the Netherlands and the countries of the Western Ocean (Ch., Xiyang), but by the 1890s only these seven Asian coun- tries remained on the list.³⁶ Whereas in the Qianlong period the Mongolian, Tibetan, and Muslim areas under the management of the Mongolian Superintendency had “all entered [the Qing’s] map and registers” (Ch., xianru bantu) and were presented “like prefectures and counties” (Ch., youru junxian),³⁷ the “subordinate countries of foreign bar- barians” under the supervision of the Ministry of Rites were not integrated into the Qing’s core territory. Nor would these countries be treated as parts of the Republic or the People’s Republic of China in the twentieth century. By the same token, the dual management system for the outer fan—the Mongolian Superin- tendency and the Ministry of Rites—under the Qing made it difficult for people outside this institutional mechanism to draw a clear line between them. This might explain why, as discussed in chapter 5, some Qing officials in the late nineteenth century responded to complications involving Chosŏn by suggesting that
Beijing apply its policy vis-à-vis Mongolia and Tibet to Chosŏn by converting Chosŏn into prefectures and counties, as they supposed Chosŏn had been in the Qianlong period. The rationale behind this suggestion applied the basic structure of the Qing empire on its western frontier to the management of its eastern one, highlighting Chosŏn’s prominent subordinate position within the empire. The role of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship is thus significant. This relationship should not be treated simply as a specific instance of the Zongfan sys- tem, as scholars have typically done. Rather, it is best understood as a prototype that shaped the formation of the Qing’s Zongfan system and helped the Manchu regime transform its political identity for the purpose of claiming centrality and accessing orthodox legitimacy in the process of reshuffling the Chinese world. In short, the Qing-Chosŏn relationship was the seedbed of the Qing’s entire Zongfan arrangement, from which the political legitimacy of both sides—the Qing and its outer fan—sprang. Civilizing the Center: The Practice of the Chosŏn Model Five aspects of the Qing’s practice of the Chosŏn model, aspects embodied in and undergirded by ritual practices and documentary discourse, showcased the Qing’s identity as the civilized center. These aspects concern the frequency and composition of missions; the overland route and the Sino-Korean geographical boundaries; humble palace memorials, imperial mandates and decrees, and orthodox legitimacy; tributes, gifts, and court-to-court interactions; and receptions and rituals. The Frequency and Composition of Imperial and Tributary Missions The exchange of missions between the Qing and Chosŏn started in 1637 and continued without interruption until the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. The fre- quency of Chosŏn’s missions to the Qing was higher than that of any other country. Whereas other subordinate countries sent tributary missions to Beijing every other year (Ryukyu), every three years (Siam), every four years (Annam), every five years (Sulu), or every ten years (Lanchang and Burma), Chosŏn dispatched sev- eral missions every year.³⁸ Although the imperial code required Chosŏn to send an annual tributary mission at the end of each year that would simultaneously serve as the mission for the winter solstice, the imperial birthday, and the lunar New Year, Chosŏn never hesitated to send more emissaries under different names, dispatching a new mission before the previous one had even returned in order to nourish its relationship with the Qing.³⁹ From 1637 to 1894, Chosŏn sent about 698 official missions to the Qing for twenty-six different purposes, an average of 2.71 missions per year.⁴⁰ In 1784 and 1788, Emperor Qianlong commented jubilantly that in this respect Chosŏn was a peer of the Qing’s inner fan.⁴¹ According to the imperial regulations, a Korean mission was to have thirty members: an envoy, an associate envoy, a secretary, three interpreters, and twenty- four tribute guard officers. The envoy, associate envoy, and secretary were the three key members. As a special privilege to Chosŏn, the number of attendants and servants attached to the mission was not limited. By contrast, the missions from Ryukyu, Lanchang, Burma, and the Netherlands were not to exceed twenty mem- bers; those from other Western countries were limited to twenty-two, those from Siam to twenty-six, and those from Annam to thirty.⁴² Many Korean scholars and businessmen visited Beijing as mission attendants or servants in order to experience Chinese culture or to seek their fortunes, so a Korean mission often num- bered several hundred people. For example, the annual tributary mission of 1653 had a total of 225 members, the gratitude mission of 1777 a total of 310, the grat- itude mission of 1803 a total of 213, and the congratulatory mission of 1889 a total of 311.⁴³ In 1829, two missions with more than six hundred people combined ar- rived in Beijing at the same time, forcing the Ministry of Rites and the Ministry of Works to borrow twenty large tents from the Imperial Household Department (Ch., Neiwu fu) to house the additional visitors. Until the late nineteenth century, the legions of Chosŏn’s missions continued their pilgrimages to Beijing every
year with a large number of tributes and horses.⁴⁴ By contrast, the Qing sent far fewer and smaller imperial missions to Chosŏn. From 1637 to 1894, the Qing undertook 172 missions to Hansŏng, an average of 0.67 missions per year. In the early Qing, the Manchu court frequently dispatched emissaries to investigate cases of homicide and smuggling at the border, to negotiate resolutions to these cases with the king, and sometimes to discuss the punishment of Korean officials who failed to satisfy the Qing. As early as the Shunzhi period, the Manchu court began to reduce the number of its envoys, the rationale behind the change being the Zongfan idea of “cherishing the small.” In May 1653, for example, in the course of investigating a cross-border case of homicide, the Ministry of Rites proposed to ask the Korean emissary in Beijing to carry the imperial documents to the king instead of dispatching an imperial envoy for the purpose, given that “Chosŏn is a country of men from afar” (Ch., Chaoxian guo xi yuanren). Emperor Shunzhi endorsed this proposal, declaring that “hereafter, do not propose to send envoys to disturb the fan [Ch., fanbang] with minor matters.”⁴⁵ By the middle period of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, such envoys to Hansŏng disappeared entirely.⁴⁶ From this point on, imperial missions to Chosŏn were of two primary types: missions for investiture and missions to confer noble rank, both relating to power shifts that required the Chinese emperor’s bestowal of legitimacy. In the early period, an imperial mission contained around a hundred men, many of whom were Manchu bannermen of the Eight Banners who joined the mission for the purpose of trade. In 1658 Emperor Shunzhi significantly trimmed the size of the mis- sions by calling for the end of Manchu trade in Hansŏng. After that, a mission comprised an envoy, an associate envoy, four interpreters, and eighteen attendants.⁴⁷ In 1845 and 1846, Emperor Daoguang further reduced the number of core members to four.⁴⁸ Taking attendants into account, after the early nine- teenth century an imperial mission had fewer than thirty members in total. The mission in 1876 comprised twenty members, and the last mission, in 1890, had twenty-eight.⁴⁹ All imperial envoys to Chosŏn—from the first envoy in 1637, Inggūldai, to the last one in 1890, Xuchang (1838–92)—were Manchu officials. They included some members of the Mongol and Han Chinese Eight Banners but no non-banner Han Chinese, whereas envoys to Annam and Ryukyu were mainly non-banner Han Chinese rather than Manchus. By at least the 1760s, Han Chinese scholars were fully aware of this ethnic discrepancy, though some of their Korean counterparts were not.⁵⁰ The door was never opened for Han Chinese to participate in tributary affairs in Korea. The exclusion was perhaps rooted in the implicit demands of the civilized–barbarian distinction and the Qing’s need to transcend the pre-1644 Manchu-Korean relationship: the Manchu court had to demonstrate, maintain, and consolidate its legitimacy as the human and institutional agent of the Mandate of Heaven and to strengthen its claim to civilized centrality and Chineseness through the hierarchical relationship. Still, some Manchu envoys, such as Akdun (1685–1756) in 1717, broadly identified themselves from a cultural perspective as “Han envoys” (Ch., hanjie) from the “central civilized country” (Ch., Zhonghua, Zhongxia).⁵¹ The Overland Route, the Willow Palisade, and Geographical Boundaries In the post-1644 period, the emissaries of the two countries traveled on an overland route, which was about 950 miles (3,000 Chinese li) long and linked Han- sŏng and Beijing via around eighty-two stations. The route passed through P’yŏngyang, Ŭiju, the Yalu River, Fenghuang City, Mukden, Shanhai Pass, Fengrun, and Tongzhou (see map 2.1). From 1644 to 1894, both Korean and Manchu emissaries were required to follow the overland route, the sole exception being the last imperial mission in 1890, which took a maritime route due to exceptional circumstances. In general, a mission took forty to sixty days to reach Beijing from Hansŏng, and an imperial mission from Beijing faced the same trudge to Hansŏng.⁵² In Manchuria the overland route skirted the long Willow Palisade (Ch., Liutiao bian)—a system of levees and trenches planted with willow trees, their branches tied together—from Fenghuang City to Shanhai Pass, where it almost connected with the Great Wall. The Manchu rulers built the palisade from the late 1630s to
the 1680s in order to preserve their economic privileges by demarcating domestic boundaries between Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese regions. In the early period of Kangxi’s reign, the palisade connecting Shanhai Pass in the west and Fenghuang City in the east, known as the Old Fence, was around 590 miles (1,900 li) long and had sixteen fence gates, while in the north the New Fence between Weiyuan Village and Fateha Mountain was 215 miles (690 li) with four gates.⁵³ Fenghuang City, located at the southeastern corner of the east wing of the Old Fence, was under the supervision of the Manchu General of Mukden (Ch., Shengjing jiangjun) and had a gate (K., ch’akmun; Ch., zhamen), known as Feng huang Gate, about three miles (eight li) to the southeast of the city.⁵⁴ The Qing built Fenghuang Gate between 1638 and 1639 and extended it southeast toward the Yalu River between 1685 and 1690 up to a location about nine miles (thirty li) from the city.⁵⁵ The gate was the only pass through which Korean emissaries could enter the Qing’s “ancestral territory” (Ch., genben zhongdi) in Manchuria.
Map 2.1 The overland route between Beijing and Ŭiju in the late eighteenth century. The line connecting points A, B, C, and D on the map marks the Willow Pal- isade, which started at Fenghuang City (A) and ended near the Great Wall (the line connecting points D, E, and F). The line connecting points A, G (Mukden), H (Shanhai Pass), I (Fengrun), and J (Tongzhou) forms the overland route that Chosŏn’s emissaries took to Beijing after crossing the Yalu River. Yŏji to, hand- written map, preserved at the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University. Copyright Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies. Between the gate and the boundary river lay a Qing-controlled area in which no one was allowed to live. In the late seventeenth century, this area spanned about thirty-four miles.⁵⁶ The Korean emissaries could pass through this area freely and were not subjected to security checks until they reached Fenghuang Gate. The garrison major of the Manchu bannermen at Fenghuang City did not welcome, check, or send off the missions beyond the gate, which may help explain why Ko- rean emissaries were occasionally robbed by Chinese bandits outside the gate.⁵⁷ For the Korean visitors, Fenghuang Gate was thus more like a borderline than the Yalu River was, although the geographical borderline ran along the middle course of the river. After entering Fenghuang Gate, the Koreans were to proceed to Beijing within twenty-eight days under the escort of Qing soldiers, passing through thirty-nine transfer stations (Ch., gongshi guanshe; Ma., alban jafara elcin i tatara guwan i boo). In fact, however, the visitors were so familiar with the route that generally no Chinese soldiers accompanied them to Beijing. The absence of Chinese monitors endowed the Koreans with fair freedom to visit places along their route and interview local people, enriching their travel journals, which eventually constituted a voluminous collection known as Yŏnhaengnok (The records of the journey to Beijing). All emissaries of the Qing’s fan were required to follow specific tributary routes and dared not deviate from them. For example, Ryukyu’s emissaries were instructed to arrive at Min’an in Fujian, Sulu’s at Xiamen in Fujian, those of Western countries at Macau in Guangdong, Siam’s at Humen in Guangdong, An- nam’s at Taiping in Guangxi, and Burma’s at Yongchang in Yunnan. After the emissaries reached the designated places, the governor-general and the governor of the province would report their arrival to the Ministry of Rites and instruct subordinate officials to send them on to Beijing. Chosŏn’s emissaries had no such rela- tions with officials in the provinces through which they passed, and they communicated directly with the Ministry of Rites. In other words, Chosŏn’s contacts with the Qing were under Beijing’s direct control, which enabled Beijing to use Chosŏn to portray the harmony of its Zongfan system whenever necessary. Along the overland route, the high frequency and large size of Chosŏn’s missions produced considerable and lucrative commercial opportunities for merchants from both countries. What flowed into the Qing realm in massive quantities, in addition to Korean and Japanese goods, was silver. The mission of 1712, for in- stance, carried more than two hundred thousand taels of silver to Beijing, while the one in 1777 brought more than ninety-three thousand taels. The bulk of the sil- ver was originally from Japan, acquired through trade between Tsushima and Chosŏn. The Hansŏng–Fenghuang City–Mukden–Beijing overland trade route was an extension of the Kyoto–Osaka–Tsushima–Pusan–Hansŏng overland and maritime trade route, with Hansŏng and Beijing the two major entrepôts on the com- bined route. Financially, the three nations made up an integrated international silver network, and in the eighteenth century the amount of silver that poured into the Qing from Chosŏn annually could reach five hundred thousand to six hundred thousand taels, which contributed to the Qing’s prosperity but aroused serious concerns among Korean officials.⁵⁸ In this sense, it is not an exaggeration to say that the Beijing–Hansŏng overland route was the most prosperous and most lucrative long-distance and international trade route in East Asia before Chosŏn opened treaty ports in the 1870s and 1880s. Humble Palace Memorials, Imperial Mandates and Decrees, and Orthodox Legitimacy The imperial court in Beijing and the royal court in Hansŏng interacted through meticulously formatted court documents written in accordance with highly institu- tionalized hierarchical norms. From 1637 on, the most important category among the documents that Chosŏn submitted to the Qing was the king’s humble
palace memorials (K., p’yo; Ch., biao). In 1705 the Ministry of Rites in Beijing laid down a set of new criteria for the syntax of these memorials that Chosŏn adhered to for the next 190 years, but the king was still free to use his own terms in composing other kinds of palace memorials.⁵⁹ The humble memorials were aimed at strengthening the Qing’s authority by reiterating and affirming the reciprocal and hierarchical relationship between the emperor and the king. The memorial sub- mitted by the crown prince and deputy king of Chosŏn, Yi Yun (King Gyŏngjong), on April 14, 1721, in the sixtieth year of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, to congratulate the emperor on his birthday, is a typical example. The memorial was written on a sheet of well-made Korean paper in tiny, narrow Chinese characters evenly ar- ranged in twenty-three vertical lines from right to left—although a memorial could, on occasion, exceed fifty lines—and it carefully followed the rules of honorific elevation, exactly as the Qing had mandated in 1705.⁶⁰ Refer ring to himself as “your minister” (K., sin; Ch., chen) of a vassal (Ch., fanfu), who could hardly bear his separation from the court (Ch., queting), Yi proclaimed that “Your Majesty raises all people of the world by assuming the Mandate of Heaven. The world is peaceful and imperial civilization extends to all places. Your Majesty has pacified the four seas, and ten thousand countries have come to revere Your Majesty [Ch., sihai yi er wanguo laiwang].”⁶¹ In such highly formalized memorials, the king frequently called himself “subordinate” or “minister,” Chosŏn the “small country,” and the Qing the “big coun- try,” the “upper country,” the “big dynasty,” the “central dynasty,” or the “Heavenly Dynasty.”⁶² These Qing-mandated terms exploited Chosŏn’s subordinate sta- tus to highlight the Qing’s centrality in the early eighteenth century. Year after year, Chosŏn, as the representative of the others, helped consolidate the Qing’s supreme cultural identity as well as Qing hegemony through its performance of such written subservience. Upon receipt of the king’s humble memorials, the em- peror generally wrote on the cover in red ink, “I have learned of the appreciative memorial that you, the king, respectfully presented. Let the relevant ministry [the Ministry of Rites] know.” The comments were made either in Manchu (“Wang sini kesi de hengkileme wesimbuhe be saha, harangga jurgan sa.”) or Chinese (“Lanwang zouxie. Zhidao liao. Gaibu zhidao.”). On the Qing side, the imperial decrees granting a deceased king noble rank or investing a new king with a patent of appointment also served to consolidate the hierarchy. The special terms used in these edicts had their own rules, which underwent a process of institutionalization after 1644. When the Qing invested Yi Chong as king in January 1638 (the first investiture that the Qing performed), the decree stated only that Chosŏn would be recognized as fan to the Qing forever.⁶³ But after 1644 the Manchu court began to include additional terms with strong political meanings in the Zongfan context. For example, the decree of investiture in 1649 clearly defined Chosŏn as an outer fan in a “remote area” (Ch., xiahuang) that submitted itself to the Qing’s virtues and civilization. In 1675 the phrase “cher- ishing the eastern country” (Ch., huairou dongtu) appeared in the decrees.⁶⁴ These terms substantially broadened the scope of the Qing’s political and cultural ide- ology and transformed its identity in the context of the civilized–barbarian dichotomy. On March 6, 1725, Emperor Yongzheng issued a mandate and a decree to Yi Gŭm to invest him as the king and his wife as the queen. The mandate of investi- ture (Ch., fengtian gaoming; Ma., abkai hesei g’aoming) consisted of five connected pieces of dyed ramie cloth in red, blue, black, white, and yellow from right to left. Each of the five sections was surrounded by a pattern of flying dragons (see figures 2.1 and 2.2). In the mandate Emperor Yongzheng stated, “The great strat- egy is simply to extend civilization [Ch., jiaohua; Ma., tacihiyan wen] to the countries from afar [Ch., haibang; Ma., goroki gurun]…. Generations of your court have been sincerely loyal and trustworthy and have been paying tribute diligently [Ch., zhigong qinxiu; Ma., tušan alban be kiceme faššambi].” In investing Yi Gŭm the “king of Chosŏn” (Ch., Chaoxian guowang; Ma., Coohiyan gurun i wang), the emperor emphasized that the king “shall serve as the fence on the eastern land [Ch., pinghan dongfan; Ma., dergi bade fiyanji dalikū], devoutly use the imperial calendar [Ch., qiangong zhengshuo; Ma., forgon ton be olhošome ginggulembi], pacify the land, and assist the imperial house forever [Ch., jiafu yu huangjia; Ma., ejen i boode aisilame wehiyembi].” The emperor advised the king to “use a pure and genuine
mind to serve the Heavenly court [Ch., tianshi; Ma., abkai gurun].”⁶⁵ A decree to the king articulated this point again by stating, “You should be loyal forever and efficiently govern the land as a minister from afar [Ch., houfu; Ma., jecen i golo], while you should be loyal and obedient and serve as a fence [Ch., pinghan; Ma., fiyanji dalikū] for the Heavenly house [Ch., tianjia; Ma., gurun boo].”⁶⁶ The Chinese and Manchu terms of the imperial edicts portrayed the king as a family member of the Qing court, and they became more sophisticated in the Qianlong period. The imperial edicts to the king in 1757, for instance, referred to Chosŏn as a “fence,” a “subordinate country” (Ch., shuguo; Ma., harangga gurun), a “remote submission” (Ch., yuanfu; Ma., goroki i jecen), and a “lower country” (Ch., xiaguo; Ma., fejergi gurun) of the “Middle Kingdom” (Ch., Zhongchao, Z hongbang; M., Dulimbai gurun). The edicts also emphasized that the king’s court (M., wang ni boo) had been loyal to and received special rewards from the “Heav- enly court” (Ch., tianshi; Ma., han i hargašan).⁶⁷ By invoking these norms, the Qing explicitly presented itself as the civilized center—China and the Heavenly Dy- nasty—in both Chinese and Manchu terms. In his memorials to the emperor, the king used a gold seal received from the Qing. From early 1637 to early 1653, the seal had only Manchu characters, which read Coohiyan gurun i wang ni doron (seal of the king of the country of Chosŏn). On April 22, 1653, Emperor Shunzhi, evidently displeased by the absence of Chi- nese script from the seal, instructed the Ministry of Rites to make a new seal that included “Chinese characters” (Ch., hanzi). As a result, the words Chaoxian guowang zhi yin (seal of the king of the country of Chosŏn) were added to the seal.⁶⁸ The emperor did not explain his rationale for the change, but his decision underscored the new dynasty’s Chineseness. On the Qing side, the emperors, in their mandates to Chosŏn, always used the “seal of declaring imperial mandate,” which carried both a Chinese text, Zhigao zhi bao, and a Manchu one, Hese wasimbure boobai, exactly the same text that appeared on the imperial mandates issued to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni in Tibet. The combination of languages reflected the polyglot politics of a multiethnic empire.⁶⁹
FIGURE 2.1. The Manchu section of the imperial mandate to invest the king of Chosŏn in 1725. Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, preserved at Jangseogak, the Academy of Korean Studies, Korea. Copyright Academy of Korean Studies.
FIGURE 2.2. The Chinese section of the imperial mandate to invest the king of Chosŏn in 1725. Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, preserved at Jangseogak, the Academy of Korean Studies, Korea. Copyright Academy of Korean Studies. The imperial investiture of the king helps explain a paradox in the Qing period: certain Confucian countries, in particular Chosŏn and Annam, were privately reluctant to identify the Qing as the supreme representative of Chinese culture, but in practice they never challenged its status as the superior country and fre- quently sent tributary missions to Beijing to display their deference. The explanation for the apparent paradox lies in the fact that the missions fulfilled a dual pur- pose in establishing not only the legitimacy of the Qing but also that of the monarchs of the fan. The Zongfan relationship between the Qing and its fan was an incarnation of this symbiotic and synergistic legitimacy, namely, the orthodox legitimacy embodied in the highly programmed rituals involved in the exchange of emissaries. This orthodox legitimacy was the goal for which King Taksin (r. 1767–82) of the Thonburi regime of Siam sent tributary missions to Beijing to pursue investiture after the fall of the Ayutthaya regime (1350–1767), even though King Taksin’s understanding of “paying tribute” (Ch., jingong) was very different from that of the Qing.⁷⁰ The need for legitimacy could also explain why Nguyễn Huệ, the leader of the peasant rebellion against the Lê Dynasty (1428–1788) of Annam, defeated the Qing army in 1789 but nonetheless accepted the Qing’s investiture in 1790. It was also in 1790 that Burma accepted the Qing investiture after winning the Burmese-Qing War in the early 1770s.⁷¹ In addition to pragmatic concerns reflecting geopolitics and China’s military might, securing political legit- imacy from China proved crucial for these regimes’ own rule. Tributes, Gifts, and Court-to-Court Interactions The Qing ritual code clearly listed the types and quantities of tribute that Chosŏn had to present for different purposes. After 1644, these fell into eight major cate- gories. Beyond the most official category of annual tribute, designated as “standard tribute” (Ch., zhenggong), the king generally referred to the items in the other seven categories, such as those marking the imperial birthday, the lunar New Year, and the winter solstice, as “gifts” or “local products.” The Qing accepted all of the submitted items and did not challenge the king’s choice of terms, although it preferred to refer to the items as “tribute.”⁷² While the annual tribute marked a country-to-country relationship, all other categories of tribute, which were presented specifically to the emperor, the empress, and the dowager empress, suggested a strong court-to-court connection. The Ministry of Rites accepted the annual tribute as a routine matter, but it had to sub- mit memorials to the emperor for instructions on how to handle tribute in other categories. In the early Qing, the Ministry of Rites forwarded all tribute items to the Ministry of Revenue and later to the Imperial Household Department, which was in charge of the affairs of the Manchu royal house and had its own financial system independent of the one managed by the Ministry of Revenue.⁷³ Therefore, although the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship seemed to manifest itself main- ly in hierarchical country-to-country interactions, in reality it was a dual system involving the two countries and the two courts. The gifts that the imperial envoys carried to Chosŏn were directed at specific members of the royal family, including the king, the queen, the crown prince, and the dowager queen. Usually the envoys brought first-rate silk for official robes. When imperial missions were dispatched to extend the emperor’s condolences on the deaths of core royalty, some gifts were consumed at the funeral ceremonies, while others were converted into 150 to 300 taels of silver by the Ministry of Rev- enue and delivered to the Korean royal house. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, imperial envoys followed a precise routine to deliver their condolences and gifts. The last such mission occurred in 1890, and it is explored in detail in chapter 5. Receptions, Ritual Performances, and the Civilized Qing Chosŏn’s emissaries were well accommodated at each transfer station after they entered China, but they had to prepare food for themselves until they arrived in
Beijing. Upon reaching their residence in Beijing, the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations, the emissaries first visited the Ministry of Rites to present the king’s memorials and the list of tribute items. All emissaries from Chosŏn and from other countries, as well as the kings they represented, had to submit their documents to the emperor through the ministry, with which they could communicate via official notes (Ch., ziwen). In the main hall of the ministry, the emis- saries would pass the memorials to the head officials, who would place the memorials in front of the imperial tablet on a table in the middle of the hall. The emis- saries would then kneel down once to make three prostrations toward the head officials, who would in turn bow three times to the emissaries with their hands folded in front (Ch., zuoyi, a ritual practiced between officials of equal ranks). Once they had finished, the emissaries would kneel down three times, each time making three prostrations toward the tablet.⁷⁴ The ministry would submit the documents to the emperor the next day, while the emissaries returned to their resi- dence to wait for the imperial audience. The Qing’s commander general of the Metropolitan Infantry Brigade Yamen (Ch., Bujun tongling yamen) sent soldiers to guard the emissaries’ residence.⁷⁵ Three additional institutions were involved in hosting the guests: the Court of Imperial Entertainments (Ch., Guanglu si) delivered daily food and drink, distrib- uted to each member of the mission according to rank; the Ministry of Revenue brought fodder for the Koreans’ horses; and the Ministry of Works provided char- coal. These meticulous regulations embodied the Qing’s policy of “cherishing men from afar.” During their stay in Beijing, the emissaries had various responsibilities to fulfill. If there was a grand court assembly of officials in the Forbidden City, the emis- saries had to attend and pay homage at the end of the wing of the Qing civil officials. A major task was to pay a formal visit to the emperor at either the Summer Palace in Beijing or the Summer Palace in Rehe (Chengde). After the audience, the emissaries would be invited to attend certain events, such as banquets in the Forbidden City, performances of Chinese operas, or fireworks shows at the Summer Palace.⁷⁶ All ritual procedures, in particular the highest level of kowtow, were minutely regulated and fastidiously practiced. Such rituals between the Chinese emperor and foreign emissaries had been defined and institutionalized at least since the “great rituals” laid out in The Rituals of the Great Tang (Ch., Da Tang Kaiyuan li), compiled in the eighth century.⁷⁷ In the Ming and the Qing, the rituals became extremely elaborate, and the Korean emissaries were required to rehearse the complicated ceremonies in advance as a sign of their loyalty and as part of the process that would “civilize the barbarians in the four quarters” (Ch., feng siyi).⁷⁸ Rituals helped maintain the political arrangement and strengthen the iden- tities of all participants.⁷⁹ In grand court gatherings, emissaries from Chosŏn were usually the first representatives of the outer fan to perform the rituals for the emperor, as on February 9, 1675, at the Lantern Festival, where the Chosŏn emissaries congratulated Kangxi ahead of their Russian, Kalka Mongol, and Ūlet Mon- gol counterparts.⁸⁰ Chosŏn’s role as an exemplar was particularly prominent in the late eighteenth century during the Qianlong period, when the Qing in many cases “followed the model for Chosŏn” (Ch., zhao Chaoxian zhi li) in managing its bilateral exchanges with Annam, Ryukyu, and Siam.⁸¹ Chinese scholars at the time also widely regarded Chosŏn as the “model for other countries” (Ch., zhuguo zhi zhang).⁸² The emissaries also attended two major official banquets, one held at the Ministry of Rites and the other at the emissaries’ residence. An astonishing number of institutions were involved in their organization: the Court of Imperial Entertainments; the Food Supply Office (Ch., Jingshan qingli si) of the Ministry of Rites; the Ministries of Revenue, Works, and War; Shuntian Prefecture; and the Revenue Superintendent of Chongwen Gate (Ch., Liangyi shuiwu jiandu). Royal contractors (Ch., hanghu) were also assigned specific tasks. Each of the three key members of the mission was treated to what was known as a fifth-level Manchu banquet and the other members to a sixth-level one, preferential treatment not afforded to emissaries from any other country. The high cost of the banquets was fully covered by the Qing and, not surprisingly, the banquets were replete with ritual performances reinforcing the bilateral hierarchical order.⁸³ The imperial code included an “illustration of the banquets for Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries” (Ch., Chaoxian gongshi yantu) and specified that the seating arrangements for banquets held for
emissaries from other countries should follow the Chosŏn pattern (Ch., geguo gongshi fangci).⁸⁴ During their sojourn in Beijing, the emissaries, particularly scholars without official status or responsibilities, were enthusiastic about socializing with Qing literati. The tradition of such interactions had started in Ming times but had been suspended in the Ming-Qing transition period because of the anti-Manchu atti- tudes that were prevalent in Chosŏn. Indeed, before the eighteenth century, the three key members of the tributary mission barely left their residence to meet with Chinese officials or scholars because many Korean scholars embracing Neo-Confucianism saw the Qing as a barbarous country and regarded the tributary mis- sion as a humiliation.⁸⁵ In the 1760s, however, literary social gatherings involving Korean emissaries again became frequent and continued until the 1890s. In the 1860s, many Chinese officials, such as Dong Wenhuan (1833–77) of the Imperial Academy (Ch., Hanlin yuan), who was known for calligraphy and epigraphy, ac- tively socialized with Koreans.⁸⁶ On the Korean side, Pak Kyusu (1807–76), an emissary who visited Beijing in 1872, befriended more than a hundred famous Chi- nese scholars through social gatherings.⁸⁷ Versed in the same Confucian classics, adhering to the same Neo-Confucianism, and using the same Chinese characters, the Qing and Chosŏn scholars could easily identify one another as men of the same caliber. They met for drinks, composed poems, and exchanged their own compositions and calligraphy. That Chosŏn was known as “Little China” might also have lent these transnational literary social gatherings a homogenous cultural identity. These savants formed an informal perennial club in which they exchanged ideas about history and literature and improved their perceptions of each other’s countries. According to Key- hiuk Kim, their communications also “assured Korea of a constant stream of information and knowledge concerning the latest intellectual trends in China.”⁸⁸ When they gathered with their Han Chinese friends, the Korean guests usually showed an aversion to Manchu customs, such as the Manchu-style official robe and hairstyle, and were very proud of their Ming-style robes and hats, in keeping with the civilized–barbarian dichotomy. But in 1766, when Hong Tae-yong (1731– 83) expressed contempt for the Manchus’ control of China, he found to his surprise that his Han Chinese counterparts, such as Yan Cheng (1733–67), did not appreciate his anti-Manchu sentiments; instead, Yan and his colleagues applauded the Qing’s support for civilization. After intensive conversation with his Chi- nese friends, Hong conceded that Koreans on a fundamental level still belonged to the “barbarians by the sea” (K., haesang chi iin). By concluding that “the civi- lized and the barbarians are the same” (K., Hwa–I il ya), he acknowledged the Qing’s civilized status.⁸⁹ Through such interactions, many Korean and Chinese scholars became close friends and continued to correspond even after the emissaries returned to Chosŏn. When Yan Cheng was on the brink of death, he laid a letter from Hong on his abdomen to indicate how deeply he treasured their friendship. When news of Yan’s death reached Hansŏng, Hong burst into tears and commented that he had lost a brother to whom he was as attached as he was to his right arm.⁹⁰ Like the emissaries from Hansŏng who experienced a combination of hardship and comfort as they made their way to Beijing, Qing imperial envoys also had to endure discomfort until they passed through Fenghuang Gate on their journey toward Ŭiju. There they were welcomed and treated well by the Korean side. Al- though the land between the gate and the Yalu River was Qing territory, the Korean prefect of Ŭiju was able to dispatch Korean officers, Manchu interpreters, and servants to welcome the envoys at the three stations in this area: Congxiu, Mazhuan, and Sanjiang. At each station the Koreans would set up temporary houses for the envoys and provide hearty meals that could feature more than thirty different dishes. In Ŭiju the prefect treated each envoy to a banquet with more than 130 kinds of food.⁹¹ Receptions along the way from Ŭiju to P’yŏngyang and then to Hansŏng were even more luxurious, and the cost was significant.⁹² In contrast to their Korean counterparts in Beijing, the Manchu envoys in Hansŏng confined themselves to ritual exchanges. Beijing-style literary social gath- erings did take place in Shuri, the capital of Ryukyu, but not in Hansŏng, where the envoys, along with their assistants, never left their lodgings to converse with local officials or scholars.⁹³ No transnational literati club like the one in Beijing ever formed in Hansŏng. After 1658, when Emperor Shunzhi put an end to
Manchu trade in Hansŏng, the imperial envoys were always temporary visitors who returned home as soon as their mission was accomplished. In addition, al- most all imperial envoys before the early eighteenth century made a point of visiting the Samjŏndo stele in a southern suburb of Hansŏng. The Koreans regarded the stele, with its inscriptions celebrating the Manchu conquest of Chosŏn, as a humiliation, and some Confucian scholars and students argued that it should be destroyed, so the envoys’ visits were sensitive and made the stele a barometer of the two countries’ relationship. In 1723 the Qing’s two envoys made a formal visit to the stele with a number of Korean officials. At the site, the vice envoy knelt down three times, each time bowing his head three times. In 1724 and 1729, the imperial envoys also paid formal visits to the stele, again accompanied by a group of Koreans. On these occasions both the Manchu envoys and their Korean interpreters kowtowed to the stele. In 1731, however, instead of visiting Samjŏndo, the envoys simply asked for copies of the inscriptions on the stele, and after 1762, they no longer even requested transcripts. By the late nineteenth century, Qing officials had only a vague understanding of the stele and were uncertain whether it featured a Manchu inscription.⁹⁴ During their sojourn in Hansŏng, the Qing envoys performed four major ceremonies in which the king participated. The first was the welcome at the Gate of Receiving Imperial Favors (K., Yŏngŭn mun) outside the West Gate of the city. The king bowed once to the imperial documents, then returned to his palace in the city. The second, conducted inside the king’s palace, was the transfer of the imperial documents and other items to the king. The king kowtowed four times to the imperial edicts. In addition, the king and the envoys bowed once or twice to each other with their hands folded in front. The king, on his own territory, did not need to perform the highest level of kowtow toward the imperial decrees or other documents and gifts, as his ministers would do in Beijing. The third ceremony was the king’s visit to the envoys at their residence, the South Palace Annex, where the Koreans honored the envoys with several tea banquets. Finally, there was the send-off at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country on the city’s outskirts, where the king provided a tea ceremony for the departing envoys. Contact between the two sides was always conducted through the Korean Ministry of Rites. All of the procedures in these ceremonies were regulated by ritual codes and were executed until the early 1890s. The Korean side had no obligation to report any domestic affairs to the envoys, nor would the envoys intervene in such affairs. Rather, this stylized interaction in Hansŏng endowed the monarch of Chosŏn with political legitimacy, continuously consolidating the reciprocal and hierarchical Zongfan relations between the two countries. Celebrating the Relationship: The Qing Emperor’s Roles in the Zongfan System As the institutional agent at the highest level of the Zongfan hierarchy, the emperor could exploit the occasions of imperial audiences and his patriarchal authority to modify and lubricate the mechanism from the top down. As the following sections show, he could freely endow tributary emissaries with various extra gifts, supervise and admonish the Manchu envoys to Chosŏn and the Manchus along the border in Manchuria, and make final decisions about border conflicts. Consolidating the System through Imperial Gifts and Extra Gifts After Chosŏn’s emissaries presented their tribute gifts to the emperor, the sovereign would bestow “routine gifts” (Ch., lishang) on them and the king. At least since the Shunzhi period, the Qing presented the tribute missions with gifts whose value exceeded that of the tribute, based on detailed calculations.⁹⁵ The gifts and their quantities varied according to the category of the mission, and when the Korean envoy was a member of the royal house, the amount and quality of the gifts would increase. The silk and satin among the gifts were taken from the Imperial Household Department, rather than the Ministry of Revenue, in order to show the emperor’s personal favor toward the “king of the fan ” (Ch., fanwang). To mark the imperial birthday and the lunar New Year, the Qing would give the king a second-class horse with bridle and each of the two envoys a third-class horse with bridle, highlighting the Manchu character of the Qing regime. The Qing
would also give the envoys silver in the average amount of at least 680 taels (for annual tributary missions and winter solstice missions) or 850 taels (for imperial birthday missions and lunar New Year missions), along with other gifts.⁹⁶ Some scholars have argued that the routine gifts were an institutionalized part of the overall Zongfan mechanism and hence afforded little flexibility.⁹⁷ Yet the emperor could break this routine at his discretion by awarding the emissaries extra gifts during audiences. For instance, in early 1795 Emperor Qianlong awarded the king a hundred copies of the Chinese character for “happiness” (Ch., fu) that he had written on small squares of red paper.⁹⁸ This sort of largesse was seem- ingly random,⁹⁹ but it did not simply represent imperial prerogative or a deviation from the flowcharts of ritual codes. Rather, the practice of giving supererogatory gifts highlighted the Qing policy of “giving more to the visitors and benefiting less from them” (Ch., houwang bolai), as Emperor Qian-long explained it to Chosŏn in 1736.¹⁰⁰ The emperor thus moderated the system by lending it flexibility and novelty. In the late eighteenth century, Emperor Qianlong disbursed an increasing quantity of extra gifts, while the amount of the tribute sent by Chosŏn remained remarkably stable. The extra imperial gifts reached their peak in the 1790s, a time when Emperor Qianlong was particularly keen to enhance the image of his dynasty as the Heavenly Dynasty. Given these priorities, the Qing court was not con- cerned about maintaining a balance between the value of the tributes and that of the imperial gifts. In 1793 a Korean emissary acknowledged that the Qing treated Chosŏn in such a favorable way that the Qing’s spending on accommodations for the tributary emissaries and the value of the various imperial gifts far exceeded the value of the Korean “local products.”¹⁰¹ Constructing a Positive Image of the Qing and Highlighting the Envoys’ Manchu Identity The Qing emperor sought to further burnish his dynasty’s image in his contacts with Chosŏn by taking steps to prevent the Manchu envoys to Chosŏn and the bannermen who resided along the border in Manchuria from compromising the dignity of the Heavenly Dynasty through open degeneracy. Emperor Qianlong, for example, felt it necessary to extend the Qing’s prolonged campaign to maintain Manchu traditions and identity to the field of the Sino-Korean communications by closely monitoring his envoys’ behavior. His first reform aimed to bolster the Manchu envoys’ integrity by discouraging corruption during their trip to Chosŏn. In 1736, after reducing by half the amount of the gifts the Koreans were expected to provide to the imperial envoys, the emperor punished two envoys who violated the new rules. He decreed that in the fu- ture the garrison generals at Mukden and Shanhai Pass should check the envoys’ luggage when they returned from Hansŏng to make sure they had not received unauthorized gifts.¹⁰² Until the last imperial mission in 1890, subsequent emperors continued to admonish their envoys to Chosŏn to remain upright and honest. Compared with their pre-1637 Ming counterparts, who had exploited Chosŏn for maximum profit, the Manchu envoys, in particular after the Kangxi period, be- haved well on their visits to Chosŏn, which helped reduce the tension between the two countries caused by the Qing invasions in the 1630s. The Korean scholar Hong Tae-yong acknowledged in 1766 that the Qing was much more generous and kind to Chosŏn than the Ming had been.¹⁰³ The Qianlong emperor also believed that the Manchu officers and soldiers in Manchuria should focus on border security. In 1737, under the claim of “giving kindness to the people from afar,” he decided to prohibit the Manchus from trading with Koreans in the Middle River area of the Yalu River and to ask “merchants and commoners of inner China” (Ch., neidi shangmin) to undertake this trade instead. The Middle River market had been established in 1592 between Chosŏn and the Ming; it had barely opened during the Ming-Qing war but was restored as a major trading center between the Qing and Chosŏn after 1646. Manchu ban- nermen and merchants near Fenghuang City had thereafter constituted the Qing’s traders in the market. Now the Qianlong emperor abruptly concluded that the bannermen were “not good at doing business” and sought to direct his Manchu warriors back to the military realm. The king, however, was deeply concerned about the potential arrival of the people of “inner China,” so he petitioned the emperor to maintain the trade with the bannermen. The emperor granted the
petition but explained that by people of “inner China” he meant only those living near the banner garrisons in Manchuria, not those south of the Great Wall or in Beijing.¹⁰⁴ This episode shows that in the border area the Manchu court was concerned more about political consequences and border security than about the economic interests of the local bannermen. It also suggests that at least by the 1730s the Qing had come to integrate Manchuria into its concept of “inner China” (Ch., neidi), further nullifying the border function of the Great Wall within the multiethnic empire. Emperor Qianlong’s more dramatic reform took place in 1763, when he dictated that all Manchu envoys to Chosŏn from that moment onward should ride hors- es instead of taking sedan chairs in Chosŏn. The emperor explained that although Chosŏn had provided sedan chairs for the missions to show its obedience to and respect for the “imperial envoys of the Heavenly Dynasty,” the Manchu officials were expert horsemen and should not ride in sedan chairs. The emperor in- structed the king to end permanently the convention of welcoming the imperial envoys with sedan chairs and to provide only horses instead. The Qing docu- ments do not explain why the emperor suddenly changed this longstanding convention. But according to the first-rank translator of the mission led by Hongying (1707–71), Xu Zongmen, who was a Beijing resident of Korean background, the emperor had originally picked another Manchu official as the envoy but, realizing how obese the chosen official was, asked him how he would make the long trip to Chosŏn. The envoy replied that since he would ride in a sedan chair, his weight would not be a problem. The emperor became angry, and to underline the Manchu martial spirit, he immediately replaced the envoy with Hongying, who was an excellent horseman. The emperor admonished Hongying to display “righteousness” (Ch., zhengda) in the outer fan and to avoid any “wretchedness” (Ch., weisuo). Meanwhile, the Korean emissaries, the emperor said, were exempt from the new rules and could maintain their custom of taking carriages to Beijing.¹⁰⁵ The Qianlong emperor’s quest to maintain and strengthen the Manchuness of the Manchus under his supervision thus helped the Qing improve its image in the eyes of its subordinate and to showcase its virtues in practice. Arbitrating Border Disputes The Qing emperor also served as the highest arbitrator in border conflicts and border-crossing disputes. In each case of border conflict with Chosŏn, it was the emperor—rather than the king, a historical precedent, or a border rule—who made the final decision. The geographical connection between the two countries occasioned a considerable number of illegal border crossings from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. These thorny cases posed a challenge to the Qing, in particular to the emperors, in terms of balancing the Qing’s lofty Zongfan discourse and its practical concerns. This aspect of the Qing’s policy underwent a major change from the Kangxi to the Qianlong period. In the Shunzhi and early Kangxi periods, the Manchu monarchs often doled out severe pun- ishments to the king or his officials over border disputes and often sent special envoys to Chosŏn for in-person investigation. The emperors embraced this ap- proach primarily because the Qing had not yet consolidated its rule in the wake of the Southern Ming (1644–62) and its influences and was worried about the possibility of a Chosŏn rebellion against the Qing. But after the Kangxi emperor suppressed the revolt of the Three Feudatories in the 1680s, the Qing praised Chosŏn for its loyalty and adopted a more relaxed policy on border conflicts with the country, eventually ceasing to send special investigative envoys. The Qing court in the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods following Kangxi governed a country that had been unified to an unprecedented degree since 1644. The court consequently focused on reinforcing the cosmopolitan ideology of all-under-Heaven in the Qing’s foreign relations. Although the emperors had clear views on the Qing’s geographical borders, they preferred to rely on traditional Zongfan norms in settling border disputes with Chosŏn. The Qing’s border policy toward Chosŏn thus became more conservative than aggressive, forming a sharp contrast with the Qing’s contemporary policy in the southwest and northwest, where the new empire continued to expand its territory. On the Chosŏn side, the savvy king and local officials applied the same Zongfan norms in their sophisticated ne- gotiations with their Qing counterparts, leaving the emperor in Beijing with no option but to endorse one Korean proposal after another.
The Mangniushao case provides a good example. In 1745 the Manchu general of Mukden, Daldangga (?–1760), suggested to Emperor Qianlong that the Qing set up a border outpost at Mangniushao near the Yalu River in order to prevent Koreans from illegally crossing the border river to sell or buy grains or to search for ginseng in Manchuria. Although in 1731 Daldangga’s predecessor, Nasutu (?–1749), had likewise proposed an outpost at Mangniushao, Emperor Yongzheng had rejected the proposal because of the king’s opposition and upheld his father’s policy, in place since 1715, of prohibiting all construction in this area.¹⁰⁶ Prompted by an increase in illegal border crossings, Daldangga resurrected Nasutu’s plan and proposed to repair the broken parts of the Willow Palisade and to open lands outside the palisade for cultivation. Emperor Qianlong initially supported Daldangga’s plan and sent a Mongol minister, Bandi (?–1755), to visit the area to confirm that Mangniushao was indeed inside China’s borders and that it would be appropriate for China to establish an outpost there. At the last moment, however, the emperor reversed his stance, invoking the precedents set by the decisions of his grandfather in 1715 and his father in 1731, as well as a decision he himself had made in another case in 1737. To justify his rejection of the proposal, he cited the imperative of “cherishing the small.” Furthermore, the emperor told Daldangga that no further such proposals should be made to the court and that Daldangga and his successors in Mukden should follow established rules in managing border affairs with Chosŏn.¹⁰⁷ In this way, the emperor reduced the possibility of further conflicts in this border area and helped stabilize the two coun- tries’ relationship from the top down. Barbarianizing the Periphery: The Qing’s Institutional Zongfan Discourse The Changing Meaning of Barbarians from Yongzheng to Qianlong The Qing interpretation of the civilized–barbarian distinction underwent a sharp change in the transitional days between the reigns of Yongzheng and Qianlong. In the late 1720s, Emperor Yongzheng had made the putative barbarity of the Qing a public issue among Qing scholars because of his response to the case of Zeng Jing (1679–1735). Encouraged by the civilized–barbarian discourse, Zeng had plotted to rebel against the Manchu “barbarians,” but after he was prosecuted, he re- versed his stance and endorsed the Qing, whereupon the emperor released him from prison. In June 1733, while Zeng was in the provinces giving lectures on the dynasty’s virtues, the emperor issued an edict to prohibit the practice of changing Chinese characters with the meaning of “barbarian” (Ch., hu, lu, yi, di) in books. The Manchu monarch defined the term “barbarian” geographically and confessed that the ancestors of the current dynasty could be called “eastern barbarians,” like ancient Chinese saints. This tone had been set by his great-grandfather Hongtaiji in 1636 in his letter to the king of Chosŏn, and Yongzheng himself had re- peated the same points in his book responding to Zeng, Great Righteousness Resolving Confusion (Ch., Dayi juemi lu) in 1729.¹⁰⁸ By proclaiming that “people living both within and outside China belong to the same family” (Ch., Zhong Wai yijia), Yongzheng insisted that the civilized–barbarian distinction should not be under- stood in a cultural sense, and even if it were, only those who were “beyond civilization” (Ch., wanghua zhi wai), like the Zunghar, might truly be called “barbarians.”¹⁰⁹ Under this definition, the outer fan of the Qing also seemed to be excluded from the category of barbarians. Yongzheng’s statements suggest that the Manchu rulers embraced cultural egalitarianism in order to redistribute cultural resources within the multiethnic empire.¹¹⁰ It is safe to say that the Manchu emperor was trying to overcome the prejudice inherent in the stereotypical civilized–barbarian distinction among Han Chinese intellectuals in the process of consolidating the Manchu regime’s orthodox legitimacy. This sustained effort can also be seen in the move by Yongzheng’s father and grandfather to expand considerably the list of Chinese monarchs who were enshrined in the Temple of Ancient Monarchs (Ch., Lidai di- wang miao), with the goal of establishing the Qing as the legitimate successor to previous dynasties that had likewise been identified as “China.”¹¹¹ With Yongzheng’s policy, the yardstick for judging “barbarians” suddenly snapped, as the ruling dynasty now identified itself both with the ancient rulers and with the
eastern barbarians. After assuming the throne in 1735, the Qianlong emperor not only quickly revoked his father’s pardon and executed Zeng but also reversed Yongzheng’s ap- proach by clearly differentiating the “civilized” Qing from the “barbarian” countries surrounding it. Qianlong thus brought the civilized–barbarian discourse back to its pre-Yongzheng meaning, in which cultural factors played a pivotal role. He exploited his father’s heritage by turning the latter’s policy of permitting the free and public use of all Chinese characters for “barbarian” into a tool for propagating the opposite message in the context of the civilized– barbarian discourse— namely, one that excluded the Qing from this category. No longer would the Great Qing downgrade itself to the rank of barbarian.¹¹² Consequently, in the Qian- long period the use of the term “foreign barbarians” in official documents reached its historical zenith.¹¹³ Through this terminology, the Qing combined its civi- lized centrality with cultural superiority. Qianlong achieved this symbolic goal by formally designating all other countries as barbarians, along with the majority of the ethnic groups under his rule, and one of the most important targets of this barbarianization at the normative level was Chosŏn. At the time when Yongzheng published his book on the definition of “barbarian,” some Manchu envoys to Chosŏn had taken to visiting Jizi Shrine in P’yŏngyang on their way back from Hansŏng.¹¹⁴ As mentioned in the introduction, Jizi was said to be the founding father of the ancient Korean regime, invested by the Chinese monarch of the Zhou Dynasty with the lands of Chosŏn, where he maintained a familistic and tributary relationship with the central court of China. Given the intense debate around ethnicity and the civilized–barbarian dichotomy in the late years of Yongzheng’s reign, the Manchu envoys’ visits to Jizi Shrine could help the Manchu regime bolster its Chineseness and its claims to legitimacy beyond its borders. When the Qing overcame the challenge of the civilized– barbarian distinction within China in the first half of the Qianlong period, visits to Jizi Shrine ceased, although Chinese historical records continued to celebrate the familial relationship between the Chinese and the Koreans. The Qing’s Systematic, Institutional Barbarianization of Chosŏn and Others In June 1751 the Qianlong emperor instructed the governors-general and governors of border provinces to draw and submit pictures of “domestic and foreign bar- barians” (Ch., neiwai miaoyi, waiyi fanzhong) in order to demonstrate the flourishing of the Qing.¹¹⁵ The emperor was following a precedent set by Emperor Taizong (r. 627–49) of the Tang Dynasty, who was believed to have brought China its most prosperous days in the pre-Qing era. Since Tang Taizong had commis- sioned paintings of the barbarians to celebrate the great moment in which “ten thousand countries came to revere the emperor” (Ch., wanguo laichao),¹¹⁶ Qian- long had every reason to commemorate his dynasty’s accomplishments in the same way. Even during the Qing expansion into Central Asia, Qianlong identified “the efforts of the Han and Tang dynasties to extend Chinese power into Central Asia” as “historical milestones” by which to measure his own progress.¹¹⁷ Beyond the obvious political factors, contemporary popular culture may also have motivated Qianlong’s desire for an illustrated record of the Qing’s imperial expansion. As a big fan of Chinese opera who contributed to the birth of Peking opera, Qianlong may have been influenced by popular operas that extolled the virtues of the civilized center of the world. These operas can be dated at least to the Yuan, but in the Ming and early Qing they were still being performed in cities such as Beijing. Their scripts described the Ming as the “Heavenly Dynasty,” the “upper country,” or the “central civilized country,” bordered by “barbarians in four directions” (primarily represented as Chosŏn, Annam, and political units in Inner Asia) who paid tribute and presented palace memorials to the great em- peror of China.¹¹⁸ In 1761, ten years after Qianlong ordered the drawings, the first edition of the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Ch., Huang Qing zhigong tu) was published in four volumes, featuring six hundred pictures of people from the Qing’s outer fan and from “barbarian places” within Qing territory or on its periphery. The first picture in the collection was of a Korean official who wore a Ming-style official robe but was labeled “a barbarian official of the country of
Chosŏn” (Ch., Chaoxian guo yiguan) (see figure 2.3). Once again, Chosŏn served as the model for others in the collection, and its prototypical role was made clear by Qing scholars in the Essentials of Complete Books of the Four Storehouses Catalog (Ch., Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao).¹¹⁹ Chosŏn, “Little China,” was thus institu- tionally converted into a country of barbarians by the Qing’s political discourse and imperial documentary mechanism. Following Chosŏn, other countries, including Ryukyu, Annam, Siam, Sulu, Lanchang, Burma, Britain, France, Japan, the Netherlands, and Russia, likewise be- came barbarians in the Qing nomenclature, as did many of the diverse peoples within Qing territory. In nearly every case, the Qing narrative constructed an impe- rial pedigree by reviewing a long history of Zongfan relations with the foreign “country” (Ch., guo; Ma., gurun) or domestic “tribe” (Ch., buluo; Ma., aiman) from the Zhou to the Ming Dynasties and emphasized that it was the Qing’s merits that prompted the “barbarians” to “send emissaries to come and pay tribute” (Ch., qianshi rugong; Ma., elcin takūrafi albabun jafanjimbi) or “come to kowtow with tribute” (Ch., chaogong; Ma., albabun jafame hengkilenjimbi).¹²⁰ In this way, the Qing systematically assimilated the historical legacies of previous dynasties into its own Zongfan relations with these countries and tribes and consolidated its legitimacy as the civilized center, or Zhongguo (Ma., Dulimbai gurun).¹²¹ Also in 1761, in order to celebrate the empress dowager’s seventieth birthday, the Qing published another magnificent collection, Illustrations of the Great Celebration (Ch., Luhuan huijing tu). The first illustration carried the title “Ten thousand coun- tries came to revere the emperor,” the precise phrase the Tang Dynasty had used, and Chosŏn’s emissaries occupied a distinguished position within it.¹²² If there was a “documentary institutionalization” for the Qing,¹²³ in terms of the Qing’s construction of its civilized identity, this process was substantially accomplished in 1761.
FIGURE 2.3. A Chosŏn official in the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Huang Qing zhigong tu, 33). Behind the cheerful facade of the great multiethnic empire lay the axiom of the Qing’s centrality in the world. And that world, of course, often found its way to the Qing threshold. Britain, which the Qing knew as “the country of Ying ji li” (“Ying ji li” is a transliteration of “England”; Ch., Yingjili guo; Ma., Ing gi lii gurun), was one of the countries portrayed as barbarian in the collection of 1761. At the end of that year, the Qianlong emperor instructed his representatives in Guangzhou to notify the “men from afar” and “foreign barbarians” there—the British merchants—that “the Heavenly Dynasty has everything it needs, so it does not need foreign barbarians to bring trivial goods for trade.”¹²⁴ The edict was a response to petitions from James Flint in 1759 and Nicholas Skottowe in 1761. The two were representatives of the British merchants who wanted to change the Canton system of trade, which channeled all trade with the West through that south- ern port. Their efforts not only were futile but in fact led to stricter regulations on Western traders in China.¹²⁵ In this sense, the rebuff that George Macartney’s mission later received from the emperor in 1793 was merely a repetition of the institutionalized rhetoric that had been directed at the British in China more than three decades earlier. Popularizing Chosŏn’s Status as Foreign Barbarians in Imperial Discourse The prolonged construction of the Qing’s new identity and the reorientation of its political discourse vis-à-vis other countries was not just the result of the emper- or’s personal activities or political motivations, imposed on the administration from the top down. Nor should they be understood purely as the outcome of implementing the political will of the Manchu court. Rather, Qing officials at the local level, from counties to prefectures to provinces, also contributed to this construction from the bottom up. As a result, in the eighteenth century, Chosŏn’s status as foreign barbarians was popularized within the norms of Qing foreign relations. This point is illustrated by the Qing policy toward shipwrecked fishermen from Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, and other countries who were rescued by local Chi- nese officials along the coast. At least from the early Qianlong period, Qing officials called these victims “barbarians who suffered from storms” (Ch., zaofeng nanyi; Ma., edun de lasihibufi jobolon de tušaha i niyalma) and sent them to Beijing or to the nearest provincial capital, from whence they could return home with embassies from their countries. From the 1730s to the 1880s, the Qing archives were full of such reports of local officials looking after shipwrecked fishermen; re- ports concerning fishermen from Chosŏn were particularly prominent.¹²⁶ By accommodating these victims on humanitarian grounds, the Qing sought to high- light its policy of “cherishing men from afar” and to “display the deep and outstanding merits of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., zhao tianchao rouyuan shenren; Ma., abkai gurun i goroki urse be gosire šumin gosin be iletulembi). This sort of rhetoric, aimed at justifying and consolidating the “way of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao tizhi; Ma., abkai gurun i doro yoso), reached its peak in the Qianlong period.¹²⁷ Chosŏn again represented the best example of the “way of the Heavenly Dynasty,” a fact that permeated many aspects of Qing-Chosŏn contacts. For instance, in 1776, one thousand taels of silver belonging to a Korean mission were stolen by Chinese thieves near Mukden. Emperor Qianlong instructed the Manchu gen- eral of Mukden, Hūngšang (1718–81), to compensate the mission for its losses in order to “uphold the way of our Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., he wo tianchao tizhi; Ma. musei amba gurun i doro de acanambi). The emperor emphasized in his Chinese edict that “the Chosŏn are a people of foreign barbarians” (Ch., Chaoxian nai waiyi zhi ren), further elucidating in the Manchu version of the edict that “the people of the country of Chosŏn are a people of foreign barbarians” (Ma., Coohiyan gurun i niyalma serengge, tulergi aiman i niyalma).¹²⁸ This case was not exceptional, and the wealth of similar cases indicates the maturation of the Qing’s Zongfan discourse.¹²⁹ Despite the harmonious imperial picture the Qing painted, its model fan was simultaneously creating an alternate vision. While Chosŏn continued publicly to display its obedience to the Qing, sending tributary missions to Beijing over and above what imperial edicts demanded, in private the Chosŏn king and his
officials, along with Chosŏn intellectuals, were reluctant to identify the Qing as the supreme representative of Chinese culture. This story is explored in the next chapter.
2
BARBARIANIZING CHOSŎN
The Chosŏn Model and the Chinese Empire, 1644–1761
The year 1644 marked the beginning of a new stage in the Qing’s exploitation of the Chosŏn model as an institutionalized policy for constructing a new imperial order within and beyond the Qing’s borders. Informed by Chosŏn’s status as the Qing’s prototypical outer fan, this model manifested itself in well-established and highly programmed formalities in the contacts between the Qing and its outer fan. Through the Chosŏn model, the Qing rulers initiated a twofold transformation by reversing and institutionalizing the discourse of the civilized–barbarian distinction: they enshrined the Qing as the new Heavenly Dynasty at the center of the known universe and converted Chosŏn and other countries into countries of barbarians on its periphery. The Qing accomplished this transformation conclusively in the middle of the eighteenth century, when the court published the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Ch., Huang Qing zhigong tu).
This chapter reveals the prolonged process by which the Qing gradually reconstructed a Chinese empire in the post-Ming world by legitimizing, enhancing, and practicing its new dual identity as China/Zhongguo and the Heavenly Dynasty through the Chosŏn model in its foreign relations from the first half of the seventeenth century to the second half of the eighteenth century. Over the course of this century and a half, the macrotransformation of the Manchu regime’s identity in the cosmopolitan politico-cultural context was deeply connected with its microtrans-formation in the Manchu-Chosŏn framework. If there was a tendency among China’s neighbors to decenter the Middle Kingdom after the Ming, this chapter brings to light the process of recentering the Middle Kingdom undertaken by the Qing.¹
Establishing a Dual Identity: The Qing as China and the Heavenly Dynasty
On October 30, 1644, Emperor Shunzhi offered a grand sacrifice to Heaven and Earth in the Qing’s new capital, Beijing. He asserted that the Qing would pacify China (Ch., sui Zhongguo) and set a good example for ten thousand countries (Ch., biaozheng wanbang).² For many people, this event marked the rise of the Qing as the equivalent of China/Zhongguo. In 1767, after finding that a magistrate in Yunnan Province had failed to refer to the Qing as the Heavenly Dynasty or China/Zhongguo in an official note to the foreign barbarians of Burma, Emperor Qianlong furiously pointed out that it is the rule for one to refer to the court as the ‘Heavenly Dynasty’ or ‘China’ when one mentions it to men from afar. Our country has unified the central area and external areas, and even the barbarians know the Great Qing’s virtue and civilization.³
Emperor Qianlong’s pronouncement indicates that the terms Heavenly Dynasty and Zhongguo were interchangeable. Historians of the Qing and modern China tend to follow the emperor, or at least the Qing’s political discourse as developed by the emperor, by treating China/Zhongguo and the Heavenly Dynasty as synonymous terms, both referring to the political unit of the Qing. Yet what the emperor did not mention—or was perhaps not able to realize—was that the Qing did not acquire the two titles simultaneously when it replaced the Ming in the early seventeenth century. As the emperor indicated, the two terms were used for the Qing almost exclusively in the context of foreign relations with men from afar or foreign barbarians, which generally referred to foreigners. In the domestic context, these terms were replaced by others, such as the Great Qing, our dynasty (Ch., wochao, benchao, or guochao), our country (Ch., wo guojia), and the imperial dynasty (Ch., huangchao or shengchao). In the first years after 1644, some Qing officials described the new regime as the Qing Dynasty (Ch., Qingchao), a successor to the Ming Dynasty in the context of foreign communications; this usage is found in correspondence between officials in Guangzhou
(Canton) and Siam in 1653. But Qingchao remains rare in Qing documents.⁴
As the Qing took over Beijing in 1644 and consolidated its rule over inner China afterward, it completed its transformation into Zhongguo, but its refashioning into the Heavenly Dynasty had barely started. In the late 1640s, when the Manchu Eight Banners were marching into South China, Southwest China, and Northwest China, the Qing began to use Chosŏn to construct its new image as the Heavenly Dynasty; however, the process turned out to be difficult and even embarrassing. According to early Qing archives, Qing scholars may have called the Qing the Heavenly Dynasty for the first time in a draft imperial edict in 1649 investing Yi Ho (King Hyojong) as the king of Chosŏn. The draft edict was written by Fu Yijian (1609–65), a Han Chinese literatus from Shandong Province who had won first place in the Qing’s first imperial civil-service examination in 1645.⁵ By emphasizing that the king of Chosŏn should be an important subordinate serving the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., pinghan tianchao) and loyal to the central civilized country (Ch., Huaxia), Fu equated the Qing, which had become Zhongguo, with the Heavenly Dynasty and the civilized country. However, the final version of the edict that was sent to Chosŏn omitted the two latter terms and continued to use the term upper country to refer to the Qing, suggesting that the Qing was not yet prepared to claim to be the Heavenly Dynasty.⁶
China, or Zhongguo, could be defined in a general geographical sense by the Qing borders, regardless of how the borders were expanded and redrawn, so long as the Qing controlled the Ming’s territory, or at least the central plain (Ch., Zhongyuan).⁷ In fact, after 1644, when the Qing rulers began writing and revising their history, they deliberately deleted some Manchu terms referring to the Ming as Zhongguo. For example, Hongtaiji, in a letter to the Ming on July 29, 1632, had explained that the Jin fought with the Ming because the Ming officials in Liaodong did not follow the way of China (Ma., Liyoodung i hafasa Dulimbai gurun i doroi tondoi beiderakū), using the Manchu term Dulimbai gurun in clear reference to China/Zhongguo. Later, the narrative written in Chinese replaced the phrase the way of China (Ch., Zhongguo/Zhongyuan zhi dao) with the way of rightness (Ch., zhengzhi zhi dao). While Hongtaiji in 1632 had called the Ming your China (Ma., suweni Dulimbai gurun), the post-1644 Chinese edition replaced this term with your country (Ch., erguo), deleting the word for China.⁸ The changing terminology shows that after 1644 the Qing deeply identified itself with China.
Given the ethnic background of the ruling house of the Qing, many scholars have been interested in establishing when the Qing court officially used the Manchu term Dulimbai gurun to define itself as China/Zhongguo. Some cite the year 1689 and the Treaty of Nerchinsk that the Qing signed with Russia. In fact, the Qing court had used this Manchu term to represent its identity much earlier in its negotiations with Zheng Jing (1642–81), the eldest son of Zheng Chenggong (1624–62), who occupied Taiwan in 1662. While Zheng Jing never questioned the Qing’s identity as China, he argued that Taiwan was not a part of China in an effort to secure for Taiwan an independent status like that of Chosŏn. Emperor Kangxi, however, reiterated in a decree in 1669 that Zheng belonged to the people of China (Ch., Zhongguo zhi ren; Ma., Dulimbai gurun i niyalma).⁹ In the late Kangxi period, the Qing presented itself as China in a favorable and definitive way. For example, in his travelogue, the Manchu official Tulišen, who was dispatched as an envoy to the Turgūt Mongols in Russia in 1712, generally referred to the Qing as Dulimbai gurun (China) or meni Dulimbai gurun (our China); these terms were rendered into Chinese as Zhongguo or Zhonghua when Tulišen’s journal was published in 1723 in both languages. Tulišen also consistently translated terms such as our place (Ma., meni bade) as our China (Ch., wo Zhongguo) and referred to all people of the Great Qing, such as the Manchus, Han Chinese, and Mongols, as people of China. More importantly, following Emperor Kangxi’s instructions, Tulišen emphasized China’s Confucian nature to Russia, claiming that our country takes fidelity, filial piety, benevolence, justice, and sincerity as fundamentals (Ma., meni gurun i banjire tondo hiyoošun, gosin, jurgan, akdun be fulehe da obumbi; Ch., wo guojia yi zhong xiao ren yi xin wei genben).¹⁰
By contrast, the Heavenly Dynasty, or Tianchao, could not be delineated in the same way, since it was based on the notion of all-under-Heaven—a China-centered politico-cultural term with no connection to borders in the geographical sense. Put another way, the Qing could define itself as China from within, but it
could not identify itself as the Heavenly Dynasty without support from outside the Qing: the new regime would first have to erect a new, Qing-centric, and multinational Zongfan system. The expectation that the Qing would become a new imperial power required the regime to transform the countries that the Ming had represented as its fan into fan in the Qing’s orbit. The Ming had pursued the same policy when it became the ruler of China (Ch., zhu Zhongguo) in 1368, immediately sending envoys to the countries that had served as fan of its predecessor, the Yuan Dynasty, with the aim of converting them into fan of the Ming.¹¹ However, unlike the Ming, the Manchu rulers in 1644 faced the tremendous challenge of overcoming their previous status as barbarians, as defined by the civilized–barbarian distinction. Compared with the mission to identify the Qing as China and as the legitimate successor to the Ming within the Qing’s borders, the quest to construct the Qing as the new Heavenly Dynasty beyond its borders called for extraordinary effort.
From the perspective of comparative philology, the Chinese term Tianchao was not initially widely adopted in the Manchu language, in which it was literally rendered as abkai gurun (Heavenly country).¹² The Manchu rulers had difficulty identifying with this term and the Chinese political concepts behind it. In July 1637, for example, after reviewing the draft edict of investiture to the king of Chosŏn, Hongtaiji commented that he did not like to equate himself with Heaven as the Ming had done, suggesting that his officials must have employed the Chinese word tian (Heaven) or the Manchu term abka (Heaven) in the draft.¹³ Nevertheless, the task of reconstructing the Qing as the new China in the seventeenth century left the Manchu rulers with no choice but to embrace the term and the rationale behind it.
The intellectual transformation of the Qing ruling house is evident in the visit of the fifth Dalai Lama (1617–82) to Beijing in late 1652 and early 1653. The Qing’s Manchu officials supported Emperor Shunzhi’s plan to greet the Dalai Lama in Daiga in Inner Mongolia, arguing that the Ūlet Mongols, who controlled Tibet militarily at the time, would be pacified by the emperor’s gracious behavior. But the Han Chinese officials argued that the emperor was the ruler of all countries under Heaven (Ch., tianxia guojia zhi zhu) and should not violate conventions by meeting with a lama, even the Dalai Lama, in person outside the capital. Still hesitant about going to Daiga, the emperor took part in a grand ceremony commemorating Confucius at the Directorate of Education (Ch., Guozi jian) in Beijing, where he knelt down twice, each time making three prostrations. The ceremony, attended by many high-ranking Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese officials and generals, conferred on the emperor the mantle of the supreme agent of Confucianism. Right after the ceremony, two Han Chinese grand secretaries, Hong Chengchou (1593–1665) and Chen Zhilin (1605–66), submitted a memorial to the emperor entreating him not to go to Daiga to welcome the Dalai Lama because astrological phenomena reported by the Imperial Astronomical Bureau suggested that intruders would threaten the emperorship. The two officials emphasized that the way of Heaven is infinite (Ch., tiandao shenyuan) and could not be predicted. After reading the memorial, the emperor immediately abandoned the idea of visiting Daiga. Instead he welcomed the Dalai Lama in the South Garden of Beijing.¹⁴ As this episode suggests, the Manchu emperor had to adjust to his role as the Son of Heaven in the Confucian sense in the post-1644 politico-cultural and ideological contexts, notwithstanding the Qing’s serious religious and military concerns over its western frontier in Inner Asia.
Reconstructing the Chinese Empire: The Rise of the Chosŏn Model
From East Asia to Southeast and Inner Asia: The Qing’s Presentation of the Chosŏn Model
The Qing did not stand alone as it sought to construct its new dual identity. Chosŏn, the first Confucian outer fan of the Qing, played an unparalleled role in providing the Manchu conquerors with resources to form and articulate the Qing’s new identity. As early as 1650, in a palace memorial to Emperor Shunzhi, the king called the Qing the Heavenly Dynasty, even though the Qing court itself was still reluctant to use the term.¹⁵ The development of Chosŏn’s essential role in the
Qing-centric Zongfan world can be divided into two historical phases: the seven years from 1637 to 1643 and the 251 years from 1644 to 1894. In the first phase, Chosŏn began serving as the outer fan of the Qing by adhering to the clearly formulated and institutionalized discipline of the Sino-Korean Zongfan system, which had functioned between the Ming and Chosŏn for more than two centuries. As chapter 1 described, the Qing was able to make a significant move toward the transformation of its identity by assuming the place of the Ming in the framework of Sino-Korean relations. The frequent visits of Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries to Mukden provided the Qing with good opportunities to emphasize and practice its centrality in the known world.
After 1644, with its dramatic emergence as a Ming-style, nationwide regime and the extensive expansion of its territory, the Qing found itself in the position of having to manage relations with multiple neighboring countries, such as Annam, Ryukyu, Lanchang (Laos), Siam, Sulu (the Philippines), and Burma, that had served as subordinates to the Ming. Having inherited these fan from the Ming, what Qing China now needed to do was to resume and refashion the Zongfan system according to its own standards. On this front, the Qing had gained valuable experience from its institutionalized communications with Chosŏn since the 1630s and, through these communications, had developed a mature model of a Qing-centric Zongfan arrangement. The Chosŏn model laid out a path whereby a country or a political entity could follow Chosŏn into the Qingcentric system primarily by receiving imperial investitures from the Qing, adopting the regnal titles of the Qing in its calendar, and sending tributary emissaries to the Qing.¹⁶ The Chosŏn model was a pattern centered on rituals.¹⁷ Although the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship had been inaugurated by the Manchu military conquest of 1637, as a result of which the crown prince, another prince, and sons of high-ranking Chosŏn officials were detained in Mukden as hostages, the unpleasant situation began to change when the Qing released the hostages in 1644. The Qing also progressively reduced the tributes required of Chosŏn until, by the late 1730s, they were less than one-tenth of what they had been in the late 1630s and became a mere symbol of political subordination.¹⁸ What accompanied the tributes was the performance of a set of highly programmed and increasingly elaborate formalities that demonstrated the hierarchical Zongfan order and the Qing’s new normative identity.
In the first years after 1644, the Qing found the Chosŏn model the most powerful and practical way of managing its relations with other countries and of extending its influence and authority. Emperor Shunzhi articulated the importance of Chosŏn’s model role in 1647 after the Qing army conquered Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong Provinces and prepared to establish relations with Ryukyu, Annam, Siam, and Japan. On March 17 and August 25, the emperor announced that the Qing would give preferential treatment to these countries as to Chosŏn (Ch., yu Chaoxian yiti youdai) as long as they subordinated themselves to ‘the civilized’ and paid tribute to the court (Ch., qingxin xianghua, chengchen rugong).¹⁹ In this way, the Manchu rulers publicized Chosŏn’s prototypical fan status and established the Qing-Chosŏn relationship as the yardstick for relations between the Qing and other countries or political entities. Rather than adopting the aggressive colonial policy of the Yuan, the Qing learned from the Ming’s Zongfan mechanism, using the sophisticated and markedly Confucian Chosŏn model to maintain stability on its frontiers and to construct a new Chinese empire beyond them.²⁰
As a result of the Qing rulers’ efforts at promoting the Chosŏn model after 1644, political units beyond the Qing’s control also came to regard it as an ideal way of solving conflicts with the Qing while retaining their own privileges. Between 1662 and 1669, for example, when the Qing was trying to persuade Zheng Jing to surrender in Taiwan, Zheng insisted on following the Chosŏn model (Ch., zhao Chaoxian shili) into the Qing’s Zongfan system by proclaiming subordination and paying tribute (Ch., chengchen nagong) but refraining from cutting his hair in the Qing style.²¹ For Zheng, the Chosŏn model appeared to offer the most favorable and promising way to resolve the standoff with the Qing. Emperor Kangxi refused this proposal on the grounds that Chosŏn had been always a foreign country (Ch., conglai suoyou zhi waiguo; Ma., daci bihe encu gurun), whereas Zheng belonged to the people of China.²² These negotiations show the perceived broad applicability and coverage of the Chosŏn model in situations in which neither independence nor complete annexation was an immediate and acceptable
solution.
The Chosŏn model provided the Manchu ruling house with a general blueprint for dealing with other political entities. Over the Qing period, two parallel central institutions were responsible for the affairs of outer fan : the Mongolian Superintendency mainly managed outer fan located to the north and west of Qing China, while the Ministry of Rites was in charge of fan in the east, the south, and the west. This book focuses on the outer fan under the management of the Ministry of Rites rather than those under the Mongolian Superintendency, although the two types of outer fan may have been associated through the Chosŏn model in the early years of the Qing’s expansion to Inner Asia and the development of its Eurasian empire.
This inconspicuous connection between the eastern and western frontiers of the Qing empire had manifested itself at least by 1653, when the Qing invested the fifth Dalai Lama and the Gusi Khan of the Ūlet Mongols by incorporating them into the Qing-dominated extended family and placing them under the Qing’s jurisdiction. At the time, the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites were administratively still closely connected with one another: it was a Manchu minister (Ch., shangshu; Ma., aliha amban) from the Ministry of Rites, Langkio, and a vice minister (Ch., shilang; Ma., ashan i amban) from the Mongolian Superintendency, Sidali, who together gave the Dalai Lama and the Gusi Khan the books of investiture. The imperial statement in the khan’s investiture book bore a remarkable resemblance to that issued to the new king of Chosŏn in 1649. It declared that the recipient must serve as the Qing’s subordinate or fence (Ch., pingfu) until the Yellow River becomes as narrow as a belt and Mount Tai becomes as small as a grindstone (Ch., daili shanhe).²³ In addition, the mechanism governing the local products and tributes that the lama and the khan presented to the emperor and the empress dowager in 1654 and the imperial gifts the lama and the khan received in return was much like that used between the Qing and Chosŏn.²⁴ Finally, the imperial mandates of investiture (Ch., gaoming; Ma., g’aoming) that the Qing issued to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni bore the same imperial seal—Seal of declaring imperial mandate (Ch., zhigao zhi bao; Ma., hese wasimbure boobai)—as had the mandate investing the new king of Chosŏn.²⁵
If we compare the imperial codes of the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites, it seems that the former borrowed institutional regulations from the latter to formalize the communications between the Manchu rulers and the Mongol fan in Inner Asia. The prototypical role of Chosŏn in the Qingcentric Zongfan system may have contributed to the Qing’s policy of integrating the Inner Asian political and military entities into the Qing’s extended family.²⁶ On the surface, the geographical responsibilities of the Ministry of Rites did not overlap with those of the Mongolian Superintendency, as Qing officials confirmed in 1743, so Qing-Chosŏn contacts were ostensibly unrelated to Qing– Inner Asian contacts.²⁷ But on the political level, soon after 1644 the Qing rulers began to apply the Zongfan rationale behind the Chosŏn model to Inner Asia, along with the Manchu court’s promulgation of the discourse of all-under-Heaven and people without difference between the outside and the inside, as part of the long process of subordinating the Zunghar Mongols, whom the Qing rulers treated as people beyond virtue and civilization.²⁸ Administratively, the Ministry of Rites was also in charge of the affairs of some lamas in Gansu and Shaanxi until the 1740s, when it transferred this jurisdiction to the Mongolian Superintendency.²⁹ The Chosŏn model, in this sense, gradually became a normative, standard, and powerful soft weapon in the repertoire of the Qing. It allowed the Manchu rulers to govern the areas conquered by the formidable Eight Banners in Inner Asia, which arguably smoothed the way for the Qing to insert its civil administrative system into these areas during the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods.
Who Were the Barbarians? The Imperial Code and the Qing’s Reforms
Under the Qing, the Zongfan order was maintained and embodied by the exchange of emissaries between the Qing and its subordinate countries (Ch., shuguo; Ma., tulergi gurun or harangga gurun), which were generally described as subordinate countries of foreign barbarians (Ch., waiyi shuguo). All exchanges were conducted in accordance with The Universal Tributary Regulations (Ch., Chaogong tongli) codified by the Ministry of Rites, and the performance of the exchanges
was supervised by the Host-Guest Office (Ch., Zhuke qingli si) of the Ministry of Rites. These regulations primarily consisted of the following seven mandates:
Investiture (Ch., cefeng): The Qing emperor gave the new king of each fan a patent of appointment through an imperial mandate of investiture along with a decree (Ch., chiyu) and an official seal for use in correspondence.
Regnal titles (Ch., nianhao): The fan adopted the Qing’s regnal titles as the way to enumerate years.
Calendar (Ch., shuoli): The fan used the Qing’s calendar and celebrated Chinese festivals.
The dispatch of emissaries to pay tribute to the Qing (Ch., chaogong), with a frequency individually determined by the Qing.
The conferral of noble rank on a deceased king or privileged members of the royal house of the fan (Ch., fengshi).
Reporting events to the Qing (Ch., zoushi): Each fan informed the emperor of important domestic events but did not need to ask for instructions and could assume that the Qing would not intervene in its domestic affairs.
Trade (Ch., maoyi or hushi), including trade at the frontiers and at the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations (Ch., Huitong siyi guan; Ma., Acanjime isanjire tulergi gurun i bithe ubaliyambure kuren) in Beijing.³⁰
The Qing made considerable changes to the Zongfan system that it inherited from the Ming. The Ming had also relied on The Universal Tributary Regulations, by which the Ministry of Rites managed routine exchanges between China and the subordinate barbarian countries in the four quarters (Ch., fanguo or siyi)—Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, the Jurchens, Mongolia, and other countries and political entities—as well as interactions between the Ming and indigenous chieftains (Ch., tuguan or tusi), including local chieftains in Yunnan, Guangxi, Guizhou, Sichuan, Hunan, and Hubei.³¹ But two significant changes distinguished the list of foreign barbarian countries in the new Qing regulations from the Ming’s list. First, the Qing excluded indigenous chieftains from its list of tributaries because of its policy toward barbarian chieftains (Ch., yimu) in southwestern China. Known as replacing the hereditary indigenous chieftains with rotating officials (Ch., gaitu guiliu), the policy had been inaugurated by the Yuan and the Ming, but only in the Yongzheng period of the Qing was it carried out on a truly large scale.³² The areas and populations under the chieftains’ control were integrated simultaneously into the Qing’s territory and into its household registration system.³³ The indigenous chieftains were thus outside the supervision of the Ministry of Rites. The line between barbarians belonging to these political units and barbarians from other countries was clear in the minds of the Manchu rulers at court and their deputies in the provinces.³⁴ Second, the Western countries gradually disappeared from the list of foreign barbarians in the tributary regulations. By the late fourteenth century, the Ming had fifteen outer fan countries, and the majority of these became the Qing’s outer fan, including Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, Lanchang, Siam, Sulu, and Burma.³⁵ From the 1760s to the 1840s during the Qing period, the list also included the Netherlands and the countries of the Western Ocean (Ch., Xiyang), but by the 1890s only these seven Asian countries remained on the list.³⁶
Whereas in the Qianlong period the Mongolian, Tibetan, and Muslim areas under the management of the Mongolian Superintendency had all entered [the Qing’s] map and registers (Ch., xianru bantu) and were presented like prefectures and counties (Ch., youru junxian),³⁷ the subordinate countries of foreign barbarians under the supervision of the Ministry of Rites were not integrated into the Qing’s core territory. Nor would these countries be treated as parts of the Republic or the People’s Republic of China in the twentieth century. By the same token, the dual management system for the outer fan—the Mongolian Superintendency and the Ministry of Rites—under the Qing made it difficult for people outside this institutional mechanism to draw a clear line between them. This might explain why, as discussed in chapter 5, some Qing officials in the late nineteenth century responded to complications involving Chosŏn by suggesting that
Beijing apply its policy vis-à-vis Mongolia and Tibet to Chosŏn by converting Chosŏn into prefectures and counties, as they supposed Chosŏn had been in the Qianlong period. The rationale behind this suggestion applied the basic structure of the Qing empire on its western frontier to the management of its eastern one, highlighting Chosŏn’s prominent subordinate position within the empire.
The role of the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship is thus significant. This relationship should not be treated simply as a specific instance of the Zongfan system, as scholars have typically done. Rather, it is best understood as a prototype that shaped the formation of the Qing’s Zongfan system and helped the Manchu regime transform its political identity for the purpose of claiming centrality and accessing orthodox legitimacy in the process of reshuffling the Chinese world. In short, the Qing-Chosŏn relationship was the seedbed of the Qing’s entire Zongfan arrangement, from which the political legitimacy of both sides—the Qing and its outer fan—sprang.
Civilizing the Center: The Practice of the Chosŏn Model
Five aspects of the Qing’s practice of the Chosŏn model, aspects embodied in and undergirded by ritual practices and documentary discourse, showcased the Qing’s identity as the civilized center. These aspects concern the frequency and composition of missions; the overland route and the Sino-Korean geographical boundaries; humble palace memorials, imperial mandates and decrees, and orthodox legitimacy; tributes, gifts, and court-to-court interactions; and receptions and rituals.
The Frequency and Composition of Imperial and Tributary Missions
The exchange of missions between the Qing and Chosŏn started in 1637 and continued without interruption until the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. The frequency of Chosŏn’s missions to the Qing was higher than that of any other country. Whereas other subordinate countries sent tributary missions to Beijing every other year (Ryukyu), every three years (Siam), every four years (Annam), every five years (Sulu), or every ten years (Lanchang and Burma), Chosŏn dispatched several missions every year.³⁸ Although the imperial code required Chosŏn to send an annual tributary mission at the end of each year that would simultaneously serve as the mission for the winter solstice, the imperial birthday, and the lunar New Year, Chosŏn never hesitated to send more emissaries under different names, dispatching a new mission before the previous one had even returned in order to nourish its relationship with the Qing.³⁹ From 1637 to 1894, Chosŏn sent about 698 official missions to the Qing for twenty-six different purposes, an average of 2.71 missions per year.⁴⁰ In 1784 and 1788, Emperor Qianlong commented jubilantly that in this respect Chosŏn was a peer of the Qing’s inner fan.⁴¹
According to the imperial regulations, a Korean mission was to have thirty members: an envoy, an associate envoy, a secretary, three interpreters, and twenty-four tribute guard officers. The envoy, associate envoy, and secretary were the three key members. As a special privilege to Chosŏn, the number of attendants and servants attached to the mission was not limited. By contrast, the missions from Ryukyu, Lanchang, Burma, and the Netherlands were not to exceed twenty members; those from other Western countries were limited to twenty-two, those from Siam to twenty-six, and those from Annam to thirty.⁴² Many Korean scholars and businessmen visited Beijing as mission attendants or servants in order to experience Chinese culture or to seek their fortunes, so a Korean mission often numbered several hundred people. For example, the annual tributary mission of 1653 had a total of 225 members, the gratitude mission of 1777 a total of 310, the gratitude mission of 1803 a total of 213, and the congratulatory mission of 1889 a total of 311.⁴³ In 1829, two missions with more than six hundred people combined arrived in Beijing at the same time, forcing the Ministry of Rites and the Ministry of Works to borrow twenty large tents from the Imperial Household Department (Ch., Neiwu fu) to house the additional visitors. Until the late nineteenth century, the legions of Chosŏn’s missions continued their pilgrimages to Beijing every
year with a large number of tributes and horses.⁴⁴
By contrast, the Qing sent far fewer and smaller imperial missions to Chosŏn. From 1637 to 1894, the Qing undertook 172 missions to Hansŏng, an average of 0.67 missions per year. In the early Qing, the Manchu court frequently dispatched emissaries to investigate cases of homicide and smuggling at the border, to negotiate resolutions to these cases with the king, and sometimes to discuss the punishment of Korean officials who failed to satisfy the Qing. As early as the Shunzhi period, the Manchu court began to reduce the number of its envoys, the rationale behind the change being the Zongfan idea of cherishing the small. In May 1653, for example, in the course of investigating a cross-border case of homicide, the Ministry of Rites proposed to ask the Korean emissary in Beijing to carry the imperial documents to the king instead of dispatching an imperial envoy for the purpose, given that Chosŏn is a country of men from afar (Ch., Chaoxian guo xi yuanren). Emperor Shunzhi endorsed this proposal, declaring that "hereafter, do not propose to send envoys to disturb the fan [Ch., fanbang] with minor matters."⁴⁵ By the middle period of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, such envoys to Hansŏng disappeared entirely.⁴⁶
From this point on, imperial missions to Chosŏn were of two primary types: missions for investiture and missions to confer noble rank, both relating to power shifts that required the Chinese emperor’s bestowal of legitimacy. In the early period, an imperial mission contained around a hundred men, many of whom were Manchu bannermen of the Eight Banners who joined the mission for the purpose of trade. In 1658 Emperor Shunzhi significantly trimmed the size of the missions by calling for the end of Manchu trade in Hansŏng. After that, a mission comprised an envoy, an associate envoy, four interpreters, and eighteen attendants.⁴⁷ In 1845 and 1846, Emperor Daoguang further reduced the number of core members to four.⁴⁸ Taking attendants into account, after the early nineteenth century an imperial mission had fewer than thirty members in total. The mission in 1876 comprised twenty members, and the last mission, in 1890, had twenty-eight.⁴⁹
All imperial envoys to Chosŏn—from the first envoy in 1637, Inggūldai, to the last one in 1890, Xuchang (1838–92)—were Manchu officials. They included some members of the Mongol and Han Chinese Eight Banners but no non-banner Han Chinese, whereas envoys to Annam and Ryukyu were mainly non-banner Han Chinese rather than Manchus. By at least the 1760s, Han Chinese scholars were fully aware of this ethnic discrepancy, though some of their Korean counterparts were not.⁵⁰ The door was never opened for Han Chinese to participate in tributary affairs in Korea. The exclusion was perhaps rooted in the implicit demands of the civilized–barbarian distinction and the Qing’s need to transcend the pre-1644 Manchu-Korean relationship: the Manchu court had to demonstrate, maintain, and consolidate its legitimacy as the human and institutional agent of the Mandate of Heaven and to strengthen its claim to civilized centrality and Chineseness through the hierarchical relationship. Still, some Manchu envoys, such as Akdun (1685–1756) in 1717, broadly identified themselves from a cultural perspective as Han envoys (Ch., hanjie) from the central civilized country (Ch., Zhonghua, Zhongxia).⁵¹
The Overland Route, the Willow Palisade, and Geographical Boundaries
In the post-1644 period, the emissaries of the two countries traveled on an overland route, which was about 950 miles (3,000 Chinese li) long and linked Hansŏng and Beijing via around eighty-two stations. The route passed through P’yŏngyang, Ŭiju, the Yalu River, Fenghuang City, Mukden, Shanhai Pass, Fengrun, and Tongzhou (see map 2.1). From 1644 to 1894, both Korean and Manchu emissaries were required to follow the overland route, the sole exception being the last imperial mission in 1890, which took a maritime route due to exceptional circumstances. In general, a mission took forty to sixty days to reach Beijing from Hansŏng, and an imperial mission from Beijing faced the same trudge to Hansŏng.⁵²
In Manchuria the overland route skirted the long Willow Palisade (Ch., Liutiao bian)—a system of levees and trenches planted with willow trees, their branches tied together—from Fenghuang City to Shanhai Pass, where it almost connected with the Great Wall. The Manchu rulers built the palisade from the late 1630s to
the 1680s in order to preserve their economic privileges by demarcating domestic boundaries between Manchu, Mongol, and Han Chinese regions. In the early period of Kangxi’s reign, the palisade connecting Shanhai Pass in the west and Fenghuang City in the east, known as the Old Fence, was around 590 miles (1,900 li) long and had sixteen fence gates, while in the north the New Fence between Weiyuan Village and Fateha Mountain was 215 miles (690 li) with four gates.⁵³ Fenghuang City, located at the southeastern corner of the east wing of the Old Fence, was under the supervision of the Manchu General of Mukden (Ch., Shengjing jiangjun) and had a gate (K., ch’akmun; Ch., zhamen), known as Feng huang Gate, about three miles (eight li) to the southeast of the city.⁵⁴ The Qing built Fenghuang Gate between 1638 and 1639 and extended it southeast toward the Yalu River between 1685 and 1690 up to a location about nine miles (thirty li) from the city.⁵⁵ The gate was the only pass through which Korean emissaries could enter the Qing’s ancestral territory (Ch., genben zhongdi) in Manchuria.
Map 2.1 The overland route between Beijing and Ŭiju in the late eighteenth century. The line connecting points A, B, C, and D on the map marks the Willow Palisade, which started at Fenghuang City (A) and ended near the Great Wall (the line connecting points D, E, and F). The line connecting points A, G (Mukden), H (Shanhai Pass), I (Fengrun), and J (Tongzhou) forms the overland route that Chosŏn’s emissaries took to Beijing after crossing the Yalu River. Yŏji to, handwritten map, preserved at the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University. Copyright Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies.
Between the gate and the boundary river lay a Qing-controlled area in which no one was allowed to live. In the late seventeenth century, this area spanned about thirty-four miles.⁵⁶ The Korean emissaries could pass through this area freely and were not subjected to security checks until they reached Fenghuang Gate. The garrison major of the Manchu bannermen at Fenghuang City did not welcome, check, or send off the missions beyond the gate, which may help explain why Korean emissaries were occasionally robbed by Chinese bandits outside the gate.⁵⁷ For the Korean visitors, Fenghuang Gate was thus more like a borderline than the Yalu River was, although the geographical borderline ran along the middle course of the river.
After entering Fenghuang Gate, the Koreans were to proceed to Beijing within twenty-eight days under the escort of Qing soldiers, passing through thirty-nine transfer stations (Ch., gongshi guanshe; Ma., alban jafara elcin i tatara guwan i boo). In fact, however, the visitors were so familiar with the route that generally no Chinese soldiers accompanied them to Beijing. The absence of Chinese monitors endowed the Koreans with fair freedom to visit places along their route and interview local people, enriching their travel journals, which eventually constituted a voluminous collection known as Yŏnhaengnok (The records of the journey to Beijing). All emissaries of the Qing’s fan were required to follow specific tributary routes and dared not deviate from them. For example, Ryukyu’s emissaries were instructed to arrive at Min’an in Fujian, Sulu’s at Xiamen in Fujian, those of Western countries at Macau in Guangdong, Siam’s at Humen in Guangdong, Annam’s at Taiping in Guangxi, and Burma’s at Yongchang in Yunnan. After the emissaries reached the designated places, the governor-general and the governor of the province would report their arrival to the Ministry of Rites and instruct subordinate officials to send them on to Beijing. Chosŏn’s emissaries had no such relations with officials in the provinces through which they passed, and they communicated directly with the Ministry of Rites. In other words, Chosŏn’s contacts with the Qing were under Beijing’s direct control, which enabled Beijing to use Chosŏn to portray the harmony of its Zongfan system whenever necessary.
Along the overland route, the high frequency and large size of Chosŏn’s missions produced considerable and lucrative commercial opportunities for merchants from both countries. What flowed into the Qing realm in massive quantities, in addition to Korean and Japanese goods, was silver. The mission of 1712, for instance, carried more than two hundred thousand taels of silver to Beijing, while the one in 1777 brought more than ninety-three thousand taels. The bulk of the silver was originally from Japan, acquired through trade between Tsushima and Chosŏn. The Hansŏng–Fenghuang City–Mukden–Beijing overland trade route was an extension of the Kyoto–Osaka–Tsushima–Pusan–Hansŏng overland and maritime trade route, with Hansŏng and Beijing the two major entrepôts on the combined route. Financially, the three nations made up an integrated international silver network, and in the eighteenth century the amount of silver that poured into the Qing from Chosŏn annually could reach five hundred thousand to six hundred thousand taels, which contributed to the Qing’s prosperity but aroused serious concerns among Korean officials.⁵⁸ In this sense, it is not an exaggeration to say that the Beijing–Hansŏng overland route was the most prosperous and most lucrative long-distance and international trade route in East Asia before Chosŏn opened treaty ports in the 1870s and 1880s.
Humble Palace Memorials, Imperial Mandates and Decrees, and Orthodox Legitimacy
The imperial court in Beijing and the royal court in Hansŏng interacted through meticulously formatted court documents written in accordance with highly institutionalized hierarchical norms. From 1637 on, the most important category among the documents that Chosŏn submitted to the Qing was the king’s humble
palace memorials (K., p’yo; Ch., biao). In 1705 the Ministry of Rites in Beijing laid down a set of new criteria for the syntax of these memorials that Chosŏn adhered to for the next 190 years, but the king was still free to use his own terms in composing other kinds of palace memorials.⁵⁹ The humble memorials were aimed at strengthening the Qing’s authority by reiterating and affirming the reciprocal and hierarchical relationship between the emperor and the king. The memorial submitted by the crown prince and deputy king of Chosŏn, Yi Yun (King Gyŏngjong), on April 14, 1721, in the sixtieth year of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, to congratulate the emperor on his birthday, is a typical example. The memorial was written on a sheet of well-made Korean paper in tiny, narrow Chinese characters evenly arranged in twenty-three vertical lines from right to left—although a memorial could, on occasion, exceed fifty lines—and it carefully followed the rules of honorific elevation, exactly as the Qing had mandated in 1705.⁶⁰ Refer ring to himself as your minister (K., sin; Ch., chen) of a vassal (Ch., fanfu), who could hardly bear his separation from the court (Ch., queting), Yi proclaimed that "Your Majesty raises all people of the world by assuming the Mandate of Heaven. The world is peaceful and imperial civilization extends to all places. Your Majesty has pacified the four seas, and ten thousand countries have come to revere Your Majesty [Ch., sihai yi er wanguo laiwang]."⁶¹
In such highly formalized memorials, the king frequently called himself subordinate or minister, Chosŏn the small country, and the Qing the big country, the upper country, the big dynasty, the central dynasty, or the Heavenly Dynasty.⁶² These Qing-mandated terms exploited Chosŏn’s subordinate status to highlight the Qing’s centrality in the early eighteenth century. Year after year, Chosŏn, as the representative of the others, helped consolidate the Qing’s supreme cultural identity as well as Qing hegemony through its performance of such written subservience. Upon receipt of the king’s humble memorials, the emperor generally wrote on the cover in red ink, I have learned of the appreciative memorial that you, the king, respectfully presented. Let the relevant ministry [the Ministry of Rites] know. The comments were made either in Manchu (Wang sini kesi de hengkileme wesimbuhe be saha, harangga jurgan sa.) or Chinese (Lanwang zouxie. Zhidao liao. Gaibu zhidao.).
On the Qing side, the imperial decrees granting a deceased king noble rank or investing a new king with a patent of appointment also served to consolidate the hierarchy. The special terms used in these edicts had their own rules, which underwent a process of institutionalization after 1644. When the Qing invested Yi Chong as king in January 1638 (the first investiture that the Qing performed), the decree stated only that Chosŏn would be recognized as fan to the Qing forever.⁶³ But after 1644 the Manchu court began to include additional terms with strong political meanings in the Zongfan context. For example, the decree of investiture in 1649 clearly defined Chosŏn as an outer fan in a remote area (Ch., xiahuang) that submitted itself to the Qing’s virtues and civilization. In 1675 the phrase cherishing the eastern country (Ch., huairou dongtu) appeared in the decrees.⁶⁴ These terms substantially broadened the scope of the Qing’s political and cultural ideology and transformed its identity in the context of the civilized–barbarian dichotomy.
On March 6, 1725, Emperor Yongzheng issued a mandate and a decree to Yi Gŭm to invest him as the king and his wife as the queen. The mandate of investiture (Ch., fengtian gaoming; Ma., abkai hesei g’aoming) consisted of five connected pieces of dyed ramie cloth in red, blue, black, white, and yellow from right to left. Each of the five sections was surrounded by a pattern of flying dragons (see figures 2.1 and 2.2). In the mandate Emperor Yongzheng stated, "The great strategy is simply to extend civilization [Ch., jiaohua; Ma., tacihiyan wen] to the countries from afar [Ch., haibang; Ma., goroki gurun]…. Generations of your court have been sincerely loyal and trustworthy and have been paying tribute diligently [Ch., zhigong qinxiu; Ma., tušan alban be kiceme faššambi]. In investing Yi Gŭm the king of Chosŏn" (Ch., Chaoxian guowang; Ma., Coohiyan gurun i wang), the emperor emphasized that the king "shall serve as the fence on the eastern land [Ch., pinghan dongfan; Ma., dergi bade fiyanji dalikū], devoutly use the imperial calendar [Ch., qiangong zhengshuo; Ma., forgon ton be olhošome ginggulembi], pacify the land, and assist the imperial house forever [Ch., jiafu yu huangjia; Ma., ejen i boode aisilame wehiyembi]. The emperor advised the king to use a pure and genuine
mind to serve the Heavenly court [Ch., tianshi; Ma., abkai gurun]."⁶⁵ A decree to the king articulated this point again by stating, "You should be loyal forever and efficiently govern the land as a minister from afar [Ch., houfu; Ma., jecen i golo], while you should be loyal and obedient and serve as a fence [Ch., pinghan; Ma., fiyanji dalikū] for the Heavenly house [Ch., tianjia; Ma., gurun boo]."⁶⁶
The Chinese and Manchu terms of the imperial edicts portrayed the king as a family member of the Qing court, and they became more sophisticated in the Qianlong period. The imperial edicts to the king in 1757, for instance, referred to Chosŏn as a fence, a subordinate country (Ch., shuguo; Ma., harangga gurun), a remote submission (Ch., yuanfu; Ma., goroki i jecen), and a lower country (Ch., xiaguo; Ma., fejergi gurun) of the Middle Kingdom (Ch., Zhongchao, Z hongbang; M., Dulimbai gurun). The edicts also emphasized that the king’s court (M., wang ni boo) had been loyal to and received special rewards from the Heavenly court (Ch., tianshi; Ma., han i hargašan).⁶⁷ By invoking these norms, the Qing explicitly presented itself as the civilized center—China and the Heavenly Dynasty—in both Chinese and Manchu terms.
In his memorials to the emperor, the king used a gold seal received from the Qing. From early 1637 to early 1653, the seal had only Manchu characters, which read Coohiyan gurun i wang ni doron (seal of the king of the country of Chosŏn). On April 22, 1653, Emperor Shunzhi, evidently displeased by the absence of Chinese script from the seal, instructed the Ministry of Rites to make a new seal that included Chinese characters (Ch., hanzi). As a result, the words Chaoxian guowang zhi yin (seal of the king of the country of Chosŏn) were added to the seal.⁶⁸ The emperor did not explain his rationale for the change, but his decision underscored the new dynasty’s Chineseness. On the Qing side, the emperors, in their mandates to Chosŏn, always used the seal of declaring imperial mandate, which carried both a Chinese text, Zhigao zhi bao, and a Manchu one, Hese wasimbure boobai, exactly the same text that appeared on the imperial mandates issued to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni in Tibet. The combination of languages reflected the polyglot politics of a multiethnic empire.⁶⁹
FIGURE 2.1. The Manchu section of the imperial mandate to invest the king of Chosŏn in 1725. Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, preserved at Jangseogak, the Academy of Korean Studies, Korea. Copyright Academy of Korean Studies.
FIGURE 2.2. The Chinese section of the imperial mandate to invest the king of Chosŏn in 1725. Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, preserved at Jangseogak, the Academy of Korean Studies, Korea. Copyright Academy of Korean Studies.
The imperial investiture of the king helps explain a paradox in the Qing period: certain Confucian countries, in particular Chosŏn and Annam, were privately reluctant to identify the Qing as the supreme representative of Chinese culture, but in practice they never challenged its status as the superior country and frequently sent tributary missions to Beijing to display their deference. The explanation for the apparent paradox lies in the fact that the missions fulfilled a dual purpose in establishing not only the legitimacy of the Qing but also that of the monarchs of the fan. The Zongfan relationship between the Qing and its fan was an incarnation of this symbiotic and synergistic legitimacy, namely, the orthodox legitimacy embodied in the highly programmed rituals involved in the exchange of emissaries. This orthodox legitimacy was the goal for which King Taksin (r. 1767–82) of the Thonburi regime of Siam sent tributary missions to Beijing to pursue investiture after the fall of the Ayutthaya regime (1350–1767), even though King Taksin’s understanding of paying tribute (Ch., jingong) was very different from that of the Qing.⁷⁰ The need for legitimacy could also explain why Nguyễn Huệ, the leader of the peasant rebellion against the Lê Dynasty (1428–1788) of Annam, defeated the Qing army in 1789 but nonetheless accepted the Qing’s investiture in 1790. It was also in 1790 that Burma accepted the Qing investiture after winning the Burmese-Qing War in the early 1770s.⁷¹ In addition to pragmatic concerns reflecting geopolitics and China’s military might, securing political legitimacy from China proved crucial for these regimes’ own rule.
Tributes, Gifts, and Court-to-Court Interactions
The Qing ritual code clearly listed the types and quantities of tribute that Chosŏn had to present for different purposes. After 1644, these fell into eight major categories. Beyond the most official category of annual tribute, designated as standard tribute (Ch., zhenggong), the king generally referred to the items in the other seven categories, such as those marking the imperial birthday, the lunar New Year, and the winter solstice, as gifts or local products. The Qing accepted all of the submitted items and did not challenge the king’s choice of terms, although it preferred to refer to the items as tribute.⁷²
While the annual tribute marked a country-to-country relationship, all other categories of tribute, which were presented specifically to the emperor, the empress, and the dowager empress, suggested a strong court-to-court connection. The Ministry of Rites accepted the annual tribute as a routine matter, but it had to submit memorials to the emperor for instructions on how to handle tribute in other categories. In the early Qing, the Ministry of Rites forwarded all tribute items to the Ministry of Revenue and later to the Imperial Household Department, which was in charge of the affairs of the Manchu royal house and had its own financial system independent of the one managed by the Ministry of Revenue.⁷³ Therefore, although the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship seemed to manifest itself mainly in hierarchical country-to-country interactions, in reality it was a dual system involving the two countries and the two courts.
The gifts that the imperial envoys carried to Chosŏn were directed at specific members of the royal family, including the king, the queen, the crown prince, and the dowager queen. Usually the envoys brought first-rate silk for official robes. When imperial missions were dispatched to extend the emperor’s condolences on the deaths of core royalty, some gifts were consumed at the funeral ceremonies, while others were converted into 150 to 300 taels of silver by the Ministry of Revenue and delivered to the Korean royal house. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, imperial envoys followed a precise routine to deliver their condolences and gifts. The last such mission occurred in 1890, and it is explored in detail in chapter 5.
Receptions, Ritual Performances, and the Civilized Qing
Chosŏn’s emissaries were well accommodated at each transfer station after they entered China, but they had to prepare food for themselves until they arrived in
Beijing. Upon reaching their residence in Beijing, the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations, the emissaries first visited the Ministry of Rites to present the king’s memorials and the list of tribute items. All emissaries from Chosŏn and from other countries, as well as the kings they represented, had to submit their documents to the emperor through the ministry, with which they could communicate via official notes (Ch., ziwen). In the main hall of the ministry, the emissaries would pass the memorials to the head officials, who would place the memorials in front of the imperial tablet on a table in the middle of the hall. The emissaries would then kneel down once to make three prostrations toward the head officials, who would in turn bow three times to the emissaries with their hands folded in front (Ch., zuoyi, a ritual practiced between officials of equal ranks). Once they had finished, the emissaries would kneel down three times, each time making three prostrations toward the tablet.⁷⁴ The ministry would submit the documents to the emperor the next day, while the emissaries returned to their residence to wait for the imperial audience.
The Qing’s commander general of the Metropolitan Infantry Brigade Yamen (Ch., Bujun tongling yamen) sent soldiers to guard the emissaries’ residence.⁷⁵ Three additional institutions were involved in hosting the guests: the Court of Imperial Entertainments (Ch., Guanglu si) delivered daily food and drink, distributed to each member of the mission according to rank; the Ministry of Revenue brought fodder for the Koreans’ horses; and the Ministry of Works provided charcoal. These meticulous regulations embodied the Qing’s policy of cherishing men from afar.
During their stay in Beijing, the emissaries had various responsibilities to fulfill. If there was a grand court assembly of officials in the Forbidden City, the emissaries had to attend and pay homage at the end of the wing of the Qing civil officials. A major task was to pay a formal visit to the emperor at either the Summer Palace in Beijing or the Summer Palace in Rehe (Chengde). After the audience, the emissaries would be invited to attend certain events, such as banquets in the Forbidden City, performances of Chinese operas, or fireworks shows at the Summer Palace.⁷⁶ All ritual procedures, in particular the highest level of kowtow, were minutely regulated and fastidiously practiced. Such rituals between the Chinese emperor and foreign emissaries had been defined and institutionalized at least since the great rituals laid out in The Rituals of the Great Tang (Ch., Da Tang Kaiyuan li), compiled in the eighth century.⁷⁷ In the Ming and the Qing, the rituals became extremely elaborate, and the Korean emissaries were required to rehearse the complicated ceremonies in advance as a sign of their loyalty and as part of the process that would civilize the barbarians in the four quarters (Ch., feng siyi).⁷⁸ Rituals helped maintain the political arrangement and strengthen the identities of all participants.⁷⁹ In grand court gatherings, emissaries from Chosŏn were usually the first representatives of the outer fan to perform the rituals for the emperor, as on February 9, 1675, at the Lantern Festival, where the Chosŏn emissaries congratulated Kangxi ahead of their Russian, Kalka Mongol, and Ūlet Mongol counterparts.⁸⁰ Chosŏn’s role as an exemplar was particularly prominent in the late eighteenth century during the Qianlong period, when the Qing in many cases followed the model for Chosŏn (Ch., zhao Chaoxian zhi li) in managing its bilateral exchanges with Annam, Ryukyu, and Siam.⁸¹ Chinese scholars at the time also widely regarded Chosŏn as the model for other countries (Ch., zhuguo zhi zhang).⁸²
The emissaries also attended two major official banquets, one held at the Ministry of Rites and the other at the emissaries’ residence. An astonishing number of institutions were involved in their organization: the Court of Imperial Entertainments; the Food Supply Office (Ch., Jingshan qingli si) of the Ministry of Rites; the Ministries of Revenue, Works, and War; Shuntian Prefecture; and the Revenue Superintendent of Chongwen Gate (Ch., Liangyi shuiwu jiandu). Royal contractors (Ch., hanghu) were also assigned specific tasks. Each of the three key members of the mission was treated to what was known as a fifth-level Manchu banquet and the other members to a sixth-level one, preferential treatment not afforded to emissaries from any other country. The high cost of the banquets was fully covered by the Qing and, not surprisingly, the banquets were replete with ritual performances reinforcing the bilateral hierarchical order.⁸³ The imperial code included an illustration of the banquets for Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries (Ch., Chaoxian gongshi yantu) and specified that the seating arrangements for banquets held for
emissaries from other countries should follow the Chosŏn pattern (Ch., geguo gongshi fangci).⁸⁴
During their sojourn in Beijing, the emissaries, particularly scholars without official status or responsibilities, were enthusiastic about socializing with Qing literati. The tradition of such interactions had started in Ming times but had been suspended in the Ming-Qing transition period because of the anti-Manchu attitudes that were prevalent in Chosŏn. Indeed, before the eighteenth century, the three key members of the tributary mission barely left their residence to meet with Chinese officials or scholars because many Korean scholars embracing Neo-Confucianism saw the Qing as a barbarous country and regarded the tributary mission as a humiliation.⁸⁵ In the 1760s, however, literary social gatherings involving Korean emissaries again became frequent and continued until the 1890s. In the 1860s, many Chinese officials, such as Dong Wenhuan (1833–77) of the Imperial Academy (Ch., Hanlin yuan), who was known for calligraphy and epigraphy, actively socialized with Koreans.⁸⁶ On the Korean side, Pak Kyusu (1807–76), an emissary who visited Beijing in 1872, befriended more than a hundred famous Chinese scholars through social gatherings.⁸⁷
Versed in the same Confucian classics, adhering to the same Neo-Confucianism, and using the same Chinese characters, the Qing and Chosŏn scholars could easily identify one another as men of the same caliber. They met for drinks, composed poems, and exchanged their own compositions and calligraphy. That Chosŏn was known as Little China might also have lent these transnational literary social gatherings a homogenous cultural identity. These savants formed an informal perennial club in which they exchanged ideas about history and literature and improved their perceptions of each other’s countries. According to Key-hiuk Kim, their communications also assured Korea of a constant stream of information and knowledge concerning the latest intellectual trends in China.⁸⁸
When they gathered with their Han Chinese friends, the Korean guests usually showed an aversion to Manchu customs, such as the Manchu-style official robe and hairstyle, and were very proud of their Ming-style robes and hats, in keeping with the civilized–barbarian dichotomy. But in 1766, when Hong Tae-yong (1731–83) expressed contempt for the Manchus’ control of China, he found to his surprise that his Han Chinese counterparts, such as Yan Cheng (1733–67), did not appreciate his anti-Manchu sentiments; instead, Yan and his colleagues applauded the Qing’s support for civilization. After intensive conversation with his Chinese friends, Hong conceded that Koreans on a fundamental level still belonged to the barbarians by the sea (K., haesang chi iin). By concluding that the civilized and the barbarians are the same (K., Hwa–I il ya), he acknowledged the Qing’s civilized status.⁸⁹ Through such interactions, many Korean and Chinese scholars became close friends and continued to correspond even after the emissaries returned to Chosŏn. When Yan Cheng was on the brink of death, he laid a letter from Hong on his abdomen to indicate how deeply he treasured their friendship. When news of Yan’s death reached Hansŏng, Hong burst into tears and commented that he had lost a brother to whom he was as attached as he was to his right arm.⁹⁰
Like the emissaries from Hansŏng who experienced a combination of hardship and comfort as they made their way to Beijing, Qing imperial envoys also had to endure discomfort until they passed through Fenghuang Gate on their journey toward Ŭiju. There they were welcomed and treated well by the Korean side. Although the land between the gate and the Yalu River was Qing territory, the Korean prefect of Ŭiju was able to dispatch Korean officers, Manchu interpreters, and servants to welcome the envoys at the three stations in this area: Congxiu, Mazhuan, and Sanjiang. At each station the Koreans would set up temporary houses for the envoys and provide hearty meals that could feature more than thirty different dishes. In Ŭiju the prefect treated each envoy to a banquet with more than 130 kinds of food.⁹¹ Receptions along the way from Ŭiju to P’yŏngyang and then to Hansŏng were even more luxurious, and the cost was significant.⁹²
In contrast to their Korean counterparts in Beijing, the Manchu envoys in Hansŏng confined themselves to ritual exchanges. Beijing-style literary social gatherings did take place in Shuri, the capital of Ryukyu, but not in Hansŏng, where the envoys, along with their assistants, never left their lodgings to converse with local officials or scholars.⁹³ No transnational literati club like the one in Beijing ever formed in Hansŏng. After 1658, when Emperor Shunzhi put an end to
Manchu trade in Hansŏng, the imperial envoys were always temporary visitors who returned home as soon as their mission was accomplished. In addition, almost all imperial envoys before the early eighteenth century made a point of visiting the Samjŏndo stele in a southern suburb of Hansŏng. The Koreans regarded the stele, with its inscriptions celebrating the Manchu conquest of Chosŏn, as a humiliation, and some Confucian scholars and students argued that it should be destroyed, so the envoys’ visits were sensitive and made the stele a barometer of the two countries’ relationship. In 1723 the Qing’s two envoys made a formal visit to the stele with a number of Korean officials. At the site, the vice envoy knelt down three times, each time bowing his head three times. In 1724 and 1729, the imperial envoys also paid formal visits to the stele, again accompanied by a group of Koreans. On these occasions both the Manchu envoys and their Korean interpreters kowtowed to the stele. In 1731, however, instead of visiting Samjŏndo, the envoys simply asked for copies of the inscriptions on the stele, and after 1762, they no longer even requested transcripts. By the late nineteenth century, Qing officials had only a vague understanding of the stele and were uncertain whether it featured a Manchu inscription.⁹⁴
During their sojourn in Hansŏng, the Qing envoys performed four major ceremonies in which the king participated. The first was the welcome at the Gate of Receiving Imperial Favors (K., Yŏngŭn mun) outside the West Gate of the city. The king bowed once to the imperial documents, then returned to his palace in the city. The second, conducted inside the king’s palace, was the transfer of the imperial documents and other items to the king. The king kowtowed four times to the imperial edicts. In addition, the king and the envoys bowed once or twice to each other with their hands folded in front. The king, on his own territory, did not need to perform the highest level of kowtow toward the imperial decrees or other documents and gifts, as his ministers would do in Beijing. The third ceremony was the king’s visit to the envoys at their residence, the South Palace Annex, where the Koreans honored the envoys with several tea banquets. Finally, there was the send-off at the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country on the city’s outskirts, where the king provided a tea ceremony for the departing envoys. Contact between the two sides was always conducted through the Korean Ministry of Rites. All of the procedures in these ceremonies were regulated by ritual codes and were executed until the early 1890s. The Korean side had no obligation to report any domestic affairs to the envoys, nor would the envoys intervene in such affairs. Rather, this stylized interaction in Hansŏng endowed the monarch of Chosŏn with political legitimacy, continuously consolidating the reciprocal and hierarchical Zongfan relations between the two countries.
Celebrating the Relationship: The Qing Emperor’s Roles in the Zongfan System
As the institutional agent at the highest level of the Zongfan hierarchy, the emperor could exploit the occasions of imperial audiences and his patriarchal authority to modify and lubricate the mechanism from the top down. As the following sections show, he could freely endow tributary emissaries with various extra gifts, supervise and admonish the Manchu envoys to Chosŏn and the Manchus along the border in Manchuria, and make final decisions about border conflicts.
Consolidating the System through Imperial Gifts and Extra Gifts
After Chosŏn’s emissaries presented their tribute gifts to the emperor, the sovereign would bestow routine gifts (Ch., lishang) on them and the king. At least since the Shunzhi period, the Qing presented the tribute missions with gifts whose value exceeded that of the tribute, based on detailed calculations.⁹⁵ The gifts and their quantities varied according to the category of the mission, and when the Korean envoy was a member of the royal house, the amount and quality of the gifts would increase. The silk and satin among the gifts were taken from the Imperial Household Department, rather than the Ministry of Revenue, in order to show the emperor’s personal favor toward the "king of the fan " (Ch., fanwang). To mark the imperial birthday and the lunar New Year, the Qing would give the king a second-class horse with bridle and each of the two envoys a third-class horse with bridle, highlighting the Manchu character of the Qing regime. The Qing
would also give the envoys silver in the average amount of at least 680 taels (for annual tributary missions and winter solstice missions) or 850 taels (for imperial birthday missions and lunar New Year missions), along with other gifts.⁹⁶
Some scholars have argued that the routine gifts were an institutionalized part of the overall Zongfan mechanism and hence afforded little flexibility.⁹⁷ Yet the emperor could break this routine at his discretion by awarding the emissaries extra gifts during audiences. For instance, in early 1795 Emperor Qianlong awarded the king a hundred copies of the Chinese character for happiness (Ch., fu) that he had written on small squares of red paper.⁹⁸ This sort of largesse was seemingly random,⁹⁹ but it did not simply represent imperial prerogative or a deviation from the flowcharts of ritual codes. Rather, the practice of giving supererogatory gifts highlighted the Qing policy of giving more to the visitors and benefiting less from them (Ch., houwang bolai), as Emperor Qian-long explained it to Chosŏn in 1736.¹⁰⁰ The emperor thus moderated the system by lending it flexibility and novelty. In the late eighteenth century, Emperor Qianlong disbursed an increasing quantity of extra gifts, while the amount of the tribute sent by Chosŏn remained remarkably stable. The extra imperial gifts reached their peak in the 1790s, a time when Emperor Qianlong was particularly keen to enhance the image of his dynasty as the Heavenly Dynasty. Given these priorities, the Qing court was not concerned about maintaining a balance between the value of the tributes and that of the imperial gifts. In 1793 a Korean emissary acknowledged that the Qing treated Chosŏn in such a favorable way that the Qing’s spending on accommodations for the tributary emissaries and the value of the various imperial gifts far exceeded the value of the Korean local products.¹⁰¹
Constructing a Positive Image of the Qing and Highlighting the Envoys’ Manchu Identity
The Qing emperor sought to further burnish his dynasty’s image in his contacts with Chosŏn by taking steps to prevent the Manchu envoys to Chosŏn and the bannermen who resided along the border in Manchuria from compromising the dignity of the Heavenly Dynasty through open degeneracy. Emperor Qianlong, for example, felt it necessary to extend the Qing’s prolonged campaign to maintain Manchu traditions and identity to the field of the Sino-Korean communications by closely monitoring his envoys’ behavior.
His first reform aimed to bolster the Manchu envoys’ integrity by discouraging corruption during their trip to Chosŏn. In 1736, after reducing by half the amount of the gifts the Koreans were expected to provide to the imperial envoys, the emperor punished two envoys who violated the new rules. He decreed that in the future the garrison generals at Mukden and Shanhai Pass should check the envoys’ luggage when they returned from Hansŏng to make sure they had not received unauthorized gifts.¹⁰² Until the last imperial mission in 1890, subsequent emperors continued to admonish their envoys to Chosŏn to remain upright and honest. Compared with their pre-1637 Ming counterparts, who had exploited Chosŏn for maximum profit, the Manchu envoys, in particular after the Kangxi period, behaved well on their visits to Chosŏn, which helped reduce the tension between the two countries caused by the Qing invasions in the 1630s. The Korean scholar Hong Tae-yong acknowledged in 1766 that the Qing was much more generous and kind to Chosŏn than the Ming had been.¹⁰³
The Qianlong emperor also believed that the Manchu officers and soldiers in Manchuria should focus on border security. In 1737, under the claim of giving kindness to the people from afar, he decided to prohibit the Manchus from trading with Koreans in the Middle River area of the Yalu River and to ask merchants and commoners of inner China (Ch., neidi shangmin) to undertake this trade instead. The Middle River market had been established in 1592 between Chosŏn and the Ming; it had barely opened during the Ming-Qing war but was restored as a major trading center between the Qing and Chosŏn after 1646. Manchu bannermen and merchants near Fenghuang City had thereafter constituted the Qing’s traders in the market. Now the Qianlong emperor abruptly concluded that the bannermen were not good at doing business and sought to direct his Manchu warriors back to the military realm. The king, however, was deeply concerned about the potential arrival of the people of inner China, so he petitioned the emperor to maintain the trade with the bannermen. The emperor granted the
petition but explained that by people of inner China he meant only those living near the banner garrisons in Manchuria, not those south of the Great Wall or in Beijing.¹⁰⁴ This episode shows that in the border area the Manchu court was concerned more about political consequences and border security than about the economic interests of the local bannermen. It also suggests that at least by the 1730s the Qing had come to integrate Manchuria into its concept of inner China (Ch., neidi), further nullifying the border function of the Great Wall within the multiethnic empire.
Emperor Qianlong’s more dramatic reform took place in 1763, when he dictated that all Manchu envoys to Chosŏn from that moment onward should ride horses instead of taking sedan chairs in Chosŏn. The emperor explained that although Chosŏn had provided sedan chairs for the missions to show its obedience to and respect for the imperial envoys of the Heavenly Dynasty, the Manchu officials were expert horsemen and should not ride in sedan chairs. The emperor instructed the king to end permanently the convention of welcoming the imperial envoys with sedan chairs and to provide only horses instead. The Qing documents do not explain why the emperor suddenly changed this longstanding convention. But according to the first-rank translator of the mission led by Hongying (1707–71), Xu Zongmen, who was a Beijing resident of Korean background, the emperor had originally picked another Manchu official as the envoy but, realizing how obese the chosen official was, asked him how he would make the long trip to Chosŏn. The envoy replied that since he would ride in a sedan chair, his weight would not be a problem. The emperor became angry, and to underline the Manchu martial spirit, he immediately replaced the envoy with Hongying, who was an excellent horseman. The emperor admonished Hongying to display righteousness (Ch., zhengda) in the outer fan and to avoid any wretchedness (Ch., weisuo). Meanwhile, the Korean emissaries, the emperor said, were exempt from the new rules and could maintain their custom of taking carriages to Beijing.¹⁰⁵ The Qianlong emperor’s quest to maintain and strengthen the Manchuness of the Manchus under his supervision thus helped the Qing improve its image in the eyes of its subordinate and to showcase its virtues in practice.
Arbitrating Border Disputes
The Qing emperor also served as the highest arbitrator in border conflicts and border-crossing disputes. In each case of border conflict with Chosŏn, it was the emperor—rather than the king, a historical precedent, or a border rule—who made the final decision. The geographical connection between the two countries occasioned a considerable number of illegal border crossings from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. These thorny cases posed a challenge to the Qing, in particular to the emperors, in terms of balancing the Qing’s lofty Zongfan discourse and its practical concerns. This aspect of the Qing’s policy underwent a major change from the Kangxi to the Qianlong period. In the Shunzhi and early Kangxi periods, the Manchu monarchs often doled out severe punishments to the king or his officials over border disputes and often sent special envoys to Chosŏn for in-person investigation. The emperors embraced this approach primarily because the Qing had not yet consolidated its rule in the wake of the Southern Ming (1644–62) and its influences and was worried about the possibility of a Chosŏn rebellion against the Qing. But after the Kangxi emperor suppressed the revolt of the Three Feudatories in the 1680s, the Qing praised Chosŏn for its loyalty and adopted a more relaxed policy on border conflicts with the country, eventually ceasing to send special investigative envoys.
The Qing court in the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods following Kangxi governed a country that had been unified to an unprecedented degree since 1644. The court consequently focused on reinforcing the cosmopolitan ideology of all-under-Heaven in the Qing’s foreign relations. Although the emperors had clear views on the Qing’s geographical borders, they preferred to rely on traditional Zongfan norms in settling border disputes with Chosŏn. The Qing’s border policy toward Chosŏn thus became more conservative than aggressive, forming a sharp contrast with the Qing’s contemporary policy in the southwest and northwest, where the new empire continued to expand its territory. On the Chosŏn side, the savvy king and local officials applied the same Zongfan norms in their sophisticated negotiations with their Qing counterparts, leaving the emperor in Beijing with no option but to endorse one Korean proposal after another.
The Mangniushao case provides a good example. In 1745 the Manchu general of Mukden, Daldangga (?–1760), suggested to Emperor Qianlong that the Qing set up a border outpost at Mangniushao near the Yalu River in order to prevent Koreans from illegally crossing the border river to sell or buy grains or to search for ginseng in Manchuria. Although in 1731 Daldangga’s predecessor, Nasutu (?–1749), had likewise proposed an outpost at Mangniushao, Emperor Yongzheng had rejected the proposal because of the king’s opposition and upheld his father’s policy, in place since 1715, of prohibiting all construction in this area.¹⁰⁶ Prompted by an increase in illegal border crossings, Daldangga resurrected Nasutu’s plan and proposed to repair the broken parts of the Willow Palisade and to open lands outside the palisade for cultivation. Emperor Qianlong initially supported Daldangga’s plan and sent a Mongol minister, Bandi (?–1755), to visit the area to confirm that Mangniushao was indeed inside China’s borders and that it would be appropriate for China to establish an outpost there. At the last moment, however, the emperor reversed his stance, invoking the precedents set by the decisions of his grandfather in 1715 and his father in 1731, as well as a decision he himself had made in another case in 1737. To justify his rejection of the proposal, he cited the imperative of cherishing the small. Furthermore, the emperor told Daldangga that no further such proposals should be made to the court and that Daldangga and his successors in Mukden should follow established rules in managing border affairs with Chosŏn.¹⁰⁷ In this way, the emperor reduced the possibility of further conflicts in this border area and helped stabilize the two countries’ relationship from the top down.
Barbarianizing the Periphery: The Qing’s Institutional Zongfan Discourse
The Changing Meaning of Barbarians from Yongzheng to Qianlong
The Qing interpretation of the civilized–barbarian distinction underwent a sharp change in the transitional days between the reigns of Yongzheng and Qianlong. In the late 1720s, Emperor Yongzheng had made the putative barbarity of the Qing a public issue among Qing scholars because of his response to the case of Zeng Jing (1679–1735). Encouraged by the civilized–barbarian discourse, Zeng had plotted to rebel against the Manchu barbarians, but after he was prosecuted, he reversed his stance and endorsed the Qing, whereupon the emperor released him from prison. In June 1733, while Zeng was in the provinces giving lectures on the dynasty’s virtues, the emperor issued an edict to prohibit the practice of changing Chinese characters with the meaning of barbarian (Ch., hu, lu, yi, di) in books. The Manchu monarch defined the term barbarian geographically and confessed that the ancestors of the current dynasty could be called eastern barbarians, like ancient Chinese saints. This tone had been set by his great-grandfather Hongtaiji in 1636 in his letter to the king of Chosŏn, and Yongzheng himself had repeated the same points in his book responding to Zeng, Great Righteousness Resolving Confusion (Ch., Dayi juemi lu) in 1729.¹⁰⁸ By proclaiming that people living both within and outside China belong to the same family (Ch., Zhong Wai yijia), Yongzheng insisted that the civilized–barbarian distinction should not be understood in a cultural sense, and even if it were, only those who were beyond civilization (Ch., wanghua zhi wai), like the Zunghar, might truly be called barbarians.¹⁰⁹ Under this definition, the outer fan of the Qing also seemed to be excluded from the category of barbarians.
Yongzheng’s statements suggest that the Manchu rulers embraced cultural egalitarianism in order to redistribute cultural resources within the multiethnic empire.¹¹⁰ It is safe to say that the Manchu emperor was trying to overcome the prejudice inherent in the stereotypical civilized–barbarian distinction among Han Chinese intellectuals in the process of consolidating the Manchu regime’s orthodox legitimacy. This sustained effort can also be seen in the move by Yongzheng’s father and grandfather to expand considerably the list of Chinese monarchs who were enshrined in the Temple of Ancient Monarchs (Ch., Lidai diwang miao), with the goal of establishing the Qing as the legitimate successor to previous dynasties that had likewise been identified as China.¹¹¹ With Yongzheng’s policy, the yardstick for judging barbarians suddenly snapped, as the ruling dynasty now identified itself both with the ancient rulers and with the
eastern barbarians.
After assuming the throne in 1735, the Qianlong emperor not only quickly revoked his father’s pardon and executed Zeng but also reversed Yongzheng’s approach by clearly differentiating the civilized Qing from the barbarian countries surrounding it. Qianlong thus brought the civilized–barbarian discourse back to its pre-Yongzheng meaning, in which cultural factors played a pivotal role. He exploited his father’s heritage by turning the latter’s policy of permitting the free and public use of all Chinese characters for barbarian into a tool for propagating the opposite message in the context of the civilized– barbarian discourse—namely, one that excluded the Qing from this category. No longer would the Great Qing downgrade itself to the rank of barbarian.¹¹² Consequently, in the Qianlong period the use of the term foreign barbarians in official documents reached its historical zenith.¹¹³ Through this terminology, the Qing combined its civilized centrality with cultural superiority. Qianlong achieved this symbolic goal by formally designating all other countries as barbarians, along with the majority of the ethnic groups under his rule, and one of the most important targets of this barbarianization at the normative level was Chosŏn.
At the time when Yongzheng published his book on the definition of barbarian, some Manchu envoys to Chosŏn had taken to visiting Jizi Shrine in P’yŏngyang on their way back from Hansŏng.¹¹⁴ As mentioned in the introduction, Jizi was said to be the founding father of the ancient Korean regime, invested by the Chinese monarch of the Zhou Dynasty with the lands of Chosŏn, where he maintained a familistic and tributary relationship with the central court of China. Given the intense debate around ethnicity and the civilized–barbarian dichotomy in the late years of Yongzheng’s reign, the Manchu envoys’ visits to Jizi Shrine could help the Manchu regime bolster its Chineseness and its claims to legitimacy beyond its borders. When the Qing overcame the challenge of the civilized–barbarian distinction within China in the first half of the Qianlong period, visits to Jizi Shrine ceased, although Chinese historical records continued to celebrate the familial relationship between the Chinese and the Koreans.
The Qing’s Systematic, Institutional Barbarianization of Chosŏn and Others
In June 1751 the Qianlong emperor instructed the governors-general and governors of border provinces to draw and submit pictures of domestic and foreign barbarians (Ch., neiwai miaoyi, waiyi fanzhong) in order to demonstrate the flourishing of the Qing.¹¹⁵ The emperor was following a precedent set by Emperor Taizong (r. 627–49) of the Tang Dynasty, who was believed to have brought China its most prosperous days in the pre-Qing era. Since Tang Taizong had commissioned paintings of the barbarians to celebrate the great moment in which ten thousand countries came to revere the emperor (Ch., wanguo laichao),¹¹⁶ Qianlong had every reason to commemorate his dynasty’s accomplishments in the same way. Even during the Qing expansion into Central Asia, Qianlong identified the efforts of the Han and Tang dynasties to extend Chinese power into Central Asia as historical milestones by which to measure his own progress.¹¹⁷
Beyond the obvious political factors, contemporary popular culture may also have motivated Qianlong’s desire for an illustrated record of the Qing’s imperial expansion. As a big fan of Chinese opera who contributed to the birth of Peking opera, Qianlong may have been influenced by popular operas that extolled the virtues of the civilized center of the world. These operas can be dated at least to the Yuan, but in the Ming and early Qing they were still being performed in cities such as Beijing. Their scripts described the Ming as the Heavenly Dynasty, the upper country, or the central civilized country, bordered by barbarians in four directions (primarily represented as Chosŏn, Annam, and political units in Inner Asia) who paid tribute and presented palace memorials to the great emperor of China.¹¹⁸
In 1761, ten years after Qianlong ordered the drawings, the first edition of the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Ch., Huang Qing zhigong tu) was published in four volumes, featuring six hundred pictures of people from the Qing’s outer fan and from barbarian places within Qing territory or on its periphery. The first picture in the collection was of a Korean official who wore a Ming-style official robe but was labeled "a barbarian official of the country of
Chosŏn" (Ch., Chaoxian guo yiguan) (see figure 2.3). Once again, Chosŏn served as the model for others in the collection, and its prototypical role was made clear by Qing scholars in the Essentials of Complete Books of the Four Storehouses Catalog (Ch., Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao).¹¹⁹ Chosŏn, Little China, was thus institutionally converted into a country of barbarians by the Qing’s political discourse and imperial documentary mechanism.
Following Chosŏn, other countries, including Ryukyu, Annam, Siam, Sulu, Lanchang, Burma, Britain, France, Japan, the Netherlands, and Russia, likewise became barbarians in the Qing nomenclature, as did many of the diverse peoples within Qing territory. In nearly every case, the Qing narrative constructed an imperial pedigree by reviewing a long history of Zongfan relations with the foreign country (Ch., guo; Ma., gurun) or domestic tribe (Ch., buluo; Ma., aiman) from the Zhou to the Ming Dynasties and emphasized that it was the Qing’s merits that prompted the barbarians to send emissaries to come and pay tribute (Ch., qianshi rugong; Ma., elcin takūrafi albabun jafanjimbi) or come to kowtow with tribute (Ch., chaogong; Ma., albabun jafame hengkilenjimbi).¹²⁰ In this way, the Qing systematically assimilated the historical legacies of previous dynasties into its own Zongfan relations with these countries and tribes and consolidated its legitimacy as the civilized center, or Zhongguo (Ma., Dulimbai gurun).¹²¹ Also in 1761, in order to celebrate the empress dowager’s seventieth birthday, the Qing published another magnificent collection, Illustrations of the Great Celebration (Ch., Luhuan huijing tu). The first illustration carried the title Ten thousand countries came to revere the emperor, the precise phrase the Tang Dynasty had used, and Chosŏn’s emissaries occupied a distinguished position within it.¹²² If there was a documentary institutionalization for the Qing,¹²³ in terms of the Qing’s construction of its civilized identity, this process was substantially accomplished in 1761.
FIGURE 2.3. A Chosŏn official in the Illustrations of Subordinate Peoples of the Imperial Qing (Huang Qing zhigong tu, 33).
Behind the cheerful facade of the great multiethnic empire lay the axiom of the Qing’s centrality in the world. And that world, of course, often found its way to the Qing threshold. Britain, which the Qing knew as the country of Ying ji li (Ying ji li is a transliteration of England; Ch., Yingjili guo; Ma., Ing gi lii gurun), was one of the countries portrayed as barbarian in the collection of 1761. At the end of that year, the Qianlong emperor instructed his representatives in Guangzhou to notify the men from afar and foreign barbarians there—the British merchants—that the Heavenly Dynasty has everything it needs, so it does not need foreign barbarians to bring trivial goods for trade.¹²⁴ The edict was a response to petitions from James Flint in 1759 and Nicholas Skottowe in 1761. The two were representatives of the British merchants who wanted to change the Canton system of trade, which channeled all trade with the West through that southern port. Their efforts not only were futile but in fact led to stricter regulations on Western traders in China.¹²⁵ In this sense, the rebuff that George Macartney’s mission later received from the emperor in 1793 was merely a repetition of the institutionalized rhetoric that had been directed at the British in China more than three decades earlier.
Popularizing Chosŏn’s Status as Foreign Barbarians in Imperial Discourse
The prolonged construction of the Qing’s new identity and the reorientation of its political discourse vis-à-vis other countries was not just the result of the emperor’s personal activities or political motivations, imposed on the administration from the top down. Nor should they be understood purely as the outcome of implementing the political will of the Manchu court. Rather, Qing officials at the local level, from counties to prefectures to provinces, also contributed to this construction from the bottom up. As a result, in the eighteenth century, Chosŏn’s status as foreign barbarians was popularized within the norms of Qing foreign relations.
This point is illustrated by the Qing policy toward shipwrecked fishermen from Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Annam, and other countries who were rescued by local Chinese officials along the coast. At least from the early Qianlong period, Qing officials called these victims barbarians who suffered from storms (Ch., zaofeng nanyi; Ma., edun de lasihibufi jobolon de tušaha i niyalma) and sent them to Beijing or to the nearest provincial capital, from whence they could return home with embassies from their countries. From the 1730s to the 1880s, the Qing archives were full of such reports of local officials looking after shipwrecked fishermen; reports concerning fishermen from Chosŏn were particularly prominent.¹²⁶ By accommodating these victims on humanitarian grounds, the Qing sought to highlight its policy of cherishing men from afar and to display the deep and outstanding merits of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., zhao tianchao rouyuan shenren; Ma., abkai gurun i goroki urse be gosire šumin gosin be iletulembi). This sort of rhetoric, aimed at justifying and consolidating the way of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao tizhi; Ma., abkai gurun i doro yoso), reached its peak in the Qianlong period.¹²⁷
Chosŏn again represented the best example of the way of the Heavenly Dynasty, a fact that permeated many aspects of Qing-Chosŏn contacts. For instance, in 1776, one thousand taels of silver belonging to a Korean mission were stolen by Chinese thieves near Mukden. Emperor Qianlong instructed the Manchu general of Mukden, Hūngšang (1718–81), to compensate the mission for its losses in order to uphold the way of our Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., he wo tianchao tizhi; Ma. musei amba gurun i doro de acanambi). The emperor emphasized in his Chinese edict that the Chosŏn are a people of foreign barbarians (Ch., Chaoxian nai waiyi zhi ren), further elucidating in the Manchu version of the edict that the people of the country of Chosŏn are a people of foreign barbarians (Ma., Coohiyan gurun i niyalma serengge, tulergi aiman i niyalma).¹²⁸ This case was not exceptional, and the wealth of similar cases indicates the maturation of the Qing’s Zongfan discourse.¹²⁹
Despite the harmonious imperial picture the Qing painted, its model fan was simultaneously creating an alternate vision. While Chosŏn continued publicly to display its obedience to the Qing, sending tributary missions to Beijing over and above what imperial edicts demanded, in private the Chosŏn king and his
officials, along with Chosŏn intellectuals, were reluctant to identify the Qing as the supreme representative of Chinese culture. This story is explored in the next chapter.
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3 JUSTIFYING THE CIVILIZED The Qing’s Contacts with Chosŏn, Annam, and Britain, 1762–1861 As Chosŏn carefully maintained its political subordination to the Qing on the surface, and the Manchu ruling house used this submission to reinforce the Qing’s centrality and Chineseness, Chosŏn simultaneously constructed its own Chineseness within its borders by depicting the Qing as barbarians in particular mo- ments. The civilized–barbarian discourse pervaded Chosŏn, nourishing a strong pro-Ming and anti-Qing attitude among the educated in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century. Chosŏn entered the contest for civilized status in a cultural sense, and its perennial missions to the Qing served this domestic construc- tion of identity. As the Qing was proclaiming Chineseness in the post-Ming era, Chosŏn, too, sought to establish itself as the exclusive legitimate successor to the Ming. In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, a group of Korean scholars who observed the Qing’s prosperity and the economic gap between the Qing and Chosŏn dared to voice their support for the Qing’s claim to civilized status. Their arguments counterbalanced the prevalent anti-Qing attitude among Korean scholars and helped Chosŏn cope with the paradox of the civilized–barbarian discourse in a practical sense. This chapter examines the interior aspects and function of the Zongfan order by showing how the Qing’s rule of “cherishing the men from afar” operated in the ritual protocol and presentations of diplomatic missions between the Qing, Chosŏn, and other countries from 1762 to 1861. The chapter discusses several cases of emissary exchanges between the Qing and Chosŏn against the background of the sharp reversal of the civilized–barbarian discourse that both sides exploited intensively for their own domestic politico-cultural legitimacy. It suggests that the Qing eventually prevailed over Chosŏn. By introducing Annam’s and Britain’s missions to China as a point of comparison for those from Chosŏn, the chapter further explores how the Manchu ruling house navigated the balance between the Chinese rhetoric commensurate with China’s claimed preeminence in the cosmopolitan world and the practical consequences of this superiority in bilateral com- munications. This balance illustrates the Qing state-craft and helps explain why, in the second half of the nineteenth century, both the Qing and Chosŏn, along with Vietnam and Ryukyu, encountered such tremendous difficulty in defining the nature of their relationship in accordance with the newly imported international law, a topic examined in part 2 of this book. Historical Memory of the Civilized: Chosŏn’s Anti-Manchu Mentality The Perception of a Barbarous Qing within Little China after 1644 With the irreversible downfall of the Ming in 1644, Chosŏn intensified its efforts to identify itself as the exclusive and genuine heir to Chinese civilization. In their daily training and practices, Korean intellectuals who were followers of Neo-Confucianism shared a consensus that the Manchu conquest of China proper in 1644 marked the “fall of the central civilized country” (K., Chunghwa hamnak).¹ In Chosŏn, numerous scholars used the regnal title of the last emperor of the Ming, Chongzhen, to date their personal letters and domestic documents. Their attitude was consolidated in the “Little China” discourse that emphasized the succes- sion of Confucian orthodox legitimacy (K., tot’ong) instead of denying explicitly that the Qing possessed political orthodox legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom. Thus, within its borders Chosŏn presented itself as the successor to Confucius, Mencius, and Zhu Xi after the demise of the Ming. On the Qing side, Chosŏn’s status as Little China was widely accepted by both ethnic Han and Manchu scholars. The Chinese officials and intelligentsia did not treat their Korean counterparts as barbarians, as they did many Europeans. On occasion, the Qing court explicitly appraised Chosŏn as “a country of rituals
and literature” (Ch., wenwu zhi bang; Ma., doro yoso i gurun), a statement also endorsed by many Chinese scholars of the Qing.² Yet when it came to locating Chosŏn within the multilevel structure of all-under-Heaven in the Qing’s political and cultural discourse, Chosŏn was inevitably designated a country of barbar- ians on China’s periphery. As this chapter shows, Korean scholars who visited Beijing had to face the challenge of reconciling their country’s putative barbarity with their conviction in its superior cultural pedigree. In late seventeenth-century Chosŏn, in particular during the reigns of King Hyojong and King Hyŏngjong, anti-Qing sentiment was widespread among intel- lectuals. Song Si-yŏl (1607–89), a leading scholar and King Hyojong’s mentor, zealously proposed a northern expedition (K., bukpŏl) against the Manchus in order to “recover the central plain” on behalf of the Ming.³ Song’s plan was never put into practice, but it won strong moral support from the court and from Confucian scholars and contributed to the rise of a Korean national identity in the post-Ming period when the country was struggling for a new episteme.⁴ Another scholar, Sin Yu-han (1681–1752), in a letter to a friend who was about to visit Beijing as a member of a tributary mission, claimed that “we are also Chinese” (K., uri yŏk Chunggukin) and that Chosŏn was “China”—a “China with Classic of Poetry and Book of Documents ” (K., sisŏ Chungguk) and a “China with [Chinese-style] clothes and belts” (K., ŭidae Chungguk). Sin went on to claim that since the fall of the Ming in 1644 China had not had a Son of Heaven, implying that political orthodox legitimacy also lay in Chosŏn, the successor to Kija (Jizi).⁵ The cases of Song and Sin reveal a pronounced victim mentality within the Korean ruling house and intellectual stratum after the humiliating Manchu invasions and the fall of the Ming. Highlighting Korea’s filial duty to the deposed Ming became an ideological tool to maintain Chosŏn’s domestic order and raise the morale of the learned class. On the one hand, the king presented himself as a loyal subordinate of the Qing for the sake of the political orthodox legitimacy grant- ed by the Qing; but on the other hand, he was the moral sponsor of the anti-Qing movement inside Chosŏn, seeking to capture the political orthodox legitimacy embedded in the connection between his rulership and his subjects. Like the Qing emperors, the Korean kings had to deal with grave challenges arising from the framework of the civilized–barbarian discourse. Against the background of this volatile balance, Chosŏn entered a more radical period of actively commemorating the “imperial Ming” during the reign of King Sukchong, when the Qing’s control over Chosŏn was loosened as the Kangxi emperor was preoccupied with suppressing the revolt of the Three Feudatories in the 1680s. In April 1704, on the sixtieth anniversary of Emperor Chongzhen’s suicide, the king established an altar near the palace in Hansŏng and performed a new ceremony to commemorate Chongzhen. Although it was the forty-third year of Kangxi, the king called the moment the “seventy-seventh year of Chongzhen,” setting the starting year to 1628, when Chongzhen ascended the throne. The king declared that the “imperial Ming” was the “owner of the civilized and the barbar- ians” (K., Hwa–I ju) but that the “northern barbarians”—that is, the Manchus—had taken the opportunity to “occupy our central plain” (K., kŏ a chungwŏn), with the result that the “rituals and clothes” (K., yeak ŭigwan)—the traditional metaphor for civilization—had become barbarous. Chosŏn, the king claimed, was the only place that still loyally worshipped the “old motherland” (K., koguk). Reciting these words at the ceremony, the king burst into tears. All of the officials around him wept too. Soon thereafter, in October of the same year, the king had a long discussion with several ministers about building a temple to Wanli, the Ming emperor who saved Chosŏn from the Japanese invasion in the 1590s. The ministers endorsed the king’s pro-Ming attitude but pointed out that it was inappropriate for a “vas- sal” to offer sacrifices to the “Son of Heaven,” so the king instead constructed a nine-floor altar and named it the Great Altar for Gratitude (K., Taebodan), where a state ceremony would be performed twice a year, in spring and autumn. The altar was completed in January 1705.⁶ Thereafter, Chosŏn continued to commemorate the Ming for another 190 years until 1895, when it declared independence from the Qing. The altar was permanently closed in 1908, three years after Chosŏn
became a protectorate of Japan and two years before it was annexed by Japan. Korean emissaries to Beijing continuously fed the popular antipathy toward the Qing in Chosŏn by providing firsthand accounts of their dealings with the bar- barous usurpers of the Ming. For these emissaries, the trip to Beijing was a journey for mourning the Ming, deprecating the Qing, and strengthening Chosŏn’s identity as Little China. As they reached various landmarks—the Yalu River, Fenghuang Gate, Liaoyang, the Korean compound in Mukden where Crown Prince So- hyŏn had been detained between 1637 and 1644, Shanhai Pass, and the Forbidden City in Beijing, where the Ming emperors had resided for centuries—the emis- saries often wrote poems lamenting the fall of the Ming. These poems became part of their journals, which were widely circulated in Chosŏn and were generically known as Yŏnhaengnok (The records of the journey to Beijing).⁷ From the second half of the eighteenth century, however, some Korean intellectuals, having witnessed the Qing’s prosperity on their journeys to Beijing and having engaged in extensive conversations with Han Chinese and Manchu scholars in Beijing, started to reconsider their entrenched view of the barbarous Qing. Disillusioned with Chosŏn’s self-proclaimed cultural superiority, these pundits recognized the Qing as a civilized country and called for Chosŏn to learn from Qing China for its own good, beyond the popular doctrine of “revering China and expelling the barbarians.” These scholars constituted the School of Northern Learning (K., Pukhak p’ae), focusing on “practical knowledge” (K., Sirhak). They successfully resumed contacts between the literati of Korea and those of China that had been suspended for more than 120 years since 1644. Among these scholars, three in particular stood out: Hong Tae-yong, Pak Che-ka (1750–1805), and Pak Chi-wŏn (1737–1805). Honoring the Great Ming: Hong Tae-yong’s Perception of the Qing Hong Tae-yong was born in Hansŏng in 1731 into Chosŏn’s ruling gentry and the hereditary class of yangban (lit. “two branches [of the ruling class]”), and he studied with Kim Wŏn-haeng (1702–72), a leading scholar of the time. In late 1765, when his uncle was appointed the secretary of the annual tributary mission to Beijing, Hong became affiliated with the mission as an officer of the emissaries’ junior relatives (K., chaje gungwan).⁸ Although Hong regarded the Qing as a bar- barous country, he was excited about the trip and was eager to exchange ideas with his Chinese counterparts. After arriving in Beijing in early 1766, Hong put al- most all his time and energy into getting to know Chinese scholars, mainly through written conversations (K., p’iltam, “conversing by writing Chinese char- acters”). These dialogues led him to conclude that the Qing, no matter how barbarous in Chosŏn’s eyes, was indeed the civilized Middle Kingdom, whereas Chosŏn, no matter how superior in its own mind, nonetheless fell into the category of barbarians. Hong, like other Koreans, was extremely proud of Chosŏn’s fashion of Ming-style clothes and hats and disparaged the Manchu hairstyle and robes. His choice of dress signaled that he maintained the true way of Chinese culture. In his conversations with Chinese intellectuals in the first weeks of his stay in Beijing, Hong frequently used his clothing to highlight Chosŏn’s cultural superiority over the Qing.⁹ Shortly thereafter, however, Hong entered into dialogue with other Chinese intellectuals, in particular Yan Cheng and Pan Tingyun (1743–?), and these highly trained scholars dramatically changed his view of the Qing. Yan and Pan, both Han Chinese, were from Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province, where they had successfully passed the imperial civil-service examinations and won the title of Juren (a qualified graduate at the provincial level). They were determined to pass the last round of imperial exams in Beijing to realize their dream of serving their country as officials. To enhance their communications with Hong, they shared with him their provincial exam essays. In the first conversation among Hong, Yan, Pan, and their Korean and Chinese peers, another Korean, Kim P’yŏng-jung, asked Pan why he had said in his exam essay that people should worship only the Zhou Dynasty—a statement that, Kim felt, could be seen as an expression of nostalgia for the deposed Ming and as an act of defiance against the Manchus. Pan explained that his words referred to the “central civilized country,” which was the “patriarch for myriad countries” (Ch., wanguo suozong), and
he emphasized that the current Son of Heaven, the Qianlong emperor, was so great that all subjects should show him obedience and respect. Worshipping the Zhou, Pan concluded, was akin to worshipping the current dynasty. Hong, for the first time in his life, heard the Qing called the central civilized country. Seeing Pan’s response as a consequence of the sensitive Manchu–Han Chinese ethnic relationship, Hong disregarded his claim and instead responded by highlighting Chosŏn’s identity as Little China. But by the end of the conversation, the two sides had found common ground in celebrating the Qing conceit that “all-under- Heav- is one unified family” (Ch., tianxia yijia).¹⁰ Hong did not reveal his sense of cultural superiority until his second conversation with Yan and Pan at the Korean residence. The conversation included a long discussion about clothes and hats, in which the Korean hosts and the Chinese guests articulated their respective understandings of the Ming-Qing transition and the Qing’s position in Chinese history. Hong emphasized several times that Koreans wore Ming-style garments, which in China by this time were worn only on the opera stage. Hong indicated that the garments served as a visible reminder of the “dignified manner of Han Chinese officials” (Ch., hanguan weiyi). The Ko- rean hosts asked Pan and Yan critical questions regarding the Manchu hair-style, clothes, and hats, and about the Ming’s stories. Pan, who was in charge of recording the conversation, answered their questions carefully and praised the Qing volubly.¹¹ Pan later became an official in Beijing and never gave Hong the copies of their correspondence that Hong had requested after returning to Hansŏng, although the two maintained a good relationship.¹² In another long conversation with Yan, Hong again used Chosŏn’s style of dress to criticize the Qing and mourn the Ming. Hong told Yan he felt extremely sad that China had lost itself with its adoption of Manchu fashions in hair and clothes and that China’s situation was in his view even worse than it had been under the Jin and Yuan Dynasties. In comparison, Hong proudly noted Chosŏn’s loyalty to the Ming, which he called the “parent nation.” Yan, however, argued that in 1644 the Qing had legitimately become the ruler of the country by defeating the rebels and defending and enacting justice. At the end of the conversation, Hong acknowledged that whereas the Ming had exploited his country, the Qing was much more generous toward Chosŏn.¹³ Hong realized that Han Chinese scholars identified the Qing both as a legitimate successor to the Ming in the political sense and as a legitimate heir to Confucianism in the cultural sense. Although the Han Chinese had adopted the Manchu queue and clothes, Hong concluded, they were still the “offspring of the old home of the central civilized country” (K., Chunghwa koga chi ye). By contrast, Hong conceded that although Koreans took pride in their Ming-style dress, on a fundamental level they still belonged to the “barbarians by the sea.” By arguing that “the civilized and the barbarians are the same,” he acknowledged the Qing’s civilized status.¹⁴ Hong returned to Chosŏn with a new perception of Qing China, and he made an immense contribution to the School of Northern Learning. Learning from the North: The Korean Visitors’ New Tone toward the Qing Revisiting the Civilized–Barbarian Discourse: Pak Che-ka’s Visit to Beijing After Hong returned to Hansŏng in 1766, his strong relationships with Pan, Yan, and other Chinese friends, and his continuous correspondence with them, swiftly became legend among his fellow scholars in Chosŏn. One of them was Pak Che-ka, born in 1750 in Hansŏng, where his father served as a minister at the court. Because his mother was a concubine, Pak was not allowed to take the civil-service examinations, but he won fame as a poet when he was young and joined a wide aristocratic and intellectual social network, through which he became acquainted with Hong. Pak was fascinated by the contacts between Hong and Chinese scholars and hoped to visit Beijing himself. His opportunity came in the spring of 1778, when the emissary Ch’ae Che-gong (1720–99) invited Pak and another fa- mous young scholar, Yi Tŏng-mu (1741–93), to join him on a tributary mission to Beijing. This trip helped transform Pak into a leading proponent of Sirhak—“practical knowledge.”
In Beijing Pak exchanged poems or conducted written conversations with more than fifty famous Han Chinese and Manchu scholars, almost all of them high- ranking officials at court, including Ji Yun (1724–1805), Pan Tingyun, Tiyeboo (1752–1824), and Fengšen Yendehe (1775–1810). He also conversed with a Muslim prince from Central Asia. After returning to Chosŏn, he spent three months composing a treatise entitled “Discussions on Northern Learning” (K., Pukhak ŭi), in which he discussed what Chosŏn could learn from the Qing in matters ranging from the construction of bridges, roads, ships, and cities to the production of porcelain, paper, bows, and brushes, as well as language and medicine.¹⁵ On each of these matters and many others, Pak described how advanced the Qing was, then compared it to Chosŏn. He suggested that it was Chosŏn’s self-imposed isolation, informed by the civilized–barbarian discourse, that prevented the country from perceiving the Qing’s accomplishments and embracing the Qing’s sophisticated practical skills. For example, he pointed out that Korean emissaries to Bei- jing did not directly contact local Chinese officials on their journey from Fenghuang Gate to Beijing but rather commissioned Korean interpreters to do so, which caused much inconvenience. Pak passionately urged his fellow scholars to study the Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, and Japanese languages. Proposals such as this one came very close to calling for a comprehensive reform of Chosŏn’s daily practices and statecraft. At the end of his treatise, Pak wrote a short piece under the title “On Worshipping the Zhou” (K., Chonju non), addressing Chosŏn’s understanding of the Qing based on the civilized–barbarian discourse. Pak followed the popular anti-Qing trend in acknowledging that the Qing were among the barbarians, but he critically pointed out that Chosŏn could nonetheless learn from the Qing in many aspects. Otherwise, Pak warned, Chosŏn could neither expel “China’s barbarians” nor transform the “eastern country’s barbarians.” “If we want to expel the barbarians,” Pak stated, “we had better know who the barbarians are first.” Pak stressed that it would not be too late for Chosŏn to seek revenge for the Ming’s demise after first carefully learning from the Qing for twenty years. Pak followed this piece with “Debate on Northern Learning” (K., Pukhak pyŏl), in which he justified his call to learn from the Qing on the basis of Neo-Confucian principles. He divided those Korean scholars who denigrated the Qing while acclaiming Chosŏn into three groups: the “lower savants” (K., hasa), focused on grains and foods; the “middle sa- vants” (K., chongsa), who were concerned with literature; and the “upper savants” (K., sangsa), who concentrated on Neo-Confucian principles. Pak argued that Chosŏn’s perception of Qing China was based on woefully incomplete knowledge of it and that Chosŏn was in fact underdeveloped compared to the prosperous Qing. Citing Zhu Xi, Pak expressed a wish that Chosŏn had more people who truly understood the principles as he did.¹⁶ Pak’s proposal that Chosŏn learn from the Qing before it fought against the Qing bore a striking resemblance to the strategy of “learning the superior techniques of the barbarians to constrain the bar- barians” (Ch., shiyi changji yi zhiyi) put forward by the Chinese scholar Wei Yuan (1794–1857) in the 1840s, although Wei’s “barbarians” referred to Europeans. Pak’s acknowledgment that the Qing was the civilized country disillusioned many of his fellow scholars. For those who had never seen the Qing, Pak described a society prosperous beyond their imaginations. Following Hong, Pak constructed a new image of the Qing, one the upper savants were reluctant to accept. Ch’ae Che-gong, the emissary who had invited Pak to Beijing, was one such upper savant. Ch’ae mourned the fall of the Ming and called the Manchu general of Fenghuang Gate “barbarous.” When he arrived in Beijing and saw the artificial hill next to the Forbidden City on which Chongzhen had committed suicide in 1644, Ch’ae composed a poem commemorating the Ming. He lamented that Chinese children on the street jeered at his Ming-style clothing. After the summer solstice rituals at the Temple of Earth, the Qianlong emperor praised the Korean mission for the best ritual performance among the outer fan. Ch’ae interpreted this as evidence that the Manchu emperor, whom he sometimes referred to as “khan,” tacitly approved of the “Han Chinese clothes and hats” that he and the other Korean visitors wore.¹⁷ When he returned to Chosŏn, Ch’ae collected the poems he had written on the trip into an anthology entitled Records of Enduring Contempt and Insults (K., Ham’in nok). In stark contrast, Korean scholars at the middle and lower levels found Pak’s proposal to “use techniques to benefit peo- ple’s livelihoods” (K., iyong husaeng) very attractive. Seeking to avoid pedanticism, these scholars contributed to the remarkable rise and dissemination of
northern learning. One of them was Pak Chi-wŏn. Reenvisioning the Barbarous Qing: Pak Chi-wŏn’s Trip to Beijing Pak Chi-wŏn was also of an aristocratic yangban background. In 1780, his cousin Pak Myŏng-wŏn (1725–90) was appointed the emissary to Beijing for Emperor Qianlong’s seventieth birthday, providing Pak Chi-wŏn an opportunity for “tourism in the upper country.” Shocked by the Qing’s wealth, evident everywhere from small towns on the Sino-Korean border to the metropolitan areas of Mukden and Beijing, Pak realized that the stereotypical perception of the Qing among the meritocracy of Chosŏn had become an obstacle to progress. Pak found it difficult to overcome the prejudices rooted in the hegemonic assumption of the Qing’s barbarity, although he was deeply influenced by Hong and had an open mind. In his Rehe Diary (K., Yŏlha ilgi), Pak frequently struggled with the moral correctness of the pro-Ming, anti-Qing principles, on the one hand, and his desire to learn from the Qing, on the other. He was uncomfortable, even pained, by any admission of the achievements of the Qing, which implied that the Qing was civilized but Chosŏn was not, just as Pak Che-ka had painfully suggested. Pak Chi-wŏn’s astonishment began on the first day of his journey, when he reached Fenghuang Gate and saw the small town inside the fence. Pak noticed that the houses, walls, doors, and streets of the town were well designed and maintained, and that the town bore no “indication of inferior rural style.” He realized that a scene like this at the “eastern end” of the Qing’s territory could only portend still more prosperous vistas in the inner reaches of the empire. How could the Manchu barbarians manage the land so efficiently, in such an impressive way, and to such a significant degree of control? Pak felt so unsettled that he wanted to return to Hansŏng. He asked his private servant, Chang Bok, “How would it be if you were born in China?” Chang, an illiterate boy, immediately answered, “China is barbarian [K., Chungguk ho ya], so I would not want to be born in China.”¹⁸ The boy’s answer was exactly the reassurance his master needed. It also reflects the prevalence among Koreans of the perception of the Qing as barbarians. Nevertheless, Pak realized that his journey would not be as peaceful as he had wished. Indeed, after he entered Fenghuang Gate, Pak’s preconceptions about the barbarous Qing crumbled a little more each day. As he passed by Liaoyang, Mukden, and many small towns and villages, Pak was confronted by beautiful buildings, thriving markets, and flourishing urban and rural communities where local civil- ians and officials treated him in a friendly manner. He enjoyed written conversations with Han Chinese and Manchu scholars and officials and appreciated local scenery and historical sites. In the course of these experiences, the charge that the Qing was barbarous completely vanished from Pak’s diary. Rather, Pak began to discern a gap between himself and his Chinese counterparts in practical terms that had been caused by Chosŏn’s cultural isolation from the Qing after 1644. His experience in two villages illustrates this point vividly. When Pak visited a pawnshop in a village called Xinmin, he was invited by the owner to write some Chinese characters as an honorable gift. Pak recalled that he had seen four big characters denoting “exceeding frost, surpassing snow” (Ch., qishuang saixue) on the front doors of some shops in Mukden and Liaoyang, so he wrote these down, assuming that they must mean that a businessman’s heart should be as pure as frost and snow. However, the four characters were actually a metaphor for the high quality of flour. The confused shop owner shook his head and murmured that the characters were not at all related to his business. Pak left the store in anger. The next day, when he camped at Xiaoheishan Village, he wrote the same four characters for a jewelry shop owner. Just as puzzled as the Xin- min merchant had been, the jeweler said, “I am selling women’s jewelry, not flour, so why did you write these characters for me?” Pak, suddenly aware of the char- acters’ actual meaning, overcame his embarrassment and calmly wrote other characters that won him high praise from the shop owner.¹⁹ Frustrated by this episode, Pak took a critical look at Chosŏn’s perception of the Qing and put forward the idea of “using techniques to benefit people’s liveli- hoods” by comparing different attitudes toward the Qing among his fellow Korean intellectuals. Like Pak Che-ka, he divided Korean scholars into upper savants, middle savants, and lower savants. He began with a scenario in which Korean people who had never visited the Qing would ask those returning from Beijing
about the impressive things they had observed on their journey. According to Pak, whereas many visitors would list without hesitation such things as the White Pagoda in Liaodong, Chinese markets, and Shanhai Pass, the upper savants would instead insist that “nothing is impressive” because the people in China, from the Son of Heaven to the common subjects, were “barbarians as long as they shaved their foreheads.” Since “barbarians are dogs and sheep,” nothing of theirs was worth praising. The middle savants would also argue that “the mountains and lands became barbarous and nothing over there is impressive until we lead a hundred thousand troops to cross Shanhai Pass to recover China.” Identifying himself as one of the lower savants who shared with the upper and middle savants the belief in “revering China and expelling the barbarians,” Pak nevertheless passionately called on his colleagues to “learn the good ways and useful systems [of the Qing] as long as they benefit our people and country, even if they are created by barbarians.” He argued, “If we want to expel the barbarians, we should learn all the good Chinese systems to change ours, after which we might be able to say that China has nothing impressive.”²⁰ Pak tried to separate recognition of the Qing’s superior practical techniques from the cultural and moral charges against the Qing. Yet this approach, which meant blurring the boundaries between civi- lized and barbarian, was a double-edged sword not only for himself but also for the general moral foundation of his country. On August 30, 1780, when Pak arrived in Beijing, he was stunned by the grandness of the splendid metropolis. In his diary, for the first time, he embraced the Qing regnal title to express the date—“the first day of the eighth month of the forty-fifth year of Qianlong”—thus incorporating himself into the Zongfan mindset by identifying the Qing as the center of the world. On that day, Pak completely overlooked the fact that he was in a country of “barbarians.”²¹ Identifying Chosŏn as a Loyal Subordinate of the Qing: Pak Chi-wŏn at Rehe When Pak Chi-wŏn and his fellow Koreans arrived in Beijing, they learned that the emperor had moved to the summer palace at Rehe, where the sixth Panchen Er- deni (1738–80) and Mongol princes would convene to celebrate the imperial birthday on September 11. On September 2, the emperor instructed the Ministry of Rites to ask the Korean emissaries to visit Rehe and ordered a minister of the Grand Council (Ch., Junjichu) to Beijing to welcome them, an act of “extraordinary imperial benevolence.” The Koreans immediately organized a special ad hoc team to travel to Rehe, to which Pak Chi-wŏn was attached. Five days later, the group arrived at Rehe, where it quickly became involved in subtle conflicts with the Chinese side. The emperor and his officials were keen to showcase Chosŏn’s sub- servience as a model outer fan, but the Koreans were equally keen to avoid this role, given their ambivalence about the Qing. However, Chosŏn’s subordinate position in the bilateral framework meant that the emissaries had few alternatives. The first incident that revealed this tension took place upon the emissaries’ arrival, when the emperor informed the emissaries that they would stand at the end of the right wing of China’s second-rank civil officials during the grand ceremony on the celebration day. This was a “special and unprecedented grace” from the emperor, because the ritual code generally required the emissaries to stand at the end of the left wing of civil officials. The ministers of the Ministry of Rites asked the emissaries to submit a memorial showing their sincere appreciation. The emissaries hesitated, as it would have been inappropriate to do so without the king’s authorization, but the ministers pushed them to draft the memorial. Pak commented that as the aged emperor became more suspicious, the ministers had to work harder to meet his wishes.²² On a subsequent occasion, the emperor sent a minister of the Grand Council to inquire whether the two emissaries would like to visit “the saintly monk from the western area” (Ch., xifan shengseng), referring to the Panchen Erdeni. The Koreans replied that they never stopped communicating with “people of China” (K., Chungguk insa), but that they did not dare to communicate with “people of other countries” (K., taguk in). Undeterred, the emperor ordered the emissaries to visit the lama at his monastery. At the monastery, the communications between the Korean emissaries and the Panchen Erdeni followed a labyrinthine path: the Erdeni spoke to the Mongol prince next to him, who relayed the message to the minister of the Grand Council, who forwarded it to the Qing interpreter, who passed it to
the interpreter from Chosŏn, who finally translated the words into Korean for the emissaries. The conversation involved Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, Chinese, and Korean, highlighting the multiethnic and multicultural nature of the unified empire, but the extent to which the Panchen Erdeni and the Korean emissaries could actually understand each other and grasp the political meanings behind the words used remains unclear. Acting on the guidance of the minister of the Grand Council, the emissaries, who were as stiff as “clay dolls and wooden puppets,” presented the Panchen Erdeni with silk handkerchiefs, and the Panchen Er- deni gave the Koreans three small bronze figurines of the Buddha and some Hada, Pulu, and Tibetan incense in return. Since the figurines contravened Confucian beliefs, the emissaries traded them for silver that they then distributed among their servants instead of bringing the figurines back to Chosŏn.²³ Behind the envoys’ reluctance to visit the Panchen Erdeni was the problem of the ritual of kowtow: the Korean emissaries refused to perform the ceremony to the lama. Pak later defended their behavior in a written conversation with a Manchu official: “Our humble country is in the same family with the big country, and there is no difference between inside and outside between us. Yet the lama is a man of the western area, so how could our envoys dare go and visit him? There is a rule that ‘subordinates have no right to conduct diplomacy’ [K., insin mu oegyo].”²⁴ Chosŏn was demonstrating its loyalty as China’s fan and subordinate. The principle that a subordinate country had no right to conduct diplomacy would be emphasized by the king of Chosŏn again and again when Western states tried to open direct lines of contact with Chosŏn between the 1830s and the 1870s. Their overtures created a tremendous and insurmountable dilemma for the scholars of Chosŏn. Although they viewed the Qing as a barbarous place and themselves as the civilized successors of the Ming within a Chosŏn-centric cultural world, as soon as another political entity approached Chosŏn, they would identify the Qing as China and hew to the Qing’s Zongfan line to embrace their unique role as the representatives of the men from afar cherished by China.²⁵ At a banquet held for representatives of the Qing’s subordinates and attended by the Panchen Erdeni, Mongol princes from Mongolia, Muslim princes from Xinjiang, emissaries from Chosŏn, and indigenous chiefs from southwestern China, the emperor lauded Chosŏn’s fealty, declaring to those gathered at the ban- quet that “Chosŏn has been serving as a fan for generations and has always been loyal. It pays its annual tribute on time, and that is truly worth praising.” The em- peror added, “We, the monarch and the subordinates, trust each other fully and belong to the same family inside and outside China, so we should not bother our- selves with these overelaborate rituals.” He then issued an edict according to which Chosŏn needed to present only an annual tribute; all other tributes, along with humble memorials, would be permanently canceled, reflecting the Qing’s policy of “cherishing men from afar with substantial measures rather than rhetoric” (Ch., rouhui yuanren, yishi bu yiwen).²⁶ Again, the Korean emissaries served as the typical men from afar for the purposes of imperial discourse extolling the Qing’s civilization and centrality. After returning home, Pak Chi-wŏn, like Pak Che-ka before him, called on his fellow scholars to learn from the Qing. In 1781 he wrote a foreword to Pak Cheka’s “Discussions on Northern Learning,” in which he reiterated that Chosŏn should abandon its incorrect assumptions about the Qing.²⁷ As other Korean scholars followed in Pak’s footsteps and made their own visits to Beijing, the Koreans’ perceptions about the Ming and the Qing continued to evolve. The Way of the Heavenly Dynasty: The Qing and the Tributary Missions of 1790 and 1793 The Imperial Grand Banquet and the Korean Mission of 1790 The Chosŏn meritocracy increasingly realized that it could not restore the Ming in China, and this recognition helped normalize its service to the Qing under the rubric of “serving the great.” Compared to Pak Che-ka in 1778 and Pak Chi-wŏn in 1780, Sŏ Ho-su (1736–99), who visited Rehe as an associate envoy to celebrate Emperor Qianlong’s eightieth birthday in 1790, described Chosŏn’s Zongfan contacts with the Qing in very moderate terms. The mission, led by envoy Hwang
In-jŏm (?–1802), associate envoy Sŏ, and secretary Yi Paek-hyŏng (1737–?), left Hansŏng on July 9 and two weeks later arrived at Ŭiju, where it could not cross the Yalu River because of flooding. During his sojourn in Ŭiju, Sŏ commented in one of his poems that “the Yalu River is the boundary between the civilized and the barbarians” (K., Hwa–I bungye), but in his diary he used the Qing’s regnal title for the date.²⁸ The Qianlong emperor was concerned about the time it would take for the Koreans to reach the celebration at Rehe. As the representatives of the Qing’s outer and inner fan convened again at Rehe, the emperor saw the attendance of Chosŏn’s emissaries as an indispensable part of the “system,” “way,” or “funda- mentals” (Ch., tizhi) of the big family. On August 1, the Korean emissaries, still in Ŭiju, received an official note from the Ministry of Rites in Beijing via the Manchu general of Mukden. The message had traveled 500 li (about 155 miles) per day, one of the fastest rates possible for the Qing mail system. The ministry in- structed the Koreans to head directly to Rehe, as they needed to arrive by August 19, the same deadline that the emperor had set for the king of Annam and the emissaries of Lanchang and Burma. When the mission crossed the river the next day, a second note from Beijing arrived, urging the envoys to meet the deadline because Chosŏn’s presence was “particularly crucial to the system” (Ch., shu yu tizhi youguan). They subsequently received a third note in a completely different tone, saying that it would be fine if the mission could not reach Rehe in time. The emissaries, perceiving the reversal as a subtle way of cherishing the men from afar, immediately organized a special team that would head directly for Rehe with humble palace memorials and selected tributes, while the rest of the mission would go to Beijing as planned. Covering more than 260 miles after passing Mukden, the emissaries reached Rehe on August 24 and learned that the emperor had changed the date of the grand banquet to August 25 to accommodate Chosŏn’s mission. The Mongol and Muslim princes, the emissaries of Burma and Lanchang, the indigenous chiefs of Taiwan, and the king of Annam had all ar- rived several days earlier.²⁹ The emperor’s decision conveyed eloquently that Chosŏn’s position was irreplaceable in the Qing-centric world. The following day, the Ministry of Rites guided Chosŏn’s emissaries to the imperial palace for an audience with the Qianlong emperor. After asking for the emissaries’ names and ranks, the emperor instructed them to attend the grand banquet and to watch the Peking opera. In further illustration of Chosŏn’s prom- inent status, the Korean emissaries were arranged in first position in the wing of the “emissaries of other countries,” while those of Annam were in second posi- tion, those of Lanchang in third, those of Burma in fourth, and the indigenous chiefs in fifth. In addition, Chosŏn’s well-written humble palace memorials were considered exemplary. Hešen (1750–99), the most influential Manchu minister in the Grand Council, showed one of the Korean memorials to the king of Annam, Nguyễn Huệ, and commented, “Chosŏn serves the great in such a good manner that it is the model for other fan .” The Vietnamese king inspected the memo- rial several times and praised it highly.³⁰ With the move of the grand meeting from Rehe to Beijing in early September, the emissaries of Chosŏn retained their prominent role in all ritual performances in the palaces of Yuan-Ming-Yuan and the Forbidden City. The emperor frequently granted the emissaries audiences, invited them to watch operas, treated them to Manchu banquets, and gave them gifts. On October 11 the Korean mission finally left Beijing for their homeland after a successful stay. Local Banquets and the Vietnamese Mission in 1790 The Qing expected the tributary emissaries from its other fan to accept and follow the imperial etiquette as readily as those from Chosŏn did. Any deviation from the prescribed practices would not only cause conflict between the Qing and the specific fan but also result in internal tension between the Qing monarch and his local officials. Such an instance occurred during the visit to Beijing of the king of Annam, Nguyễn Huệ, in 1790. Annam experienced a turbulent period toward the end of the eighteenth century, and the Qing was drawn into the turmoil. In 1771, in what was called the Tây- so’n Rebellion, Nguyễn Huệ and his two brothers overthrew the Nguyễn family, which controlled the south of Vietnam, and restored the later Lê Dynasty
(1428–1788). In 1788, worried about Nguyễn’s growing power, the young king, Lê Duy Kỳ (1765–93), fled the capital. At Lê’s request, Emperor Qianlong sent troops to Annam, which had been the Qing’s “outer fan for more than one hundred years.” Under the command of the governor-general of Liangguang, Sun Shiyi (1720–96), the Chinese army quickly occupied Hanoi and restored the government of Lê Duy Kỳ. But the Chinese forces were defeated in an unexpected attack by Nguyễn in January 1789, and Lê fled Hanoi again. Emperor Qianlong appointed his favorite Manchu general, Fuk’anggan (1753–96), who had just suppressed a rebellion in Taiwan, to replace Sun and organize a counterattack. However, the emperor was not interested in conquering Vietnam through a large-scale war, and he instructed Fuk’anggan and Sun to be receptive to any attempts by Nguyễn to sue for peace. The emperor reviewed China’s frustrating experience with “con- verting Vietnam into China’s prefectures and counties” (Ch., junxian qi di) in pre-Qing history and stressed that the Qing would not “integrate Annam into China’s map and register” (Ch., shouru bantu) by imitating the case of Xinjiang, where the court had had to dispatch numerous officials to manage the land after the mili- tary conquest, in particular after the war with the Zunghar Mongols.³¹ Qing policymakers thus clearly understood that policies were to be applied flexibly in dif- ferent parts of the Qing frontier. As it turned out, Nguyễn was not ready for another fight with the Qing either, so in the same month he presented Sun with “a humble palace memorial” to express his willingness to become a subordinate of the “Heavenly Dynasty,” marking the end of the conflict on the battlefield. Recognizing the motivation behind Nguyễn’s act of submission to the Qing, Qianlong issued an edict on May 15, declaring that he would not use force against the country for the sake of the “barbarian people of Annam.” Believing that “Heaven has abandoned the Lê,” the emperor settled the Lê family and its loyal fol- lowers in the city of Guilin in Guangxi, a Chinese province bordering Vietnam.³² This arrangement signaled that the Qing was preparing to support a new Viet- namese regime. To that end, the emperor indicated that he might invest Nguyễn as king if Nguyễn visited Beijing in person. This, according to the emperor, was precisely how he managed foreign barbarians—with mercy and discipline. The emperor also confirmed that Lê and his followers would not be sent back to Annam for restoration, and to prove his intentions he ordered them to cut their hair according to the Qing style and to wear Qing clothes. In Guilin, Fuk’anggan and Sun Shiyi told the desperate young king, “You are in the land of the central civilized country [Ch., Zhonghua zhi tu], so you should follow China’s system [Ch., Zhongguo zhi zhi] and change your hairstyle and clothes.”³³ As the manager of communications at the border, Fuk’anggan understood the mood of his aging and vainglorious master in Beijing, so he impressed on the emperor Nguyễn’s willingness to visit Beijing. In August the emperor quickly invested Nguyễn as the new king in order to provide him with the necessary ortho- dox legitimacy to govern and stabilize Annam domestically. In the book of investiture, the emperor emphasized the importance of the principle of “serving the great” on the part of an outer fan and that of “cherishing the small” on the part of China, highlighting the same ideological reciprocity that existed between Chosŏn and the Qing. The emperor took four steps to welcome the new king to Beijing. First, he instructed the Grand Secretariat and the Ministry of Rites to cre- ate new “guest-host rituals” (Ch., binzhu zhi li) between the king and the Qing’s governors-general and governors. He also endowed the king with a golden belt that was reserved for the Qing’s “royal vassals” (Ch., Zongfan).³⁴ Second, he moved the dethroned Lê to Beijing and appointed him a hereditary major in the Han Eight Banners. The 376 followers who had accompanied Lê were registered with the banner household system, and many were moved to Jiangnan, Zhejiang, Sichuan, and other provinces. Third, the emperor allowed the new Nguyễn regime to pick up their Chinese calendar books every year from the governor of Guangxi instead of traveling to Beijing for them. And fourth, he promised to open a border market after Nguyễn had visited Beijing, in recognition of the idea that “the barbarian people of that country are all loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty.” All of these measures were aimed at encouraging Nguyễn’s “sincerity in transforming into a subordinate of the civilized” (Ch., xianghua zhi cheng).³⁵ On May 26, 1790, the king and his mission of 150 members reached the Qing border, where he performed the highest level of kowtow to the imperial edicts and
gifts.³⁶ Fuk’anggan then accompanied Nguyễn to Rehe, passing through Guangxi, Guangdong, Hunan, Jiangxi, Hubei, Henan, and Zhili Provinces. In early June the mission arrived in the port of Guangzhou, and the “Western barbarians” of the Cohongs (referring to local factories through which the Western merchants traded with the Chinese side) gathered to witness the homage paid to the Qing by the king of an outer fan.³⁷ Two months later the Qing court invested Nguyễn’s son as crown prince, and the emperor applauded the father-son relationship between the emperor and Nguyễn. Following the precedents set by his reception of the king of Chosŏn and the Mongol khan of Korcin, the emperor dispatched a minister from the Ministry of Rites to welcome the king to a tea ceremony at Liangx- iang, a few miles south of Beijing. The practice of the policy of cherishing the men from afar went smoothly until a report from Rehe in late July made the emperor uncomfortable. The officials there sent word that they had received an unofficial note (Ch., chuandan) saying that the daily cost of entertaining and accommodating the Vietnamese mission in Jiangxi was around four thousand taels of silver—an astounding sum. The officials were worried that it would be inappropriate for them to host the mission with less luxury once it reached Rehe, but they could only work with the funds they had available. The emperor, too, was shocked by the cost, as he had treated Mongol princes and emissaries of other countries to annual banquets for less than one thousand taels. An expense of 4,000 taels per day meant that the total amount spent on the king and his entourage would reach 0.8 million taels during their two-hundred-day sojourn in China. Believing that this issue “deeply concerned the way of the Heavenly Dynasty,” the emperor lectured his officials that “the great Heavenly Dynasty should not welcome one or two subordinates from the remote lands in a luxurious way.” In addition, said the emperor, if the king were entertained too lavishly in the prov- inces, he would not sufficiently appreciate the imperial grace when treated with less opulence in Rehe. Chosŏn’s missions illustrated the emperor’s point. The Koreans prepared their own meals at each transfer station, but once they arrived in Beijing or Rehe, their daily logistics were entirely taken over by Qing personnel and the emissaries were hosted in a sumptuous manner. This substantial difference in hospitality between the provinces and Beijing created exactly the effect that the emperor sought. The danger posed by the luxurious treatment of Annam’s emissaries along their route lay in its potential to undermine the spectacle of impe- rial generosity that the emperor, informed by the Chosŏn model, wished to present at the mission’s final destination. Thus, the emperor instructed the provincial authorities in Jiangxi, Hubei, Henan, and Zhili to tone down the extravagance of their receptions, as this was the only way that “the mean between abundance and scarcity” (Ch., fengjian shizhong) could be realized. It was the first time in the Qianlong period that the emperor gave orders to temper the level of luxury in enter- taining foreign dignitaries.³⁸ The event created an opportunity for the emperor to discipline his officials. He listed two possible reasons for the astonishing costs: either local officials delib- erately spent too much in order to seek profitable reimbursement from the imperial coffers in the future, or the Chinese escorts extorted too much money from the provinces they passed through. Either possibility could damage the “way of the Heavenly Dynasty.” The emperor ordered governors in Guangdong, Jiangxi, Hubei, Anhui, and Zhili to investigate how the four-thousand-tael figure had come about. None of the officials claimed responsibility, but the emperor insisted that the origin of the unofficial note be identified and suggested it might have come from Zhili. Liang Kentang (1715–1802), the governor-general of Zhili, immedi- ately reported that the note was wrongly printed in his province. The emperor condemned Liang and closed the case, but he did not punish Liang, who was appar- ently the scapegoat of the emperor’s face-saving inquiry.³⁹ When the mission from Annam arrived in Rehe on August 20, 1790, Nguyễn was granted an imperial audience together with the indigenous chiefs of south- western China and Taiwan, the khan of Kazak, the princes of Mongolia and the Muslim tributaries, and the emissaries of Burma and Lanchang. The emperor be- stowed official Qing robes on the king and his followers. On August 25, as described in the previous section, Chosŏn’s bedraggled emissaries reached Rehe, and
all the men from afar could finally convene at the imperial hall for the grand banquet. There and later in Beijing, the envoys from the Qing’s periphery kowtowed to their shared Son of Heaven in China. What Qianlong saw and experienced was indeed a harmonious picture of the Heavenly Dynasty. The Way of the Heavenly Dynasty: The British Mission in 1793 Three years later, the emperor would receive a very different group of men from afar. This mission came from England, known in China as Yingjili. In September 1792 Lord Macartney (1737–1806) left Portsmouth for China to seek greater commercial opportunities in the name of celebrating Qianlong’s birthday. In July 1793 the mission reached Dagu Harbor in Tianjin and was welcomed by Liang Kentang and by Zhengrui, the salt tax commissioner of Changlu. On September 14 Macartney and his assistants, who were called “British tributary emissaries” (Ch., Yingjili guo gongshi), were granted an audience with Qianlong at Rehe, after which the mission was sent back to Guangzhou via the overland route. Scholars have described the visit as an epoch-making collision of two different cultural, social, and imperial systems and as the beginning of the East-West encounter that eventually led to the Opium War of 1839–42.⁴⁰ Rather than reviewing the entire event, which has been well examined, this section focuses on the connection between the British mission and the legacy of Annam’s mission in 1790 against the historical backdrop of the Qing’s institutional barbarianization of all other countries, including Britain. Until 1793 the Qing did not have a clear sense of the British presence in India and failed to connect the British activities on the Tibetan frontier with those in India.⁴¹ The Qing court saw the British embassy of 1793 as a tributary mission from an outer fan, so all bilateral contacts had to be conducted in accordance with imperial codes just like those that applied to Chosŏn, Annam, and Ryukyu. This time, the emperor made a point of instructing his local officials to treat the “for- eign barbarians” of the British tributary mission appropriately “between abundance and scarcity.” Such treatment, said the emperor, would befit “the way” of the “upper country” and ensure that the “men from afar” would not disdain China. Of the officials involved in hosting the mission, Liang Kentang, still smarting from the scandal of the overly extravagant hospitality shown to Annam in 1790, was perhaps the only one who thoroughly understood what the emperor meant. The emperor, too, might have taken the precedent of Annam as a standard for testing his officials. The game between the emperor and his officials was back on. In Au- gust, after learning that Zhejiang, Shandong, and Tianjin had lavished food on the British envoys, the emperor admonished his officials on the proper balance to be observed in welcoming the men from afar. Too little generosity, he explained, might “prevent them from transforming into the civilized,” while too much might “result in their contempt for the way and dignity of the Heavenly Dynasty.” The point was to show “neither inferiority nor superiority” in entertaining, but to “re- main in accord with the way and highlight the act of cherishing.” He reminded Liang several times of this “proper way.”⁴² When the mission reached Rehe on September 8, Macartney and his assistants refused to prostrate themselves before the emperor. The next day the emperor issued an edict to Liang and his colleagues, expressing his disappointment in the British envoys. The edict attributed the envoys’ shocking lack of respect to the extravagant treatment they had received in the provinces, which must have encouraged the barbarians’ arrogance and overshadowed the impression that Rehe ought to have made on them. To remedy the matter and punish the provinces, the emperor ordered that the mission return to Guangdong by the overland route and along interior rivers, and that all accommodations and meals at transfer stations be provided in strict conformity with tributary precedents for “such rude for- eign barbarians.” The emperor further stressed that the hospitality extended to the envoys in Beijing should be moderated in order to highlight the Chinese sys- tem through this punishment and to show the “[appropriate] way to manage an outer fan ” (Ch., jiayu waifan zhi dao).⁴³ From the emperor’s perspective, the ac- commodations and meals were meant to reflect the way of the dynasty, a point the British visitors and many local Chinese officials completely missed. For the emperor, an essential aspect of controlling the envoys of outer fan was the skillful deployment of the bureaucratic apparatus to cherish the men from afar appro- priately.
After negotiations concerning the performance of rituals, the British group—consisting of Macartney; his deputy, George Staunton (1737–1801); Staunton’s twelve-year-old son, George Thomas Staunton (1781–1859); and other members of the mission—was granted an imperial audience at the grand tent on September 14. Instead of kowtowing, the members of the mission knelt down on one knee and bowed their heads nine times. The British performed the same compromise ritual again on September 17, the imperial birthday, and days after that both in Rehe and in Beijing.⁴⁴ Simultaneously, the Manchu and Mongol princes and Burmese emissaries performed the rituals in strict observance of the imperial codes. After the ceremony, the emperor endowed the British mission with many gifts, including Korean clothing that had been piling up in Beijing as a result of Chosŏn’s annual tributes. For their part, the British submitted to the emperor their version of a “humble palace memorial,” which, among other things, asked him to station a permanent representative in Beijing and to begin trading outside Guangzhou. In reply, the emperor issued a long edict to King George III, refusing all of their requests. He ex- plained that no precedents beyond the “established rules” existed, so Britain could not hope to change China’s “way of cherishing the men from afar and the bar- barians in the four directions of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao jiahui yuanren fuyu siyi zhi dao). The emperor explained that he understood that Yingjili was so far from China that it was unfamiliar with the magnificent “way of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao tizhi), but he stressed that the British could not live and trade in Beijing because “the civilized–barbarian distinction is extremely strict” (Ch., Hua–Yi zhi bian shenyan). The Jesuit missionaries in Beijing, the emperor said, were not allowed to contact Chinese people either.⁴⁵ Macartney failed to obtain any trade concessions and thus shared the fate of his predecessors, James Flint in 1759 and Nicholas Skottowe in 1761. Instead the British embassy’s visit to China, which the Qing considered a tributary mission, strengthened the Qing’s position as the civilized center and reinforced its institutionalized norms regarding its foreign relations. After all, it was Qing China that, as Li Chen observes, “maintained a dominant position in deciding the terms of the Sino-Western economic, cultural, and political relationships.”⁴⁶ The British thus had no effect on the Qing’s worldview. On January 8, 1794, Macartney departed Guangzhou for Calcutta. The next day, three emissaries from Ryukyu were granted an audience with Qianlong in the Forbidden City, where they kowtowed to the emperor as usual. On January 22 the Mongol and Muslim princes and the chieftains of indigenous tribes from southwestern China were granted an imperial audience in which they too kowtowed to the Son of Heaven in the traditional manner. Three days later the Korean emissaries of the annual tributary mission prostrated themselves in front of the emperor. Then came New Year’s Day, and all princes and tributary emissaries convened in the Forbidden City to attend the grand assembly and lavish banquets together with Chinese offi- cials, all performing the highest level of kowtow again.⁴⁷ After the British mission left, then, the Zongfan mechanism between the Qing and its outer fan continued to operate in its accustomed seamless manner. Rebellious Western and Loyal Eastern Barbarians in the 1840s The First Opium War and the Diplomatic Paradox of Qing China Britain did not give up. In 1816 Lord Amherst (1783–1857) visited China as an ambassador. George Thomas Staunton, who had met with Qianlong as part of the Macartney mission and later served as the director of the British East India Company in Guangzhou, acted as Amherst’s deputy. By this time, China was ruled by Qianlong’s son, Jiaqing. When the British mission arrived in Tianjin and contacted local officials, the deputy governor-general of Zhili, Tojin (1755–1835), adopted the tone of the provincial hosts during the Vietnamese mission in 1790 and the British mission in 1793, assuring Jiaqing that he would adhere to precedent and welcome the tributary mission in order to prevent the foreigners from disdaining China. The crisis over kowtow, however, erupted again between the two sides. Because the dispute remained unsettled by the time the mission arrived in Beijing in late
August, the British did not immediately visit the emperor. The emperor read their absence as a sign of British contempt that “China as the common leader under the Heaven” (Ch., Zhongguo wei tianxia gongzhu) could not tolerate. The emperor also did not trust Staunton, saying that the latter should remember what cere- monies he had performed to Qianlong in 1793. In the end, the emperor refused to accept Amherst’s “humble palace memorial,” returned the British “tributes,” and ordered the envoys to be sent back to their homeland with token gifts from China.⁴⁸ The second British mission had also failed. In 1821 Staunton published a translation of the travelogue of Tulišen, the official who had visited Russia as the Qing envoy in 1712. In the preface, Staunton pointed out that the Chinese government followed an “anti-social system” in their intercourse with other nations and that China would consequently “rank very low indeed in the scale of civilized nations.”⁴⁹ Staunton’s ranking of civilization from his Eurocentric point of view served well the British strategy in China at the time. As the British-dominated opium trade reached new heights, the large inflows of opium and the dramatic outflows of silver were creating a financial crisis in China, forcing Beijing to consider banning the opium trade. In April 1840 Staunton, by then a member of the British Parliament, urged his colleagues to use force against China.⁵⁰ The ensuing Opium War between the two countries ended with the conclusion of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, the twenty-second year of Daoguang, Qianlong’s grandson. According to the Treaty of Nanjing and the Supplementary Treaty of Bogue, which was negotiated according to Western norms and signed in 1843, Britain gained the right of extraterritoriality and “most favored nation” status in China. The treaties thus planted the seeds of European imperi- alism in the Chinese world through the emerging treaty port framework. In 1844 the Qing established the position of superintendent of trade for the five ports (Ch., Wukou tongshang dachen) to manage contacts with Britain, France, the United States, and other Western countries. On the surface, the new post moved these treaty nations out of the orbit of the Ministry of Rites and the scope of the Zongfan framework. But the first official to hold the post was Qiying (1787–1858), a Manchu and a signatory of the Treaty of Nanjing who soon after became governor-general of Liangguang, where he was in charge of China’s contacts not only with Western countries in Guangzhou but also with Annam, Siam, and sev- eral other outer fan. This new post was thus added to the established Zongfan system without changing the nature of the system per se. Likewise, nothing really changed in other parts of the Qing periphery after the war. Keeping the West out of the Ritual: Qing Envoys to Chosŏn After Queen Kim of Chosŏn passed away in late 1843, the Daoguang emperor appointed two Manchu officials, Baijun (?–1859) and Hengxing, as envoys to deliver his condolences to Hansŏng. In February 1844 the two envoys left Beijing for Chosŏn with the imperial book of condolences and other items. After crossing Fenghuang Gate and marching toward the Yalu River, they found that the Koreans had set up several shanties to welcome them. In Ŭiju more Korean officials, in- cluding one with the king’s name card, greeted the envoys. On April 7 the envoys arrived in Hongjewŏn, in the suburbs of Hansŏng, where a high-ranking official with the king’s name card and a minister of the Ŭijŏngbu, the Korean cabinet, welcomed them. The grand ceremony was held the next day. In the morning the envoys were escorted to the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country outside the West Gate of the capital. The king came out through the West Gate to receive the imperial edict and returned to his palace first. The envoys were then escorted through the South Gate and dismounted from their horses near a gate to the palace. Baijun was guided by an usher to the grand hall, where he placed the imperial book of condolences and the condolence money on a desk on the east side of the hall and stood next to the desk. The king, at the foot of the steps to the hall, kowtowed to the imperial items and then proceeded to the mourning hall. There the two envoys in turn made offerings to the spirit of the dead. The king led the royal family members into the hall and knelt down in front of the envoys to receive the emperor’s condolences. Following ritual wailing, the last step of the ceremony, the imperial book of condolences was burned.⁵¹
The king then invited the envoys to the grand hall for a tea ceremony, after which the envoys went to their residence, the South Palace Annex. The next day the king visited the envoys to treat them to a tea banquet, and Korean officials visited the envoys to ask them to write Chinese characters, keeping the guests busy. The envoys also distributed 300 taels of silver and 490 felt caps among local servants. On April 12 the king sent off the envoys, giving each a gift of 2,500 taels of silver. After they returned to Beijing, the envoys reported on their mission to the emperor and suggested that the emperor preserve the 5,000 taels of silver in the Ministry of Rites, which could return the silver to Chosŏn through the country’s next mission to Beijing to show the imperial kindness of cherishing the men from afar.⁵² During their three-day sojourn in Hansŏng, the envoys did not talk with the king about any events in China related to the Opium War, the treaties signed with Western countries, or the changes in China’s foreign policies in South China, nor did the king ask about these matters. Their interactions were confined to the performance of minutely prescribed rituals that undergirded the longstanding mutual dependence of their legitimacy as Zhongguo and its outer fan, respec- tively. This primacy of ritual was demonstrated again soon afterward, in 1845. In April 1845 Emperor Daoguang appointed Huashana (1806–59), a Manchu minister of the Ministry of Revenue, and Deshun, an associate general of the Mon- gol Eight Banners, as envoys to Hansŏng to invest a new queen. The envoys arrived in Hansŏng in late May. The king went outside the city to welcome the envoys and the imperial books of investiture, after which the envoys were taken in sedan chairs to the palace, where they alighted in front of the grand hall and carried in the books of investiture. The king entered the hall to receive the imperial books by performing the kowtow. An usher read the books aloud to Chosŏn’s officials outside the hall, and then the king led his officials in three cheers of “Long live the emperor” (Ch., shanhu wansui). After a stay of three days, the envoys left the capital.⁵³ When the envoys reported to Beijing, the emperor asked them about the distance they had traveled, the king’s clothes, and the gifts sent by the king, but no mention was made of Chosŏn’s politics or other domestic Korean issues. For the emperor, the crises and challenges imposed by the war with Britain and the opening of treaty ports in Southeast China were entirely outside the purview of Qing-Chosŏn relations. At the top of the Qing administration, the Sinocentric cos- mopolitan order and the Qing’s identity as the Heavenly Dynasty remained untouched. Chosŏn, the prototypical outer fan, still maintained its loyalty to the Great Qing. Ministers and Emissaries: The British and Korean Missions to Beijing, 1860 and 1861 The Permanent Residence of Western Representatives in Beijing In 1856 the Second Opium War erupted in Guangzhou. The Chinese governor-general and imperial commissioner, Ye Mingchen (1807–59), who was in charge of foreign affairs, was captured in his office in the city in January 1858 by the Anglo-French forces under the leadership of Lord Elgin (1811–63). Part of a family that had enjoyed close contacts with Korean visitors in Beijing, Ye shared with Koreans the discourse of the civilized–barbarian distinction.⁵⁴ He had served in Guangzhou for more than a decade as one of the strongest opponents of allowing British representatives and merchants to move into the walled city. In his last memorial to the Xianfeng emperor before he was captured, Ye analyzed his negotiations with the British, French, and American ministers in Guangzhou and underlined his strategy of “secretly preparing for crises and publicly cherishing the barbarians.”⁵⁵ The Western colonial states’ expansion to East Asia remained incomprehensible to Ye, who still conceptualized all international contacts, including conflicts, skirmishes, and even the ongoing war, within the Zongfan frame- work. The emperor, with no better understanding than Ye, regarded the behavior of the British and French as “rebellion” and emphasized that China’s first imper- ative was to “cherish” these wayward subordinates to “preserve the national polity and refuse their requests.” The rationale was the same as that behind Qian- long’s instructions regarding the Macartney embassy in 1793. Neither the emperor nor his ministers at court nor his governors at the border realized that they
were dealing with several global powers engaging in gunboat diplomacy from Africa to East Asia. The war situation continued to escalate. In April 1858 the British, French, American, and Russian ministers convened in Tianjin and dispatched an ultimatum to Beijing, demanding negotiations with Chinese “plenipotentiaries” (Ch., bianyi xingshi). Among the requests made by these states, such as expanding trade to the Chinese interior and opening more ports, the most offensive to the Qing was the demand to lodge permanent representatives in Beijing, precisely as Macartney had proposed in 1793. The court instructed the governor-general of Zhili, Tan Tingxiang (?–1870), who was negotiating with the European ministers in Tianjin, to clarify that “all contacts between China and foreign countries have always been conducted at the borders, and only countries among China’s subordinates [Ch., shuguo] can visit Beijing to pay tribute [Ch., chaogong]. No commissioner from those countries has ever been allowed to reside in Beijing permanently.” The court also refused to appoint any plenipotentiaries. The emperor argued that his stance was not xenophobic because “China is not afraid of the visit of the barbarians to Beijing, however many people were to come; the problem is that such a visit does not fit the system.” Along the same lines, he refused to allow the American min- ister, William Reed (1806–76), to visit Beijing because “the United States is a friendly country [Ch., yuguo], but the imperial collection of precedents does not record how we should treat a friendly country, so the practice of entertaining might be inappropriate.”⁵⁶ The emperor asked that the ministers return to Guangzhou and discuss such issues as tariffs with the governor-general there, suggesting that the negotiations should be conducted with the superintendent of trade for the five ports at the border rather than in Beijing. The location of the negotiations was an integral aspect of the Sinocentric world order and thus mattered greatly in the eyes of the Qing rulers. The Anglo-French Alliance ignored the emperor’s instructions and occupied the Dagu Forts on May 20, after which they forwarded Tan Tingxiang a note re- questing that the four nations be allowed entry into Tianjin for negotiations with the Chinese plenipotentiaries as well as entry into Beijing, where they would ei- ther pay a visit to the emperor or meet with grand secretaries. On May 28 the emperor appointed the Manchu grand secretary, Guiliang (1785–62), as minister ex- traordinary and the Manchu minister Huashana as plenipotentiary and sent them to Tianjin for negotiations. Huashana, who had served as the deputy of the Son of Heaven on the mission to Chosŏn in 1845, now became a diplomatic representative of the Chinese sovereign who was equal to the monarchs of Britain and France. The emperor particularly instructed Tan to inform the foreign ministers that there was no need for them to visit Beijing. In the meantime, he ordered Prince Sengge Rinchen (1811–65) of the Korcin Mongols to use his Mongol warriors to reinforce the garrison between Tianjin and Beijing. The Sino-British negotiations reached a deadlock over the issue of a permanent representative in Beijing. At court, many high-ranking officials, such as Prince Yi (Dzai Yūwan, 1816–61), firmly refused the Western request to place representatives in Beijing. They suggested instead that Britain could follow the established practice of the “Russian barbarians” (Ch., E yi) and station students rather than commissioners in Beijing. The students would dress in “the clothes and caps of China” (Ch., Zhongguo yiguan), abide by local rules, and refrain from involvement in official affairs. Britain could negotiate with Chinese governors-general and governors over trade affairs at treaty ports. If the British insisted on visiting Beijing, the emperor said that they would have to travel from Shanghai via the over- land route, escorted by Chinese officials, with all accommodations and meals covered by China. They could visit Beijing once every three or five years, not annually.⁵⁷ Not coincidentally, this proposal fit precisely into the existing tributary ritual codes: Beijing was trying to draw Britain into the established Zongfan sys- tem. From 1761 to 1793, then to 1858, the Qing court’s understanding of Britain remained the same because the Qing’s institutionalized Zongfan norms never changed. This ideal model was soon partly—if opaquely—realized in the treaty with the United States, concluded on June 18, 1858, in Tianjin. Article 5 of the treaty regu- lated the visit of the American minister to Beijing in accordance with the specific ritual codes for the Qing’s outer fan.⁵⁸ The regulations specified the frequency of
the Americans’ visits to Beijing, the overland route they were to take from Tianjin to Beijing, their entertainment by local authorities, the requisite written notice to the Ministry of Rites, and especially the size of the mission—twenty members, which was the maximum head count of tributary missions allowed for Ryukyu, Lan- chang, Burma, and the Netherlands. Although the treaty granted the United States the status of a most favored nation, Beijing saw this status simply as a special favor for foreign barbarians, unrelated to China’s statehood and sovereignty. In this sense, the Qing court treated the United States as a tributary state, which the latter, of course, completely failed to realize. Within the domestic Confucianism-centered intellectual framework, neither the Qing ruling house nor the majority of its officials who had passed the imperial civil-service examinations thought beyond the framework of the civilized–barbarian distinction. The new knowledge imported from the West by American and European missionaries who were active in Southeast Asia and South China had not yet had an impact on the Chinese intellectual forces behind the post-Qianlong institutionalized order. On June 23, 1858, the Chinese minister Zhou Zupei (1793– 1867) and thirty of his colleagues submitted memorials against the permanent residence of “barbarous emissaries” in Beijing. Among the “eight evils” of such residence highlighted in Zhou’s memorial was the preaching of the gospel by the foreigners, which would “turn our manner of clothes, caps, rituals, and music into something fit for beasts” (Ch., yiguan liyue zhi zu, yi yu qinshou). He also warned that “if countries such as Chosŏn and Ryukyu, which have been loyal to China for a long time and sincerely send emissaries and pay tribute to the court, saw the disobedience of these barbarians, they, too, would despise the Heavenly Dynasty.” This argument was further underscored by Chen Rui, who emphasized the “fundamental divide between China and the others” (Ch., Zhong Wai zhi dafang).⁵⁹ In terms of their thinking, these officials were no different from Ye Mingchen, who at the time was detained by the British in Calcutta. Despite such keen resistance, Guiliang and Huashana accepted the British-drafted treaty after they realized the situation was beyond China’s control. The treaty with Britain, signed on June 26, allowed Britain to appoint diplomatic agents to the court in Beijing, where they would not kowtow to the emperor. According to article 3, the British ambassador, minister, or other diplomatic agent “shall not be called upon to perform any ceremony derogatory to him as representing the Sovereign of an independent nation, on a footing of equality with that of China. On the other hand, he shall use the same forms of ceremony and respect to His Majesty the Emperor as are employed by the Ambassadors, Ministers, or Diplomatic Agents of Her Majesty toward the Sovereigns of independent and equal European nations.”⁶⁰ In retrospect, this article opened the gates of Beijing to the representatives of Britain and other treaty nations and marked the beginning of the collapse of the centuries-long ritual system and the erosion of the Zongfan infrastructure. Being forced to fundamentally change its time-honored ritual norms, even if only in part, the Great Qing moved toward its eventual transformation from a cosmopolitan empire to a state equal to Britain according to post- Westphalian political and diplomatic norms. Historic though the change was, the Chinese may not have fully understood the treaty’s importance because of linguistic discrepancies. The Chinese version of the treaty, for instance, states that “Britain is a nation of zizhu on a footing of equality with China” (Ch., Yingguo zizhu zhi bang, yu Zhongguo pingdeng). The term zizhu, which meant self-rule or autonomy, was usually used in a Zongfan context. China regarded its outer fan as possessing this right, so it was different from the British understanding of the term “independence.” This divergence would become apparent in the following years, when China and the Western states as well as Japan tried to define the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship and Chosŏn’s international position. The seeds of further conflicts between the norms of the Chi- nese Zongfan system and those of European international law were thus planted directly in these treaties. What further shook the foundation of the civilized–barbarian discourse was article 51 of the Sino-British treaty of 1858, which decreed that the character yi (“bar- barian”) “shall not be applied to the Government or subjects of Her Britannic Majesty in any Chinese official document issued by the Chinese Authorities either in
the Capital or in the Provinces.”⁶¹ Britain and other Western nations that were eligible to invoke the most-favored-nation clause thus broke away legally and in- stitutionally from the category of barbarians in Chinese diplomatic discourse. From then on, in Chinese official narratives the character yi was increasingly re- placed by yang (“overseas,” “foreign”) and the term “barbarians” (Ch., yiren) by “foreigners” (Ch., yangren). This amendment, however, applied only to Western treaty nations that had never occupied an essential position in the Zongfan system. The Qing still consid- ered its major outer fan, such as Chosŏn, Vietnam, and Ryukyu, countries of barbarians. In this sense, the treaty port system, although it was expanding rapidly at the end of the 1850s, merely complicated the Qing’s view of the countries in the “Western Ocean.” In other words, the disintegration of Sinocentrism as a result of the 1858 treaties occurred on the Qing’s intellectual periphery, not at the core of its intellectual and ideological structure as informed and represented by the Qing’s principal outer fan. The ministers of the treaty nations residing in Beijing would soon be confronted with the complexity and perplexity of this distinction. Who Were the Barbarians Now? The British and Korean Missions to Beijing Treaties in hand, the ministers of Britain, France, Russia, and the United States left Tianjin for Shanghai, where they and Chinese representatives signed additional treaties on tariffs. The war would have been over had the British and French ministers in the summer of 1859 followed the Qing’s designated route to enter Beijing after they landed at Tianjin for the ratification of the treaties. But the ministers refused to follow Qing instructions, and their rash entry into the firth of the Beihe River near the Dagu Forts led to Chinese bombardment. The war resumed less than a year after the British Crown imposed direct control over India by nation- alizing the British East India Company in August 1858. Under the leadership of Lord Elgin, who was determined to employ gunboat diplomacy against Beijing, the Anglo-French alliance returned to China in the summer of 1860 and reoccupied the Dagu Forts. There the alliance almost annihilated the Mongol cavalry of Prince Sengge Rinchen with the Armstrong gun, a weapon created by Britain and employed in combat for the first time. The Qing succumbed not only to the joint colo- nialism of the European states but also to revolutionary post–Crimean War European military technology. The alliance occupied Tianjin and marched toward Beijing in late August. Although the Beijing court sent representatives to Tongzhou, near Beijing, for negoti- ations, on September 18 Prince Sengge Rinchen captured Harry Parkes (1828–85), the British commissioner in Guangzhou, as well as Henry Loch (1827–1900), Elgin’s private secretary, and twenty-four British and thirteen French officers and soldiers. Only half of these prisoners of war—including Parkes and Loch— survived and were eventually released on October 8, when the alliance gained control of Beijing’s suburbs and started looting the imperial palace of Yuan-Ming- Yuan. The frightened Son of Heaven, Emperor Xianfeng, had fled to Rehe on September 22 after appointing his younger brother Prince Gong (a.k.a. Prince Kung, 1833–98) as the envoy extraordinary and plenipotentiary to supervise the uncertain peace negotiations. On October 13 the Western forces took over the Anding Gate of the city. The Qing saw this as a more serious threat than it did the ongoing Taiping Rebellion in South China, as the court in Rehe and the caretaker admi- nistration in Beijing were extremely vulnerable to the aggressive European alliance and their powerful cannons positioned on the city’s old walls. From October 12 to 16, the survivors and bodies of the prisoners of war were returned to the alliance. The evident cruelty inflicted on the corpses, mutilated be- yond recognition, shocked Elgin and his fellow commanders. Elgin “at once notified to Prince Kung that he was too horrified by what had occurred to hold further communication with a government guilty of such deeds of treachery and bloodshed, until by some great punishment inflicted upon the Emperor and the gov- erning classes, he had made apparent … the detestation with which the Allies viewed such conduct.” The “great punishment” turned out to be the immolation of Yuan-Ming-Yuan. On October 18, the second day after the alliance buried the former prisoners, flames engulfed the magnificent imperial garden that had been co- designed by European Jesuit missionaries. Loch recorded that “during the whole of Friday the 19th, Yuen-Ming-Yuen was still burning; the clouds of smoke driven by the wind, hung like a vast black pall over Pekin.”⁶² Numerous buildings in which the Qing emperors had given audience to emissaries of its outer fan—once
including Britain and always including Chosŏn—were burned to the ground. On October 20 Prince Gong offered Elgin China’s submission to the alliance’s de- mands. The capital was fully opened to the alliance. Parkes and Loch entered the city the next day and ironically selected the grand hall of the Ministry of Rites as the site for the signing of the convention. Elgin departed for the grand hall on October 24, carried in a sedan chair by sixteen Chinese footmen—an honor previously reserved for the emperor—and accompanied by an escort of more than six hundred men. When the procession reached the hall, according to Loch, Prince Gong “advanced to receive Lord Elgin with an anxious, hesitating salutation,” while the latter “bowed, and at once walked forward to his seat, motioning Prince Kung to take the one on the right.” After they signed the convention, exchanged treaties, and talked briefly about maintaining friendship, “Lord Elgin rose to take leave; Prince Kung accompanied him a short distance, and then stopped; but on Lord Elgin doing so likewise, the principal mandarins in attendance urgently beckoned Prince Kung to move forward, and after a few moments of hesitation he walked with Lord Elgin to the edge of the steps.” Prince Gong was apparently adjusting to a new etiquette that he had never before performed. Witnessing the entire procedure, Loch enthusiastically claimed, “Thus was happily concluded an event which was the commencement of a new era, not only in the history of the Empire of China, but of the world, by the introduction of four hundred millions of the human race into the family of civi- lized nations.”⁶³ Like George Thomas Staunton’s, Loch’s judgment on civilization was thoroughly Eurocentric. Loch was correct in asserting that China had entered a new era. In January 1861 the Qing court established a temporary “office in charge of affairs concerning all countries” (Ch., Zongli geguo shiwu yamen, hereafter “the Zongli Yamen”) under Prince Gong’s supervision. The Yamen was responsible for China’s foreign rela- tions only with Britain, France, the United States, Russia, and other treaty nations, not with Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Vietnam, and other outer fan, whose contacts with Beijing were still under the auspices of the Ministry of Rites. The new institution was designed with the goal of expediency to meet challenges in a time of crisis, and it was modeled on the Grand Council.⁶⁴ The officials who served in the Yamen did so only on a part-time basis. The official tablet hanging at the main en- trance of the institution read, “Goodness and happiness between the center and the outside” (Ch., Zhong Wai tifu), highlighting the key Confucian doctrine of the mean. More importantly, the Yamen was deemed an imitation of the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations and was consequently categorized as part of the established Zongfan system. According to the court’s plan, once the momentary crisis had passed, foreign affairs would revert to the management of the Min- istry of Rites as usual, for the sake of “cherishing the outer fan .”⁶⁵ Yet like the Grand Council, the Zongli Yamen continued to serve the court after the crisis, and in 1901 it became the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ch., Waiwu bu). The Yamen survived primarily because China’s treaty partners always treated it as a ministry of foreign affairs at which Western diplomats could apply the con- cepts of international law to their negotiations with the Chinese side; still, the diplomats were not blind to the fact that the Yamen was different from a ministry of foreign affairs in the Western sense.⁶⁶ Beijing also realized that it was impossible to disband the Zongli Yamen, in particular after March 1861, when the French, British, Russian, and American ministers arrived in Beijing and established their offices next to the Forbidden City. In response, Beijing quickly organized a diplo- matic network from the top down by appointing superintendents of trade for Tianjin and Shanghai. So began a new era. As noted earlier, these institutional changes to the Zongfan framework affected only those parts that governed relations with treaty nations; beyond those, the Zongfan system stood unchanged. As ever, Chosŏn played an exemplary role in maintaining the Qing’s superiority within this established system. After learning from the 1860 annual tributary mission to Beijing that the emperor had moved to Rehe, the king of Chosŏn immediately sent a special mission to China with the aim of visiting the emperor at Rehe and demonstrating to him Chosŏn’s concern as a loyal subordinate of the imperial dynasty. In early 1861 the Korean emis- saries reached postwar Beijing, bearing various tributes. The Ministry of Rites asked the emperor whether the emissaries should visit Rehe, following the
precedents of Annam’s mission in 1790, Lanchang’s and Burma’s missions in 1795, and Annam’s mission in 1803. The emperor responded that there was no need for the Korean emissaries to travel to Rehe, but he instructed the ministry to follow convention by treating the emissaries to banquets and endowing them and the king with generous gifts in order to show his “ultimate kindness of cherishing the fan in a favored way.”⁶⁷ In fact, between November 1858 and May 1861, Chosŏn dispatched five tributary missions to Beijing in spite of the war in China. In the early 1790s, Chosŏn and British emissaries had convened in Rehe and Beijing as representatives of two outer fan—both of them nations of barbarians in the Qing’s eyes. But whereas the British emissaries had violently changed their status in the Chinese world by the early 1860s by entering Beijing under the cover of cannons, their Korean counter- parts continued to approach the imperial capital with humble palace memorials and tributes. Although the Korean emissaries also pursued the secret mission of obtaining intelligence in China in order to enable the Korean court to assess the situation there, their frequent presence in Beijing provided the Qing with a steady stream of resources to maintain its conventional ritual code, politico-cultural hierarchy, and imperial norms, which were under fire from the British and the French. However, the Korean emissaries never again saw the Xianfeng emperor, who died in Rehe in August and became the last emperor who refused to allow the Western barbarians to stand before him without kowtowing.⁶⁸ It was not until 1873 that Xianfeng’s son, Tongzhi, gave foreign ministers their first imperial audience at which the ministers did not kowtow. The audience took place at the Purple Light Pavilion (Ch., Ziguang ge) in the Forbidden City, the same venue at which the Qing emperor had met with emissaries of China’s outer fan since 1761—the year in which the Qing institutionalized the status of all other countries within its own imperial norms, as described in chapter 2. In 1873 the pavil- ion no longer witnessed the ritual of kowtow, but the politico-cultural significance of the imperial audience in that location remained essentially the same. Inter- estingly, and ironically, since 1949 the state leaders of the People’s Republic of China, who converted part of the Qing imperial palace into their living quarters and political headquarters, have used the pavilion to meet with foreign guests from other, equal states of the world—if no longer in the sense of all-under-Heaven.
3
JUSTIFYING THE CIVILIZED
The Qing’s Contacts with Chosŏn, Annam, and Britain, 1762–1861
As Chosŏn carefully maintained its political subordination to the Qing on the surface, and the Manchu ruling house used this submission to reinforce the Qing’s centrality and Chineseness, Chosŏn simultaneously constructed its own Chineseness within its borders by depicting the Qing as barbarians in particular moments. The civilized–barbarian discourse pervaded Chosŏn, nourishing a strong pro-Ming and anti-Qing attitude among the educated in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century. Chosŏn entered the contest for civilized status in a cultural sense, and its perennial missions to the Qing served this domestic construction of identity. As the Qing was proclaiming Chineseness in the post-Ming era, Chosŏn, too, sought to establish itself as the exclusive legitimate successor to the Ming. In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, a group of Korean scholars who observed the Qing’s prosperity and the economic gap between the Qing and Chosŏn dared to voice their support for the Qing’s claim to civilized status. Their arguments counterbalanced the prevalent anti-Qing attitude among Korean scholars and helped Chosŏn cope with the paradox of the civilized–barbarian discourse in a practical sense.
This chapter examines the interior aspects and function of the Zongfan order by showing how the Qing’s rule of cherishing the men from afar operated in the ritual protocol and presentations of diplomatic missions between the Qing, Chosŏn, and other countries from 1762 to 1861. The chapter discusses several cases of emissary exchanges between the Qing and Chosŏn against the background of the sharp reversal of the civilized–barbarian discourse that both sides exploited intensively for their own domestic politico-cultural legitimacy. It suggests that the Qing eventually prevailed over Chosŏn. By introducing Annam’s and Britain’s missions to China as a point of comparison for those from Chosŏn, the chapter further explores how the Manchu ruling house navigated the balance between the Chinese rhetoric commensurate with China’s claimed preeminence in the cosmopolitan world and the practical consequences of this superiority in bilateral communications. This balance illustrates the Qing state-craft and helps explain why, in the second half of the nineteenth century, both the Qing and Chosŏn, along with Vietnam and Ryukyu, encountered such tremendous difficulty in defining the nature of their relationship in accordance with the newly imported international law, a topic examined in part 2 of this book.
Historical Memory of the Civilized: Chosŏn’s Anti-Manchu Mentality
The Perception of a Barbarous Qing within Little China after 1644
With the irreversible downfall of the Ming in 1644, Chosŏn intensified its efforts to identify itself as the exclusive and genuine heir to Chinese civilization. In their daily training and practices, Korean intellectuals who were followers of Neo-Confucianism shared a consensus that the Manchu conquest of China proper in 1644 marked the fall of the central civilized country (K., Chunghwa hamnak).¹ In Chosŏn, numerous scholars used the regnal title of the last emperor of the Ming, Chongzhen, to date their personal letters and domestic documents. Their attitude was consolidated in the Little China discourse that emphasized the succession of Confucian orthodox legitimacy (K., tot’ong) instead of denying explicitly that the Qing possessed political orthodox legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom. Thus, within its borders Chosŏn presented itself as the successor to Confucius, Mencius, and Zhu Xi after the demise of the Ming.
On the Qing side, Chosŏn’s status as Little China was widely accepted by both ethnic Han and Manchu scholars. The Chinese officials and intelligentsia did not treat their Korean counterparts as barbarians, as they did many Europeans. On occasion, the Qing court explicitly appraised Chosŏn as "a country of rituals
and literature" (Ch., wenwu zhi bang; Ma., doro yoso i gurun), a statement also endorsed by many Chinese scholars of the Qing.² Yet when it came to locating Chosŏn within the multilevel structure of all-under-Heaven in the Qing’s political and cultural discourse, Chosŏn was inevitably designated a country of barbarians on China’s periphery. As this chapter shows, Korean scholars who visited Beijing had to face the challenge of reconciling their country’s putative barbarity with their conviction in its superior cultural pedigree.
In late seventeenth-century Chosŏn, in particular during the reigns of King Hyojong and King Hyŏngjong, anti-Qing sentiment was widespread among intellectuals. Song Si-yŏl (1607–89), a leading scholar and King Hyojong’s mentor, zealously proposed a northern expedition (K., bukpŏl) against the Manchus in order to recover the central plain on behalf of the Ming.³ Song’s plan was never put into practice, but it won strong moral support from the court and from Confucian scholars and contributed to the rise of a Korean national identity in the post-Ming period when the country was struggling for a new episteme.⁴ Another scholar, Sin Yu-han (1681–1752), in a letter to a friend who was about to visit Beijing as a member of a tributary mission, claimed that we are also Chinese (K., uri yŏk Chunggukin) and that Chosŏn was China—a "China with Classic of Poetry and Book of Documents " (K., sisŏ Chungguk) and a China with [Chinese-style] clothes and belts (K., ŭidae Chungguk). Sin went on to claim that since the fall of the Ming in 1644 China had not had a Son of Heaven, implying that political orthodox legitimacy also lay in Chosŏn, the successor to Kija (Jizi).⁵
The cases of Song and Sin reveal a pronounced victim mentality within the Korean ruling house and intellectual stratum after the humiliating Manchu invasions and the fall of the Ming. Highlighting Korea’s filial duty to the deposed Ming became an ideological tool to maintain Chosŏn’s domestic order and raise the morale of the learned class. On the one hand, the king presented himself as a loyal subordinate of the Qing for the sake of the political orthodox legitimacy granted by the Qing; but on the other hand, he was the moral sponsor of the anti-Qing movement inside Chosŏn, seeking to capture the political orthodox legitimacy embedded in the connection between his rulership and his subjects. Like the Qing emperors, the Korean kings had to deal with grave challenges arising from the framework of the civilized–barbarian discourse.
Against the background of this volatile balance, Chosŏn entered a more radical period of actively commemorating the imperial Ming during the reign of King Sukchong, when the Qing’s control over Chosŏn was loosened as the Kangxi emperor was preoccupied with suppressing the revolt of the Three Feudatories in the 1680s. In April 1704, on the sixtieth anniversary of Emperor Chongzhen’s suicide, the king established an altar near the palace in Hansŏng and performed a new ceremony to commemorate Chongzhen. Although it was the forty-third year of Kangxi, the king called the moment the seventy-seventh year of Chongzhen, setting the starting year to 1628, when Chongzhen ascended the throne. The king declared that the imperial Ming was the owner of the civilized and the barbarians (K., Hwa–I ju) but that the northern barbarians—that is, the Manchus—had taken the opportunity to occupy our central plain (K., kŏ a chungwŏn), with the result that the rituals and clothes (K., yeak ŭigwan)—the traditional metaphor for civilization—had become barbarous. Chosŏn, the king claimed, was the only place that still loyally worshipped the old motherland (K., koguk). Reciting these words at the ceremony, the king burst into tears. All of the officials around him wept too.
Soon thereafter, in October of the same year, the king had a long discussion with several ministers about building a temple to Wanli, the Ming emperor who saved Chosŏn from the Japanese invasion in the 1590s. The ministers endorsed the king’s pro-Ming attitude but pointed out that it was inappropriate for a vassal to offer sacrifices to the Son of Heaven, so the king instead constructed a nine-floor altar and named it the Great Altar for Gratitude (K., Taebodan), where a state ceremony would be performed twice a year, in spring and autumn. The altar was completed in January 1705.⁶ Thereafter, Chosŏn continued to commemorate the Ming for another 190 years until 1895, when it declared independence from the Qing. The altar was permanently closed in 1908, three years after Chosŏn
became a protectorate of Japan and two years before it was annexed by Japan.
Korean emissaries to Beijing continuously fed the popular antipathy toward the Qing in Chosŏn by providing firsthand accounts of their dealings with the barbarous usurpers of the Ming. For these emissaries, the trip to Beijing was a journey for mourning the Ming, deprecating the Qing, and strengthening Chosŏn’s identity as Little China. As they reached various landmarks—the Yalu River, Fenghuang Gate, Liaoyang, the Korean compound in Mukden where Crown Prince Sohyŏn had been detained between 1637 and 1644, Shanhai Pass, and the Forbidden City in Beijing, where the Ming emperors had resided for centuries—the emissaries often wrote poems lamenting the fall of the Ming. These poems became part of their journals, which were widely circulated in Chosŏn and were generically known as Yŏnhaengnok (The records of the journey to Beijing).⁷
From the second half of the eighteenth century, however, some Korean intellectuals, having witnessed the Qing’s prosperity on their journeys to Beijing and having engaged in extensive conversations with Han Chinese and Manchu scholars in Beijing, started to reconsider their entrenched view of the barbarous Qing. Disillusioned with Chosŏn’s self-proclaimed cultural superiority, these pundits recognized the Qing as a civilized country and called for Chosŏn to learn from Qing China for its own good, beyond the popular doctrine of revering China and expelling the barbarians. These scholars constituted the School of Northern Learning (K., Pukhak p’ae), focusing on practical knowledge (K., Sirhak). They successfully resumed contacts between the literati of Korea and those of China that had been suspended for more than 120 years since 1644. Among these scholars, three in particular stood out: Hong Tae-yong, Pak Che-ka (1750–1805), and Pak Chi-wŏn (1737–1805).
Honoring the Great Ming: Hong Tae-yong’s Perception of the Qing
Hong Tae-yong was born in Hansŏng in 1731 into Chosŏn’s ruling gentry and the hereditary class of yangban (lit. two branches [of the ruling class]), and he studied with Kim Wŏn-haeng (1702–72), a leading scholar of the time. In late 1765, when his uncle was appointed the secretary of the annual tributary mission to Beijing, Hong became affiliated with the mission as an officer of the emissaries’ junior relatives (K., chaje gungwan).⁸ Although Hong regarded the Qing as a barbarous country, he was excited about the trip and was eager to exchange ideas with his Chinese counterparts. After arriving in Beijing in early 1766, Hong put almost all his time and energy into getting to know Chinese scholars, mainly through written conversations (K., p’iltam, conversing by writing Chinese characters). These dialogues led him to conclude that the Qing, no matter how barbarous in Chosŏn’s eyes, was indeed the civilized Middle Kingdom, whereas Chosŏn, no matter how superior in its own mind, nonetheless fell into the category of barbarians.
Hong, like other Koreans, was extremely proud of Chosŏn’s fashion of Ming-style clothes and hats and disparaged the Manchu hairstyle and robes. His choice of dress signaled that he maintained the true way of Chinese culture. In his conversations with Chinese intellectuals in the first weeks of his stay in Beijing, Hong frequently used his clothing to highlight Chosŏn’s cultural superiority over the Qing.⁹ Shortly thereafter, however, Hong entered into dialogue with other Chinese intellectuals, in particular Yan Cheng and Pan Tingyun (1743–?), and these highly trained scholars dramatically changed his view of the Qing.
Yan and Pan, both Han Chinese, were from Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province, where they had successfully passed the imperial civil-service examinations and won the title of Juren (a qualified graduate at the provincial level). They were determined to pass the last round of imperial exams in Beijing to realize their dream of serving their country as officials. To enhance their communications with Hong, they shared with him their provincial exam essays. In the first conversation among Hong, Yan, Pan, and their Korean and Chinese peers, another Korean, Kim P’yŏng-jung, asked Pan why he had said in his exam essay that people should worship only the Zhou Dynasty—a statement that, Kim felt, could be seen as an expression of nostalgia for the deposed Ming and as an act of defiance against the Manchus. Pan explained that his words referred to the central civilized country, which was the patriarch for myriad countries (Ch., wanguo suozong), and
he emphasized that the current Son of Heaven, the Qianlong emperor, was so great that all subjects should show him obedience and respect. Worshipping the Zhou, Pan concluded, was akin to worshipping the current dynasty. Hong, for the first time in his life, heard the Qing called the central civilized country. Seeing Pan’s response as a consequence of the sensitive Manchu–Han Chinese ethnic relationship, Hong disregarded his claim and instead responded by highlighting Chosŏn’s identity as Little China. But by the end of the conversation, the two sides had found common ground in celebrating the Qing conceit that all-under-Heaven is one unified family (Ch., tianxia yijia).¹⁰
Hong did not reveal his sense of cultural superiority until his second conversation with Yan and Pan at the Korean residence. The conversation included a long discussion about clothes and hats, in which the Korean hosts and the Chinese guests articulated their respective understandings of the Ming-Qing transition and the Qing’s position in Chinese history. Hong emphasized several times that Koreans wore Ming-style garments, which in China by this time were worn only on the opera stage. Hong indicated that the garments served as a visible reminder of the dignified manner of Han Chinese officials (Ch., hanguan weiyi). The Korean hosts asked Pan and Yan critical questions regarding the Manchu hair-style, clothes, and hats, and about the Ming’s stories. Pan, who was in charge of recording the conversation, answered their questions carefully and praised the Qing volubly.¹¹ Pan later became an official in Beijing and never gave Hong the copies of their correspondence that Hong had requested after returning to Hansŏng, although the two maintained a good relationship.¹²
In another long conversation with Yan, Hong again used Chosŏn’s style of dress to criticize the Qing and mourn the Ming. Hong told Yan he felt extremely sad that China had lost itself with its adoption of Manchu fashions in hair and clothes and that China’s situation was in his view even worse than it had been under the Jin and Yuan Dynasties. In comparison, Hong proudly noted Chosŏn’s loyalty to the Ming, which he called the parent nation. Yan, however, argued that in 1644 the Qing had legitimately become the ruler of the country by defeating the rebels and defending and enacting justice. At the end of the conversation, Hong acknowledged that whereas the Ming had exploited his country, the Qing was much more generous toward Chosŏn.¹³ Hong realized that Han Chinese scholars identified the Qing both as a legitimate successor to the Ming in the political sense and as a legitimate heir to Confucianism in the cultural sense. Although the Han Chinese had adopted the Manchu queue and clothes, Hong concluded, they were still the offspring of the old home of the central civilized country (K., Chunghwa koga chi ye). By contrast, Hong conceded that although Koreans took pride in their Ming-style dress, on a fundamental level they still belonged to the barbarians by the sea. By arguing that the civilized and the barbarians are the same, he acknowledged the Qing’s civilized status.¹⁴ Hong returned to Chosŏn with a new perception of Qing China, and he made an immense contribution to the School of Northern Learning.
Learning from the North: The Korean Visitors’ New Tone toward the Qing
Revisiting the Civilized–Barbarian Discourse: Pak Che-ka’s Visit to Beijing
After Hong returned to Hansŏng in 1766, his strong relationships with Pan, Yan, and other Chinese friends, and his continuous correspondence with them, swiftly became legend among his fellow scholars in Chosŏn. One of them was Pak Che-ka, born in 1750 in Hansŏng, where his father served as a minister at the court. Because his mother was a concubine, Pak was not allowed to take the civil-service examinations, but he won fame as a poet when he was young and joined a wide aristocratic and intellectual social network, through which he became acquainted with Hong. Pak was fascinated by the contacts between Hong and Chinese scholars and hoped to visit Beijing himself. His opportunity came in the spring of 1778, when the emissary Ch’ae Che-gong (1720–99) invited Pak and another famous young scholar, Yi Tŏng-mu (1741–93), to join him on a tributary mission to Beijing. This trip helped transform Pak into a leading proponent of Sirhak—practical knowledge.
In Beijing Pak exchanged poems or conducted written conversations with more than fifty famous Han Chinese and Manchu scholars, almost all of them high-ranking officials at court, including Ji Yun (1724–1805), Pan Tingyun, Tiyeboo (1752–1824), and Fengšen Yendehe (1775–1810). He also conversed with a Muslim prince from Central Asia. After returning to Chosŏn, he spent three months composing a treatise entitled Discussions on Northern Learning (K., Pukhak ŭi), in which he discussed what Chosŏn could learn from the Qing in matters ranging from the construction of bridges, roads, ships, and cities to the production of porcelain, paper, bows, and brushes, as well as language and medicine.¹⁵ On each of these matters and many others, Pak described how advanced the Qing was, then compared it to Chosŏn. He suggested that it was Chosŏn’s self-imposed isolation, informed by the civilized–barbarian discourse, that prevented the country from perceiving the Qing’s accomplishments and embracing the Qing’s sophisticated practical skills. For example, he pointed out that Korean emissaries to Beijing did not directly contact local Chinese officials on their journey from Fenghuang Gate to Beijing but rather commissioned Korean interpreters to do so, which caused much inconvenience. Pak passionately urged his fellow scholars to study the Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, and Japanese languages. Proposals such as this one came very close to calling for a comprehensive reform of Chosŏn’s daily practices and statecraft.
At the end of his treatise, Pak wrote a short piece under the title On Worshipping the Zhou (K., Chonju non), addressing Chosŏn’s understanding of the Qing based on the civilized–barbarian discourse. Pak followed the popular anti-Qing trend in acknowledging that the Qing were among the barbarians, but he critically pointed out that Chosŏn could nonetheless learn from the Qing in many aspects. Otherwise, Pak warned, Chosŏn could neither expel China’s barbarians nor transform the eastern country’s barbarians. If we want to expel the barbarians, Pak stated, we had better know who the barbarians are first. Pak stressed that it would not be too late for Chosŏn to seek revenge for the Ming’s demise after first carefully learning from the Qing for twenty years. Pak followed this piece with Debate on Northern Learning (K., Pukhak pyŏl), in which he justified his call to learn from the Qing on the basis of Neo-Confucian principles. He divided those Korean scholars who denigrated the Qing while acclaiming Chosŏn into three groups: the lower savants (K., hasa), focused on grains and foods; the middle savants (K., chongsa), who were concerned with literature; and the upper savants (K., sangsa), who concentrated on Neo-Confucian principles. Pak argued that Chosŏn’s perception of Qing China was based on woefully incomplete knowledge of it and that Chosŏn was in fact underdeveloped compared to the prosperous Qing. Citing Zhu Xi, Pak expressed a wish that Chosŏn had more people who truly understood the principles as he did.¹⁶ Pak’s proposal that Chosŏn learn from the Qing before it fought against the Qing bore a striking resemblance to the strategy of learning the superior techniques of the barbarians to constrain the barbarians (Ch., shiyi changji yi zhiyi) put forward by the Chinese scholar Wei Yuan (1794–1857) in the 1840s, although Wei’s barbarians referred to Europeans.
Pak’s acknowledgment that the Qing was the civilized country disillusioned many of his fellow scholars. For those who had never seen the Qing, Pak described a society prosperous beyond their imaginations. Following Hong, Pak constructed a new image of the Qing, one the upper savants were reluctant to accept. Ch’ae Che-gong, the emissary who had invited Pak to Beijing, was one such upper savant. Ch’ae mourned the fall of the Ming and called the Manchu general of Fenghuang Gate barbarous. When he arrived in Beijing and saw the artificial hill next to the Forbidden City on which Chongzhen had committed suicide in 1644, Ch’ae composed a poem commemorating the Ming. He lamented that Chinese children on the street jeered at his Ming-style clothing. After the summer solstice rituals at the Temple of Earth, the Qianlong emperor praised the Korean mission for the best ritual performance among the outer fan. Ch’ae interpreted this as evidence that the Manchu emperor, whom he sometimes referred to as khan, tacitly approved of the Han Chinese clothes and hats that he and the other Korean visitors wore.¹⁷ When he returned to Chosŏn, Ch’ae collected the poems he had written on the trip into an anthology entitled Records of Enduring Contempt and Insults (K., Ham’in nok). In stark contrast, Korean scholars at the middle and lower levels found Pak’s proposal to use techniques to benefit people’s livelihoods (K., iyong husaeng) very attractive. Seeking to avoid pedanticism, these scholars contributed to the remarkable rise and dissemination of
northern learning. One of them was Pak Chi-wŏn.
Reenvisioning the Barbarous Qing: Pak Chi-wŏn’s Trip to Beijing
Pak Chi-wŏn was also of an aristocratic yangban background. In 1780, his cousin Pak Myŏng-wŏn (1725–90) was appointed the emissary to Beijing for Emperor Qianlong’s seventieth birthday, providing Pak Chi-wŏn an opportunity for tourism in the upper country. Shocked by the Qing’s wealth, evident everywhere from small towns on the Sino-Korean border to the metropolitan areas of Mukden and Beijing, Pak realized that the stereotypical perception of the Qing among the meritocracy of Chosŏn had become an obstacle to progress. Pak found it difficult to overcome the prejudices rooted in the hegemonic assumption of the Qing’s barbarity, although he was deeply influenced by Hong and had an open mind. In his Rehe Diary (K., Yŏlha ilgi), Pak frequently struggled with the moral correctness of the pro-Ming, anti-Qing principles, on the one hand, and his desire to learn from the Qing, on the other. He was uncomfortable, even pained, by any admission of the achievements of the Qing, which implied that the Qing was civilized but Chosŏn was not, just as Pak Che-ka had painfully suggested.
Pak Chi-wŏn’s astonishment began on the first day of his journey, when he reached Fenghuang Gate and saw the small town inside the fence. Pak noticed that the houses, walls, doors, and streets of the town were well designed and maintained, and that the town bore no indication of inferior rural style. He realized that a scene like this at the eastern end of the Qing’s territory could only portend still more prosperous vistas in the inner reaches of the empire. How could the Manchu barbarians manage the land so efficiently, in such an impressive way, and to such a significant degree of control? Pak felt so unsettled that he wanted to return to Hansŏng. He asked his private servant, Chang Bok, How would it be if you were born in China? Chang, an illiterate boy, immediately answered, "China is barbarian [K., Chungguk ho ya], so I would not want to be born in China."¹⁸ The boy’s answer was exactly the reassurance his master needed. It also reflects the prevalence among Koreans of the perception of the Qing as barbarians. Nevertheless, Pak realized that his journey would not be as peaceful as he had wished.
Indeed, after he entered Fenghuang Gate, Pak’s preconceptions about the barbarous Qing crumbled a little more each day. As he passed by Liaoyang, Mukden, and many small towns and villages, Pak was confronted by beautiful buildings, thriving markets, and flourishing urban and rural communities where local civilians and officials treated him in a friendly manner. He enjoyed written conversations with Han Chinese and Manchu scholars and officials and appreciated local scenery and historical sites. In the course of these experiences, the charge that the Qing was barbarous completely vanished from Pak’s diary. Rather, Pak began to discern a gap between himself and his Chinese counterparts in practical terms that had been caused by Chosŏn’s cultural isolation from the Qing after 1644. His experience in two villages illustrates this point vividly.
When Pak visited a pawnshop in a village called Xinmin, he was invited by the owner to write some Chinese characters as an honorable gift. Pak recalled that he had seen four big characters denoting exceeding frost, surpassing snow (Ch., qishuang saixue) on the front doors of some shops in Mukden and Liaoyang, so he wrote these down, assuming that they must mean that a businessman’s heart should be as pure as frost and snow. However, the four characters were actually a metaphor for the high quality of flour. The confused shop owner shook his head and murmured that the characters were not at all related to his business. Pak left the store in anger. The next day, when he camped at Xiaoheishan Village, he wrote the same four characters for a jewelry shop owner. Just as puzzled as the Xinmin merchant had been, the jeweler said, I am selling women’s jewelry, not flour, so why did you write these characters for me? Pak, suddenly aware of the characters’ actual meaning, overcame his embarrassment and calmly wrote other characters that won him high praise from the shop owner.¹⁹
Frustrated by this episode, Pak took a critical look at Chosŏn’s perception of the Qing and put forward the idea of using techniques to benefit people’s livelihoods by comparing different attitudes toward the Qing among his fellow Korean intellectuals. Like Pak Che-ka, he divided Korean scholars into upper savants, middle savants, and lower savants. He began with a scenario in which Korean people who had never visited the Qing would ask those returning from Beijing
about the impressive things they had observed on their journey. According to Pak, whereas many visitors would list without hesitation such things as the White Pagoda in Liaodong, Chinese markets, and Shanhai Pass, the upper savants would instead insist that nothing is impressive because the people in China, from the Son of Heaven to the common subjects, were barbarians as long as they shaved their foreheads. Since barbarians are dogs and sheep, nothing of theirs was worth praising. The middle savants would also argue that the mountains and lands became barbarous and nothing over there is impressive until we lead a hundred thousand troops to cross Shanhai Pass to recover China. Identifying himself as one of the lower savants who shared with the upper and middle savants the belief in revering China and expelling the barbarians, Pak nevertheless passionately called on his colleagues to learn the good ways and useful systems [of the Qing] as long as they benefit our people and country, even if they are created by barbarians. He argued, If we want to expel the barbarians, we should learn all the good Chinese systems to change ours, after which we might be able to say that China has nothing impressive.²⁰ Pak tried to separate recognition of the Qing’s superior practical techniques from the cultural and moral charges against the Qing. Yet this approach, which meant blurring the boundaries between civilized and barbarian, was a double-edged sword not only for himself but also for the general moral foundation of his country.
On August 30, 1780, when Pak arrived in Beijing, he was stunned by the grandness of the splendid metropolis. In his diary, for the first time, he embraced the Qing regnal title to express the date—the first day of the eighth month of the forty-fifth year of Qianlong—thus incorporating himself into the Zongfan mindset by identifying the Qing as the center of the world. On that day, Pak completely overlooked the fact that he was in a country of barbarians.²¹
Identifying Chosŏn as a Loyal Subordinate of the Qing: Pak Chi-wŏn at Rehe
When Pak Chi-wŏn and his fellow Koreans arrived in Beijing, they learned that the emperor had moved to the summer palace at Rehe, where the sixth Panchen Erdeni (1738–80) and Mongol princes would convene to celebrate the imperial birthday on September 11. On September 2, the emperor instructed the Ministry of Rites to ask the Korean emissaries to visit Rehe and ordered a minister of the Grand Council (Ch., Junjichu) to Beijing to welcome them, an act of extraordinary imperial benevolence. The Koreans immediately organized a special ad hoc team to travel to Rehe, to which Pak Chi-wŏn was attached. Five days later, the group arrived at Rehe, where it quickly became involved in subtle conflicts with the Chinese side. The emperor and his officials were keen to showcase Chosŏn’s subservience as a model outer fan, but the Koreans were equally keen to avoid this role, given their ambivalence about the Qing. However, Chosŏn’s subordinate position in the bilateral framework meant that the emissaries had few alternatives.
The first incident that revealed this tension took place upon the emissaries’ arrival, when the emperor informed the emissaries that they would stand at the end of the right wing of China’s second-rank civil officials during the grand ceremony on the celebration day. This was a special and unprecedented grace from the emperor, because the ritual code generally required the emissaries to stand at the end of the left wing of civil officials. The ministers of the Ministry of Rites asked the emissaries to submit a memorial showing their sincere appreciation. The emissaries hesitated, as it would have been inappropriate to do so without the king’s authorization, but the ministers pushed them to draft the memorial. Pak commented that as the aged emperor became more suspicious, the ministers had to work harder to meet his wishes.²²
On a subsequent occasion, the emperor sent a minister of the Grand Council to inquire whether the two emissaries would like to visit the saintly monk from the western area (Ch., xifan shengseng), referring to the Panchen Erdeni. The Koreans replied that they never stopped communicating with people of China (K., Chungguk insa), but that they did not dare to communicate with people of other countries (K., taguk in). Undeterred, the emperor ordered the emissaries to visit the lama at his monastery. At the monastery, the communications between the Korean emissaries and the Panchen Erdeni followed a labyrinthine path: the Erdeni spoke to the Mongol prince next to him, who relayed the message to the minister of the Grand Council, who forwarded it to the Qing interpreter, who passed it to
the interpreter from Chosŏn, who finally translated the words into Korean for the emissaries. The conversation involved Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, Chinese, and Korean, highlighting the multiethnic and multicultural nature of the unified empire, but the extent to which the Panchen Erdeni and the Korean emissaries could actually understand each other and grasp the political meanings behind the words used remains unclear. Acting on the guidance of the minister of the Grand Council, the emissaries, who were as stiff as clay dolls and wooden puppets, presented the Panchen Erdeni with silk handkerchiefs, and the Panchen Erdeni gave the Koreans three small bronze figurines of the Buddha and some Hada, Pulu, and Tibetan incense in return. Since the figurines contravened Confucian beliefs, the emissaries traded them for silver that they then distributed among their servants instead of bringing the figurines back to Chosŏn.²³
Behind the envoys’ reluctance to visit the Panchen Erdeni was the problem of the ritual of kowtow: the Korean emissaries refused to perform the ceremony to the lama. Pak later defended their behavior in a written conversation with a Manchu official: "Our humble country is in the same family with the big country, and there is no difference between inside and outside between us. Yet the lama is a man of the western area, so how could our envoys dare go and visit him? There is a rule that ‘subordinates have no right to conduct diplomacy’ [K., insin mu oegyo]."²⁴ Chosŏn was demonstrating its loyalty as China’s fan and subordinate. The principle that a subordinate country had no right to conduct diplomacy would be emphasized by the king of Chosŏn again and again when Western states tried to open direct lines of contact with Chosŏn between the 1830s and the 1870s. Their overtures created a tremendous and insurmountable dilemma for the scholars of Chosŏn. Although they viewed the Qing as a barbarous place and themselves as the civilized successors of the Ming within a Chosŏn-centric cultural world, as soon as another political entity approached Chosŏn, they would identify the Qing as China and hew to the Qing’s Zongfan line to embrace their unique role as the representatives of the men from afar cherished by China.²⁵
At a banquet held for representatives of the Qing’s subordinates and attended by the Panchen Erdeni, Mongol princes from Mongolia, Muslim princes from Xinjiang, emissaries from Chosŏn, and indigenous chiefs from southwestern China, the emperor lauded Chosŏn’s fealty, declaring to those gathered at the banquet that "Chosŏn has been serving as a fan for generations and has always been loyal. It pays its annual tribute on time, and that is truly worth praising. The emperor added, We, the monarch and the subordinates, trust each other fully and belong to the same family inside and outside China, so we should not bother ourselves with these overelaborate rituals. He then issued an edict according to which Chosŏn needed to present only an annual tribute; all other tributes, along with humble memorials, would be permanently canceled, reflecting the Qing’s policy of cherishing men from afar with substantial measures rather than rhetoric" (Ch., rouhui yuanren, yishi bu yiwen).²⁶ Again, the Korean emissaries served as the typical men from afar for the purposes of imperial discourse extolling the Qing’s civilization and centrality.
After returning home, Pak Chi-wŏn, like Pak Che-ka before him, called on his fellow scholars to learn from the Qing. In 1781 he wrote a foreword to Pak Cheka’s Discussions on Northern Learning, in which he reiterated that Chosŏn should abandon its incorrect assumptions about the Qing.²⁷ As other Korean scholars followed in Pak’s footsteps and made their own visits to Beijing, the Koreans’ perceptions about the Ming and the Qing continued to evolve.
The Way of the Heavenly Dynasty: The Qing and the Tributary Missions of 1790 and 1793
The Imperial Grand Banquet and the Korean Mission of 1790
The Chosŏn meritocracy increasingly realized that it could not restore the Ming in China, and this recognition helped normalize its service to the Qing under the rubric of serving the great. Compared to Pak Che-ka in 1778 and Pak Chi-wŏn in 1780, Sŏ Ho-su (1736–99), who visited Rehe as an associate envoy to celebrate Emperor Qianlong’s eightieth birthday in 1790, described Chosŏn’s Zongfan contacts with the Qing in very moderate terms. The mission, led by envoy Hwang
In-jŏm (?–1802), associate envoy Sŏ, and secretary Yi Paek-hyŏng (1737–?), left Hansŏng on July 9 and two weeks later arrived at Ŭiju, where it could not cross the Yalu River because of flooding. During his sojourn in Ŭiju, Sŏ commented in one of his poems that the Yalu River is the boundary between the civilized and the barbarians (K., Hwa–I bungye), but in his diary he used the Qing’s regnal title for the date.²⁸
The Qianlong emperor was concerned about the time it would take for the Koreans to reach the celebration at Rehe. As the representatives of the Qing’s outer and inner fan convened again at Rehe, the emperor saw the attendance of Chosŏn’s emissaries as an indispensable part of the system, way, or fundamentals (Ch., tizhi) of the big family. On August 1, the Korean emissaries, still in Ŭiju, received an official note from the Ministry of Rites in Beijing via the Manchu general of Mukden. The message had traveled 500 li (about 155 miles) per day, one of the fastest rates possible for the Qing mail system. The ministry instructed the Koreans to head directly to Rehe, as they needed to arrive by August 19, the same deadline that the emperor had set for the king of Annam and the emissaries of Lanchang and Burma. When the mission crossed the river the next day, a second note from Beijing arrived, urging the envoys to meet the deadline because Chosŏn’s presence was particularly crucial to the system (Ch., shu yu tizhi youguan). They subsequently received a third note in a completely different tone, saying that it would be fine if the mission could not reach Rehe in time.
The emissaries, perceiving the reversal as a subtle way of cherishing the men from afar, immediately organized a special team that would head directly for Rehe with humble palace memorials and selected tributes, while the rest of the mission would go to Beijing as planned. Covering more than 260 miles after passing Mukden, the emissaries reached Rehe on August 24 and learned that the emperor had changed the date of the grand banquet to August 25 to accommodate Chosŏn’s mission. The Mongol and Muslim princes, the emissaries of Burma and Lanchang, the indigenous chiefs of Taiwan, and the king of Annam had all arrived several days earlier.²⁹ The emperor’s decision conveyed eloquently that Chosŏn’s position was irreplaceable in the Qing-centric world.
The following day, the Ministry of Rites guided Chosŏn’s emissaries to the imperial palace for an audience with the Qianlong emperor. After asking for the emissaries’ names and ranks, the emperor instructed them to attend the grand banquet and to watch the Peking opera. In further illustration of Chosŏn’s prominent status, the Korean emissaries were arranged in first position in the wing of the emissaries of other countries, while those of Annam were in second position, those of Lanchang in third, those of Burma in fourth, and the indigenous chiefs in fifth. In addition, Chosŏn’s well-written humble palace memorials were considered exemplary. Hešen (1750–99), the most influential Manchu minister in the Grand Council, showed one of the Korean memorials to the king of Annam, Nguyễn Huệ, and commented, "Chosŏn serves the great in such a good manner that it is the model for other fan ." The Vietnamese king inspected the memorial several times and praised it highly.³⁰
With the move of the grand meeting from Rehe to Beijing in early September, the emissaries of Chosŏn retained their prominent role in all ritual performances in the palaces of Yuan-Ming-Yuan and the Forbidden City. The emperor frequently granted the emissaries audiences, invited them to watch operas, treated them to Manchu banquets, and gave them gifts. On October 11 the Korean mission finally left Beijing for their homeland after a successful stay.
Local Banquets and the Vietnamese Mission in 1790
The Qing expected the tributary emissaries from its other fan to accept and follow the imperial etiquette as readily as those from Chosŏn did. Any deviation from the prescribed practices would not only cause conflict between the Qing and the specific fan but also result in internal tension between the Qing monarch and his local officials. Such an instance occurred during the visit to Beijing of the king of Annam, Nguyễn Huệ, in 1790.
Annam experienced a turbulent period toward the end of the eighteenth century, and the Qing was drawn into the turmoil. In 1771, in what was called the Tây-so’n Rebellion, Nguyễn Huệ and his two brothers overthrew the Nguyễn family, which controlled the south of Vietnam, and restored the later Lê Dynasty
(1428–1788). In 1788, worried about Nguyễn’s growing power, the young king, Lê Duy Kỳ (1765–93), fled the capital. At Lê’s request, Emperor Qianlong sent troops to Annam, which had been the Qing’s "outer fan for more than one hundred years. Under the command of the governor-general of Liangguang, Sun Shiyi (1720–96), the Chinese army quickly occupied Hanoi and restored the government of Lê Duy Kỳ. But the Chinese forces were defeated in an unexpected attack by Nguyễn in January 1789, and Lê fled Hanoi again. Emperor Qianlong appointed his favorite Manchu general, Fuk’anggan (1753–96), who had just suppressed a rebellion in Taiwan, to replace Sun and organize a counterattack. However, the emperor was not interested in conquering Vietnam through a large-scale war, and he instructed Fuk’anggan and Sun to be receptive to any attempts by Nguyễn to sue for peace. The emperor reviewed China’s frustrating experience with converting Vietnam into China’s prefectures and counties" (Ch., junxian qi di) in pre-Qing history and stressed that the Qing would not integrate Annam into China’s map and register (Ch., shouru bantu) by imitating the case of Xinjiang, where the court had had to dispatch numerous officials to manage the land after the military conquest, in particular after the war with the Zunghar Mongols.³¹ Qing policymakers thus clearly understood that policies were to be applied flexibly in different parts of the Qing frontier. As it turned out, Nguyễn was not ready for another fight with the Qing either, so in the same month he presented Sun with a humble palace memorial to express his willingness to become a subordinate of the Heavenly Dynasty, marking the end of the conflict on the battlefield.
Recognizing the motivation behind Nguyễn’s act of submission to the Qing, Qianlong issued an edict on May 15, declaring that he would not use force against the country for the sake of the barbarian people of Annam. Believing that Heaven has abandoned the Lê, the emperor settled the Lê family and its loyal followers in the city of Guilin in Guangxi, a Chinese province bordering Vietnam.³² This arrangement signaled that the Qing was preparing to support a new Vietnamese regime. To that end, the emperor indicated that he might invest Nguyễn as king if Nguyễn visited Beijing in person. This, according to the emperor, was precisely how he managed foreign barbarians—with mercy and discipline. The emperor also confirmed that Lê and his followers would not be sent back to Annam for restoration, and to prove his intentions he ordered them to cut their hair according to the Qing style and to wear Qing clothes. In Guilin, Fuk’anggan and Sun Shiyi told the desperate young king, "You are in the land of the central civilized country [Ch., Zhonghua zhi tu], so you should follow China’s system [Ch., Zhongguo zhi zhi] and change your hairstyle and clothes."³³
As the manager of communications at the border, Fuk’anggan understood the mood of his aging and vainglorious master in Beijing, so he impressed on the emperor Nguyễn’s willingness to visit Beijing. In August the emperor quickly invested Nguyễn as the new king in order to provide him with the necessary orthodox legitimacy to govern and stabilize Annam domestically. In the book of investiture, the emperor emphasized the importance of the principle of serving the great on the part of an outer fan and that of cherishing the small on the part of China, highlighting the same ideological reciprocity that existed between Chosŏn and the Qing. The emperor took four steps to welcome the new king to Beijing. First, he instructed the Grand Secretariat and the Ministry of Rites to create new guest-host rituals (Ch., binzhu zhi li) between the king and the Qing’s governors-general and governors. He also endowed the king with a golden belt that was reserved for the Qing’s royal vassals (Ch., Zongfan).³⁴ Second, he moved the dethroned Lê to Beijing and appointed him a hereditary major in the Han Eight Banners. The 376 followers who had accompanied Lê were registered with the banner household system, and many were moved to Jiangnan, Zhejiang, Sichuan, and other provinces. Third, the emperor allowed the new Nguyễn regime to pick up their Chinese calendar books every year from the governor of Guangxi instead of traveling to Beijing for them. And fourth, he promised to open a border market after Nguyễn had visited Beijing, in recognition of the idea that the barbarian people of that country are all loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty. All of these measures were aimed at encouraging Nguyễn’s sincerity in transforming into a subordinate of the civilized (Ch., xianghua zhi cheng).³⁵
On May 26, 1790, the king and his mission of 150 members reached the Qing border, where he performed the highest level of kowtow to the imperial edicts and
gifts.³⁶ Fuk’anggan then accompanied Nguyễn to Rehe, passing through Guangxi, Guangdong, Hunan, Jiangxi, Hubei, Henan, and Zhili Provinces. In early June the mission arrived in the port of Guangzhou, and the Western barbarians of the Cohongs (referring to local factories through which the Western merchants traded with the Chinese side) gathered to witness the homage paid to the Qing by the king of an outer fan.³⁷ Two months later the Qing court invested Nguyễn’s son as crown prince, and the emperor applauded the father-son relationship between the emperor and Nguyễn. Following the precedents set by his reception of the king of Chosŏn and the Mongol khan of Korcin, the emperor dispatched a minister from the Ministry of Rites to welcome the king to a tea ceremony at Liangxiang, a few miles south of Beijing.
The practice of the policy of cherishing the men from afar went smoothly until a report from Rehe in late July made the emperor uncomfortable. The officials there sent word that they had received an unofficial note (Ch., chuandan) saying that the daily cost of entertaining and accommodating the Vietnamese mission in Jiangxi was around four thousand taels of silver—an astounding sum. The officials were worried that it would be inappropriate for them to host the mission with less luxury once it reached Rehe, but they could only work with the funds they had available. The emperor, too, was shocked by the cost, as he had treated Mongol princes and emissaries of other countries to annual banquets for less than one thousand taels. An expense of 4,000 taels per day meant that the total amount spent on the king and his entourage would reach 0.8 million taels during their two-hundred-day sojourn in China.
Believing that this issue deeply concerned the way of the Heavenly Dynasty, the emperor lectured his officials that the great Heavenly Dynasty should not welcome one or two subordinates from the remote lands in a luxurious way. In addition, said the emperor, if the king were entertained too lavishly in the provinces, he would not sufficiently appreciate the imperial grace when treated with less opulence in Rehe. Chosŏn’s missions illustrated the emperor’s point. The Koreans prepared their own meals at each transfer station, but once they arrived in Beijing or Rehe, their daily logistics were entirely taken over by Qing personnel and the emissaries were hosted in a sumptuous manner. This substantial difference in hospitality between the provinces and Beijing created exactly the effect that the emperor sought. The danger posed by the luxurious treatment of Annam’s emissaries along their route lay in its potential to undermine the spectacle of imperial generosity that the emperor, informed by the Chosŏn model, wished to present at the mission’s final destination. Thus, the emperor instructed the provincial authorities in Jiangxi, Hubei, Henan, and Zhili to tone down the extravagance of their receptions, as this was the only way that the mean between abundance and scarcity (Ch., fengjian shizhong) could be realized. It was the first time in the Qianlong period that the emperor gave orders to temper the level of luxury in entertaining foreign dignitaries.³⁸
The event created an opportunity for the emperor to discipline his officials. He listed two possible reasons for the astonishing costs: either local officials deliberately spent too much in order to seek profitable reimbursement from the imperial coffers in the future, or the Chinese escorts extorted too much money from the provinces they passed through. Either possibility could damage the way of the Heavenly Dynasty. The emperor ordered governors in Guangdong, Jiangxi, Hubei, Anhui, and Zhili to investigate how the four-thousand-tael figure had come about. None of the officials claimed responsibility, but the emperor insisted that the origin of the unofficial note be identified and suggested it might have come from Zhili. Liang Kentang (1715–1802), the governor-general of Zhili, immediately reported that the note was wrongly printed in his province. The emperor condemned Liang and closed the case, but he did not punish Liang, who was apparently the scapegoat of the emperor’s face-saving inquiry.³⁹
When the mission from Annam arrived in Rehe on August 20, 1790, Nguyễn was granted an imperial audience together with the indigenous chiefs of southwestern China and Taiwan, the khan of Kazak, the princes of Mongolia and the Muslim tributaries, and the emissaries of Burma and Lanchang. The emperor bestowed official Qing robes on the king and his followers. On August 25, as described in the previous section, Chosŏn’s bedraggled emissaries reached Rehe, and
all the men from afar could finally convene at the imperial hall for the grand banquet. There and later in Beijing, the envoys from the Qing’s periphery kowtowed to their shared Son of Heaven in China. What Qianlong saw and experienced was indeed a harmonious picture of the Heavenly Dynasty.
The Way of the Heavenly Dynasty: The British Mission in 1793
Three years later, the emperor would receive a very different group of men from afar. This mission came from England, known in China as Yingjili. In September 1792 Lord Macartney (1737–1806) left Portsmouth for China to seek greater commercial opportunities in the name of celebrating Qianlong’s birthday. In July 1793 the mission reached Dagu Harbor in Tianjin and was welcomed by Liang Kentang and by Zhengrui, the salt tax commissioner of Changlu. On September 14 Macartney and his assistants, who were called British tributary emissaries (Ch., Yingjili guo gongshi), were granted an audience with Qianlong at Rehe, after which the mission was sent back to Guangzhou via the overland route. Scholars have described the visit as an epoch-making collision of two different cultural, social, and imperial systems and as the beginning of the East-West encounter that eventually led to the Opium War of 1839–42.⁴⁰ Rather than reviewing the entire event, which has been well examined, this section focuses on the connection between the British mission and the legacy of Annam’s mission in 1790 against the historical backdrop of the Qing’s institutional barbarianization of all other countries, including Britain.
Until 1793 the Qing did not have a clear sense of the British presence in India and failed to connect the British activities on the Tibetan frontier with those in India.⁴¹ The Qing court saw the British embassy of 1793 as a tributary mission from an outer fan, so all bilateral contacts had to be conducted in accordance with imperial codes just like those that applied to Chosŏn, Annam, and Ryukyu. This time, the emperor made a point of instructing his local officials to treat the foreign barbarians of the British tributary mission appropriately between abundance and scarcity. Such treatment, said the emperor, would befit the way of the upper country and ensure that the men from afar would not disdain China. Of the officials involved in hosting the mission, Liang Kentang, still smarting from the scandal of the overly extravagant hospitality shown to Annam in 1790, was perhaps the only one who thoroughly understood what the emperor meant. The emperor, too, might have taken the precedent of Annam as a standard for testing his officials. The game between the emperor and his officials was back on. In August, after learning that Zhejiang, Shandong, and Tianjin had lavished food on the British envoys, the emperor admonished his officials on the proper balance to be observed in welcoming the men from afar. Too little generosity, he explained, might prevent them from transforming into the civilized, while too much might result in their contempt for the way and dignity of the Heavenly Dynasty. The point was to show neither inferiority nor superiority in entertaining, but to remain in accord with the way and highlight the act of cherishing. He reminded Liang several times of this proper way.⁴²
When the mission reached Rehe on September 8, Macartney and his assistants refused to prostrate themselves before the emperor. The next day the emperor issued an edict to Liang and his colleagues, expressing his disappointment in the British envoys. The edict attributed the envoys’ shocking lack of respect to the extravagant treatment they had received in the provinces, which must have encouraged the barbarians’ arrogance and overshadowed the impression that Rehe ought to have made on them. To remedy the matter and punish the provinces, the emperor ordered that the mission return to Guangdong by the overland route and along interior rivers, and that all accommodations and meals at transfer stations be provided in strict conformity with tributary precedents for such rude foreign barbarians. The emperor further stressed that the hospitality extended to the envoys in Beijing should be moderated in order to highlight the Chinese system through this punishment and to show the "[appropriate] way to manage an outer fan " (Ch., jiayu waifan zhi dao).⁴³ From the emperor’s perspective, the accommodations and meals were meant to reflect the way of the dynasty, a point the British visitors and many local Chinese officials completely missed. For the emperor, an essential aspect of controlling the envoys of outer fan was the skillful deployment of the bureaucratic apparatus to cherish the men from afar appropriately.
After negotiations concerning the performance of rituals, the British group—consisting of Macartney; his deputy, George Staunton (1737–1801); Staunton’s twelve-year-old son, George Thomas Staunton (1781–1859); and other members of the mission—was granted an imperial audience at the grand tent on September 14. Instead of kowtowing, the members of the mission knelt down on one knee and bowed their heads nine times. The British performed the same compromise ritual again on September 17, the imperial birthday, and days after that both in Rehe and in Beijing.⁴⁴ Simultaneously, the Manchu and Mongol princes and Burmese emissaries performed the rituals in strict observance of the imperial codes. After the ceremony, the emperor endowed the British mission with many gifts, including Korean clothing that had been piling up in Beijing as a result of Chosŏn’s annual tributes.
For their part, the British submitted to the emperor their version of a humble palace memorial, which, among other things, asked him to station a permanent representative in Beijing and to begin trading outside Guangzhou. In reply, the emperor issued a long edict to King George III, refusing all of their requests. He explained that no precedents beyond the established rules existed, so Britain could not hope to change China’s way of cherishing the men from afar and the barbarians in the four directions of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao jiahui yuanren fuyu siyi zhi dao). The emperor explained that he understood that Yingjili was so far from China that it was unfamiliar with the magnificent way of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao tizhi), but he stressed that the British could not live and trade in Beijing because the civilized–barbarian distinction is extremely strict (Ch., Hua–Yi zhi bian shenyan). The Jesuit missionaries in Beijing, the emperor said, were not allowed to contact Chinese people either.⁴⁵ Macartney failed to obtain any trade concessions and thus shared the fate of his predecessors, James Flint in 1759 and Nicholas Skottowe in 1761. Instead the British embassy’s visit to China, which the Qing considered a tributary mission, strengthened the Qing’s position as the civilized center and reinforced its institutionalized norms regarding its foreign relations. After all, it was Qing China that, as Li Chen observes, maintained a dominant position in deciding the terms of the Sino-Western economic, cultural, and political relationships.⁴⁶
The British thus had no effect on the Qing’s worldview. On January 8, 1794, Macartney departed Guangzhou for Calcutta. The next day, three emissaries from Ryukyu were granted an audience with Qianlong in the Forbidden City, where they kowtowed to the emperor as usual. On January 22 the Mongol and Muslim princes and the chieftains of indigenous tribes from southwestern China were granted an imperial audience in which they too kowtowed to the Son of Heaven in the traditional manner. Three days later the Korean emissaries of the annual tributary mission prostrated themselves in front of the emperor. Then came New Year’s Day, and all princes and tributary emissaries convened in the Forbidden City to attend the grand assembly and lavish banquets together with Chinese officials, all performing the highest level of kowtow again.⁴⁷ After the British mission left, then, the Zongfan mechanism between the Qing and its outer fan continued to operate in its accustomed seamless manner.
Rebellious Western and Loyal Eastern Barbarians in the 1840s
The First Opium War and the Diplomatic Paradox of Qing China
Britain did not give up. In 1816 Lord Amherst (1783–1857) visited China as an ambassador. George Thomas Staunton, who had met with Qianlong as part of the Macartney mission and later served as the director of the British East India Company in Guangzhou, acted as Amherst’s deputy. By this time, China was ruled by Qianlong’s son, Jiaqing. When the British mission arrived in Tianjin and contacted local officials, the deputy governor-general of Zhili, Tojin (1755–1835), adopted the tone of the provincial hosts during the Vietnamese mission in 1790 and the British mission in 1793, assuring Jiaqing that he would adhere to precedent and welcome the tributary mission in order to prevent the foreigners from disdaining China.
The crisis over kowtow, however, erupted again between the two sides. Because the dispute remained unsettled by the time the mission arrived in Beijing in late
August, the British did not immediately visit the emperor. The emperor read their absence as a sign of British contempt that China as the common leader under the Heaven (Ch., Zhongguo wei tianxia gongzhu) could not tolerate. The emperor also did not trust Staunton, saying that the latter should remember what ceremonies he had performed to Qianlong in 1793. In the end, the emperor refused to accept Amherst’s humble palace memorial, returned the British tributes, and ordered the envoys to be sent back to their homeland with token gifts from China.⁴⁸ The second British mission had also failed.
In 1821 Staunton published a translation of the travelogue of Tulišen, the official who had visited Russia as the Qing envoy in 1712. In the preface, Staunton pointed out that the Chinese government followed an anti-social system in their intercourse with other nations and that China would consequently rank very low indeed in the scale of civilized nations.⁴⁹ Staunton’s ranking of civilization from his Eurocentric point of view served well the British strategy in China at the time. As the British-dominated opium trade reached new heights, the large inflows of opium and the dramatic outflows of silver were creating a financial crisis in China, forcing Beijing to consider banning the opium trade. In April 1840 Staunton, by then a member of the British Parliament, urged his colleagues to use force against China.⁵⁰ The ensuing Opium War between the two countries ended with the conclusion of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, the twenty-second year of Daoguang, Qianlong’s grandson. According to the Treaty of Nanjing and the Supplementary Treaty of Bogue, which was negotiated according to Western norms and signed in 1843, Britain gained the right of extraterritoriality and most favored nation status in China. The treaties thus planted the seeds of European imperialism in the Chinese world through the emerging treaty port framework.
In 1844 the Qing established the position of superintendent of trade for the five ports (Ch., Wukou tongshang dachen) to manage contacts with Britain, France, the United States, and other Western countries. On the surface, the new post moved these treaty nations out of the orbit of the Ministry of Rites and the scope of the Zongfan framework. But the first official to hold the post was Qiying (1787–1858), a Manchu and a signatory of the Treaty of Nanjing who soon after became governor-general of Liangguang, where he was in charge of China’s contacts not only with Western countries in Guangzhou but also with Annam, Siam, and several other outer fan. This new post was thus added to the established Zongfan system without changing the nature of the system per se. Likewise, nothing really changed in other parts of the Qing periphery after the war.
Keeping the West out of the Ritual: Qing Envoys to Chosŏn
After Queen Kim of Chosŏn passed away in late 1843, the Daoguang emperor appointed two Manchu officials, Baijun (?–1859) and Hengxing, as envoys to deliver his condolences to Hansŏng. In February 1844 the two envoys left Beijing for Chosŏn with the imperial book of condolences and other items. After crossing Fenghuang Gate and marching toward the Yalu River, they found that the Koreans had set up several shanties to welcome them. In Ŭiju more Korean officials, including one with the king’s name card, greeted the envoys. On April 7 the envoys arrived in Hongjewŏn, in the suburbs of Hansŏng, where a high-ranking official with the king’s name card and a minister of the Ŭijŏngbu, the Korean cabinet, welcomed them.
The grand ceremony was held the next day. In the morning the envoys were escorted to the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country outside the West Gate of the capital. The king came out through the West Gate to receive the imperial edict and returned to his palace first. The envoys were then escorted through the South Gate and dismounted from their horses near a gate to the palace. Baijun was guided by an usher to the grand hall, where he placed the imperial book of condolences and the condolence money on a desk on the east side of the hall and stood next to the desk. The king, at the foot of the steps to the hall, kowtowed to the imperial items and then proceeded to the mourning hall. There the two envoys in turn made offerings to the spirit of the dead. The king led the royal family members into the hall and knelt down in front of the envoys to receive the emperor’s condolences. Following ritual wailing, the last step of the ceremony, the imperial book of condolences was burned.⁵¹
The king then invited the envoys to the grand hall for a tea ceremony, after which the envoys went to their residence, the South Palace Annex. The next day the king visited the envoys to treat them to a tea banquet, and Korean officials visited the envoys to ask them to write Chinese characters, keeping the guests busy. The envoys also distributed 300 taels of silver and 490 felt caps among local servants. On April 12 the king sent off the envoys, giving each a gift of 2,500 taels of silver. After they returned to Beijing, the envoys reported on their mission to the emperor and suggested that the emperor preserve the 5,000 taels of silver in the Ministry of Rites, which could return the silver to Chosŏn through the country’s next mission to Beijing to show the imperial kindness of cherishing the men from afar.⁵² During their three-day sojourn in Hansŏng, the envoys did not talk with the king about any events in China related to the Opium War, the treaties signed with Western countries, or the changes in China’s foreign policies in South China, nor did the king ask about these matters. Their interactions were confined to the performance of minutely prescribed rituals that undergirded the longstanding mutual dependence of their legitimacy as Zhongguo and its outer fan, respectively. This primacy of ritual was demonstrated again soon afterward, in 1845.
In April 1845 Emperor Daoguang appointed Huashana (1806–59), a Manchu minister of the Ministry of Revenue, and Deshun, an associate general of the Mongol Eight Banners, as envoys to Hansŏng to invest a new queen. The envoys arrived in Hansŏng in late May. The king went outside the city to welcome the envoys and the imperial books of investiture, after which the envoys were taken in sedan chairs to the palace, where they alighted in front of the grand hall and carried in the books of investiture. The king entered the hall to receive the imperial books by performing the kowtow. An usher read the books aloud to Chosŏn’s officials outside the hall, and then the king led his officials in three cheers of Long live the emperor (Ch., shanhu wansui). After a stay of three days, the envoys left the capital.⁵³ When the envoys reported to Beijing, the emperor asked them about the distance they had traveled, the king’s clothes, and the gifts sent by the king, but no mention was made of Chosŏn’s politics or other domestic Korean issues. For the emperor, the crises and challenges imposed by the war with Britain and the opening of treaty ports in Southeast China were entirely outside the purview of Qing-Chosŏn relations. At the top of the Qing administration, the Sinocentric cosmopolitan order and the Qing’s identity as the Heavenly Dynasty remained untouched. Chosŏn, the prototypical outer fan, still maintained its loyalty to the Great Qing.
Ministers and Emissaries: The British and Korean Missions to Beijing, 1860 and 1861
The Permanent Residence of Western Representatives in Beijing
In 1856 the Second Opium War erupted in Guangzhou. The Chinese governor-general and imperial commissioner, Ye Mingchen (1807–59), who was in charge of foreign affairs, was captured in his office in the city in January 1858 by the Anglo-French forces under the leadership of Lord Elgin (1811–63). Part of a family that had enjoyed close contacts with Korean visitors in Beijing, Ye shared with Koreans the discourse of the civilized–barbarian distinction.⁵⁴ He had served in Guangzhou for more than a decade as one of the strongest opponents of allowing British representatives and merchants to move into the walled city. In his last memorial to the Xianfeng emperor before he was captured, Ye analyzed his negotiations with the British, French, and American ministers in Guangzhou and underlined his strategy of secretly preparing for crises and publicly cherishing the barbarians.⁵⁵ The Western colonial states’ expansion to East Asia remained incomprehensible to Ye, who still conceptualized all international contacts, including conflicts, skirmishes, and even the ongoing war, within the Zongfan framework. The emperor, with no better understanding than Ye, regarded the behavior of the British and French as rebellion and emphasized that China’s first imperative was to cherish these wayward subordinates to preserve the national polity and refuse their requests. The rationale was the same as that behind Qianlong’s instructions regarding the Macartney embassy in 1793. Neither the emperor nor his ministers at court nor his governors at the border realized that they
were dealing with several global powers engaging in gunboat diplomacy from Africa to East Asia.
The war situation continued to escalate. In April 1858 the British, French, American, and Russian ministers convened in Tianjin and dispatched an ultimatum to Beijing, demanding negotiations with Chinese plenipotentiaries (Ch., bianyi xingshi). Among the requests made by these states, such as expanding trade to the Chinese interior and opening more ports, the most offensive to the Qing was the demand to lodge permanent representatives in Beijing, precisely as Macartney had proposed in 1793. The court instructed the governor-general of Zhili, Tan Tingxiang (?–1870), who was negotiating with the European ministers in Tianjin, to clarify that "all contacts between China and foreign countries have always been conducted at the borders, and only countries among China’s subordinates [Ch., shuguo] can visit Beijing to pay tribute [Ch., chaogong]. No commissioner from those countries has ever been allowed to reside in Beijing permanently. The court also refused to appoint any plenipotentiaries. The emperor argued that his stance was not xenophobic because China is not afraid of the visit of the barbarians to Beijing, however many people were to come; the problem is that such a visit does not fit the system. Along the same lines, he refused to allow the American minister, William Reed (1806–76), to visit Beijing because the United States is a friendly country [Ch., yuguo], but the imperial collection of precedents does not record how we should treat a friendly country, so the practice of entertaining might be inappropriate."⁵⁶ The emperor asked that the ministers return to Guangzhou and discuss such issues as tariffs with the governor-general there, suggesting that the negotiations should be conducted with the superintendent of trade for the five ports at the border rather than in Beijing. The location of the negotiations was an integral aspect of the Sinocentric world order and thus mattered greatly in the eyes of the Qing rulers.
The Anglo-French Alliance ignored the emperor’s instructions and occupied the Dagu Forts on May 20, after which they forwarded Tan Tingxiang a note requesting that the four nations be allowed entry into Tianjin for negotiations with the Chinese plenipotentiaries as well as entry into Beijing, where they would either pay a visit to the emperor or meet with grand secretaries. On May 28 the emperor appointed the Manchu grand secretary, Guiliang (1785–62), as minister extraordinary and the Manchu minister Huashana as plenipotentiary and sent them to Tianjin for negotiations. Huashana, who had served as the deputy of the Son of Heaven on the mission to Chosŏn in 1845, now became a diplomatic representative of the Chinese sovereign who was equal to the monarchs of Britain and France. The emperor particularly instructed Tan to inform the foreign ministers that there was no need for them to visit Beijing. In the meantime, he ordered Prince Sengge Rinchen (1811–65) of the Korcin Mongols to use his Mongol warriors to reinforce the garrison between Tianjin and Beijing.
The Sino-British negotiations reached a deadlock over the issue of a permanent representative in Beijing. At court, many high-ranking officials, such as Prince Yi (Dzai Yūwan, 1816–61), firmly refused the Western request to place representatives in Beijing. They suggested instead that Britain could follow the established practice of the Russian barbarians (Ch., E yi) and station students rather than commissioners in Beijing. The students would dress in the clothes and caps of China (Ch., Zhongguo yiguan), abide by local rules, and refrain from involvement in official affairs. Britain could negotiate with Chinese governors-general and governors over trade affairs at treaty ports. If the British insisted on visiting Beijing, the emperor said that they would have to travel from Shanghai via the overland route, escorted by Chinese officials, with all accommodations and meals covered by China. They could visit Beijing once every three or five years, not annually.⁵⁷ Not coincidentally, this proposal fit precisely into the existing tributary ritual codes: Beijing was trying to draw Britain into the established Zongfan system. From 1761 to 1793, then to 1858, the Qing court’s understanding of Britain remained the same because the Qing’s institutionalized Zongfan norms never changed.
This ideal model was soon partly—if opaquely—realized in the treaty with the United States, concluded on June 18, 1858, in Tianjin. Article 5 of the treaty regulated the visit of the American minister to Beijing in accordance with the specific ritual codes for the Qing’s outer fan.⁵⁸ The regulations specified the frequency of
the Americans’ visits to Beijing, the overland route they were to take from Tianjin to Beijing, their entertainment by local authorities, the requisite written notice to the Ministry of Rites, and especially the size of the mission—twenty members, which was the maximum head count of tributary missions allowed for Ryukyu, Lanchang, Burma, and the Netherlands. Although the treaty granted the United States the status of a most favored nation, Beijing saw this status simply as a special favor for foreign barbarians, unrelated to China’s statehood and sovereignty. In this sense, the Qing court treated the United States as a tributary state, which the latter, of course, completely failed to realize.
Within the domestic Confucianism-centered intellectual framework, neither the Qing ruling house nor the majority of its officials who had passed the imperial civil-service examinations thought beyond the framework of the civilized–barbarian distinction. The new knowledge imported from the West by American and European missionaries who were active in Southeast Asia and South China had not yet had an impact on the Chinese intellectual forces behind the post-Qianlong institutionalized order. On June 23, 1858, the Chinese minister Zhou Zupei (1793– 1867) and thirty of his colleagues submitted memorials against the permanent residence of barbarous emissaries in Beijing. Among the eight evils of such residence highlighted in Zhou’s memorial was the preaching of the gospel by the foreigners, which would turn our manner of clothes, caps, rituals, and music into something fit for beasts (Ch., yiguan liyue zhi zu, yi yu qinshou). He also warned that if countries such as Chosŏn and Ryukyu, which have been loyal to China for a long time and sincerely send emissaries and pay tribute to the court, saw the disobedience of these barbarians, they, too, would despise the Heavenly Dynasty. This argument was further underscored by Chen Rui, who emphasized the fundamental divide between China and the others (Ch., Zhong Wai zhi dafang).⁵⁹ In terms of their thinking, these officials were no different from Ye Mingchen, who at the time was detained by the British in Calcutta.
Despite such keen resistance, Guiliang and Huashana accepted the British-drafted treaty after they realized the situation was beyond China’s control. The treaty with Britain, signed on June 26, allowed Britain to appoint diplomatic agents to the court in Beijing, where they would not kowtow to the emperor. According to article 3, the British ambassador, minister, or other diplomatic agent shall not be called upon to perform any ceremony derogatory to him as representing the Sovereign of an independent nation, on a footing of equality with that of China. On the other hand, he shall use the same forms of ceremony and respect to His Majesty the Emperor as are employed by the Ambassadors, Ministers, or Diplomatic Agents of Her Majesty toward the Sovereigns of independent and equal European nations.⁶⁰ In retrospect, this article opened the gates of Beijing to the representatives of Britain and other treaty nations and marked the beginning of the collapse of the centuries-long ritual system and the erosion of the Zongfan infrastructure. Being forced to fundamentally change its time-honored ritual norms, even if only in part, the Great Qing moved toward its eventual transformation from a cosmopolitan empire to a state equal to Britain according to post-Westphalian political and diplomatic norms.
Historic though the change was, the Chinese may not have fully understood the treaty’s importance because of linguistic discrepancies. The Chinese version of the treaty, for instance, states that "Britain is a nation of zizhu on a footing of equality with China" (Ch., Yingguo zizhu zhi bang, yu Zhongguo pingdeng). The term zizhu, which meant self-rule or autonomy, was usually used in a Zongfan context. China regarded its outer fan as possessing this right, so it was different from the British understanding of the term independence. This divergence would become apparent in the following years, when China and the Western states as well as Japan tried to define the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship and Chosŏn’s international position. The seeds of further conflicts between the norms of the Chinese Zongfan system and those of European international law were thus planted directly in these treaties.
What further shook the foundation of the civilized–barbarian discourse was article 51 of the Sino-British treaty of 1858, which decreed that the character yi (barbarian) "shall not be applied to the Government or subjects of Her Britannic Majesty in any Chinese official document issued by the Chinese Authorities either in
the Capital or in the Provinces."⁶¹ Britain and other Western nations that were eligible to invoke the most-favored-nation clause thus broke away legally and institutionally from the category of barbarians in Chinese diplomatic discourse. From then on, in Chinese official narratives the character yi was increasingly replaced by yang (overseas, foreign) and the term barbarians (Ch., yiren) by foreigners (Ch., yangren).
This amendment, however, applied only to Western treaty nations that had never occupied an essential position in the Zongfan system. The Qing still considered its major outer fan, such as Chosŏn, Vietnam, and Ryukyu, countries of barbarians. In this sense, the treaty port system, although it was expanding rapidly at the end of the 1850s, merely complicated the Qing’s view of the countries in the Western Ocean. In other words, the disintegration of Sinocentrism as a result of the 1858 treaties occurred on the Qing’s intellectual periphery, not at the core of its intellectual and ideological structure as informed and represented by the Qing’s principal outer fan. The ministers of the treaty nations residing in Beijing would soon be confronted with the complexity and perplexity of this distinction.
Who Were the Barbarians Now? The British and Korean Missions to Beijing
Treaties in hand, the ministers of Britain, France, Russia, and the United States left Tianjin for Shanghai, where they and Chinese representatives signed additional treaties on tariffs. The war would have been over had the British and French ministers in the summer of 1859 followed the Qing’s designated route to enter Beijing after they landed at Tianjin for the ratification of the treaties. But the ministers refused to follow Qing instructions, and their rash entry into the firth of the Beihe River near the Dagu Forts led to Chinese bombardment. The war resumed less than a year after the British Crown imposed direct control over India by nationalizing the British East India Company in August 1858. Under the leadership of Lord Elgin, who was determined to employ gunboat diplomacy against Beijing, the Anglo-French alliance returned to China in the summer of 1860 and reoccupied the Dagu Forts. There the alliance almost annihilated the Mongol cavalry of Prince Sengge Rinchen with the Armstrong gun, a weapon created by Britain and employed in combat for the first time. The Qing succumbed not only to the joint colonialism of the European states but also to revolutionary post–Crimean War European military technology.
The alliance occupied Tianjin and marched toward Beijing in late August. Although the Beijing court sent representatives to Tongzhou, near Beijing, for negotiations, on September 18 Prince Sengge Rinchen captured Harry Parkes (1828–85), the British commissioner in Guangzhou, as well as Henry Loch (1827–1900), Elgin’s private secretary, and twenty-four British and thirteen French officers and soldiers. Only half of these prisoners of war—including Parkes and Loch—survived and were eventually released on October 8, when the alliance gained control of Beijing’s suburbs and started looting the imperial palace of Yuan-Ming-Yuan. The frightened Son of Heaven, Emperor Xianfeng, had fled to Rehe on September 22 after appointing his younger brother Prince Gong (a.k.a. Prince Kung, 1833–98) as the envoy extraordinary and plenipotentiary to supervise the uncertain peace negotiations. On October 13 the Western forces took over the Anding Gate of the city. The Qing saw this as a more serious threat than it did the ongoing Taiping Rebellion in South China, as the court in Rehe and the caretaker administration in Beijing were extremely vulnerable to the aggressive European alliance and their powerful cannons positioned on the city’s old walls.
From October 12 to 16, the survivors and bodies of the prisoners of war were returned to the alliance. The evident cruelty inflicted on the corpses, mutilated beyond recognition, shocked Elgin and his fellow commanders. Elgin at once notified to Prince Kung that he was too horrified by what had occurred to hold further communication with a government guilty of such deeds of treachery and bloodshed, until by some great punishment inflicted upon the Emperor and the governing classes, he had made apparent … the detestation with which the Allies viewed such conduct. The great punishment turned out to be the immolation of Yuan-Ming-Yuan. On October 18, the second day after the alliance buried the former prisoners, flames engulfed the magnificent imperial garden that had been co-designed by European Jesuit missionaries. Loch recorded that during the whole of Friday the 19th, Yuen-Ming-Yuen was still burning; the clouds of smoke driven by the wind, hung like a vast black pall over Pekin.⁶² Numerous buildings in which the Qing emperors had given audience to emissaries of its outer fan—once
including Britain and always including Chosŏn—were burned to the ground. On October 20 Prince Gong offered Elgin China’s submission to the alliance’s demands. The capital was fully opened to the alliance. Parkes and Loch entered the city the next day and ironically selected the grand hall of the Ministry of Rites as the site for the signing of the convention.
Elgin departed for the grand hall on October 24, carried in a sedan chair by sixteen Chinese footmen—an honor previously reserved for the emperor—and accompanied by an escort of more than six hundred men. When the procession reached the hall, according to Loch, Prince Gong advanced to receive Lord Elgin with an anxious, hesitating salutation, while the latter bowed, and at once walked forward to his seat, motioning Prince Kung to take the one on the right. After they signed the convention, exchanged treaties, and talked briefly about maintaining friendship, Lord Elgin rose to take leave; Prince Kung accompanied him a short distance, and then stopped; but on Lord Elgin doing so likewise, the principal mandarins in attendance urgently beckoned Prince Kung to move forward, and after a few moments of hesitation he walked with Lord Elgin to the edge of the steps. Prince Gong was apparently adjusting to a new etiquette that he had never before performed. Witnessing the entire procedure, Loch enthusiastically claimed, Thus was happily concluded an event which was the commencement of a new era, not only in the history of the Empire of China, but of the world, by the introduction of four hundred millions of the human race into the family of civilized nations.⁶³ Like George Thomas Staunton’s, Loch’s judgment on civilization was thoroughly Eurocentric.
Loch was correct in asserting that China had entered a new era. In January 1861 the Qing court established a temporary office in charge of affairs concerning all countries (Ch., Zongli geguo shiwu yamen, hereafter the Zongli Yamen) under Prince Gong’s supervision. The Yamen was responsible for China’s foreign relations only with Britain, France, the United States, Russia, and other treaty nations, not with Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Vietnam, and other outer fan, whose contacts with Beijing were still under the auspices of the Ministry of Rites. The new institution was designed with the goal of expediency to meet challenges in a time of crisis, and it was modeled on the Grand Council.⁶⁴ The officials who served in the Yamen did so only on a part-time basis. The official tablet hanging at the main entrance of the institution read, Goodness and happiness between the center and the outside (Ch., Zhong Wai tifu), highlighting the key Confucian doctrine of the mean. More importantly, the Yamen was deemed an imitation of the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations and was consequently categorized as part of the established Zongfan system. According to the court’s plan, once the momentary crisis had passed, foreign affairs would revert to the management of the Ministry of Rites as usual, for the sake of "cherishing the outer fan ."⁶⁵
Yet like the Grand Council, the Zongli Yamen continued to serve the court after the crisis, and in 1901 it became the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ch., Waiwu bu). The Yamen survived primarily because China’s treaty partners always treated it as a ministry of foreign affairs at which Western diplomats could apply the concepts of international law to their negotiations with the Chinese side; still, the diplomats were not blind to the fact that the Yamen was different from a ministry of foreign affairs in the Western sense.⁶⁶ Beijing also realized that it was impossible to disband the Zongli Yamen, in particular after March 1861, when the French, British, Russian, and American ministers arrived in Beijing and established their offices next to the Forbidden City. In response, Beijing quickly organized a diplomatic network from the top down by appointing superintendents of trade for Tianjin and Shanghai. So began a new era.
As noted earlier, these institutional changes to the Zongfan framework affected only those parts that governed relations with treaty nations; beyond those, the Zongfan system stood unchanged. As ever, Chosŏn played an exemplary role in maintaining the Qing’s superiority within this established system. After learning from the 1860 annual tributary mission to Beijing that the emperor had moved to Rehe, the king of Chosŏn immediately sent a special mission to China with the aim of visiting the emperor at Rehe and demonstrating to him Chosŏn’s concern as a loyal subordinate of the imperial dynasty. In early 1861 the Korean emissaries reached postwar Beijing, bearing various tributes. The Ministry of Rites asked the emperor whether the emissaries should visit Rehe, following the
precedents of Annam’s mission in 1790, Lanchang’s and Burma’s missions in 1795, and Annam’s mission in 1803. The emperor responded that there was no need for the Korean emissaries to travel to Rehe, but he instructed the ministry to follow convention by treating the emissaries to banquets and endowing them and the king with generous gifts in order to show his "ultimate kindness of cherishing the fan in a favored way."⁶⁷
In fact, between November 1858 and May 1861, Chosŏn dispatched five tributary missions to Beijing in spite of the war in China. In the early 1790s, Chosŏn and British emissaries had convened in Rehe and Beijing as representatives of two outer fan—both of them nations of barbarians in the Qing’s eyes. But whereas the British emissaries had violently changed their status in the Chinese world by the early 1860s by entering Beijing under the cover of cannons, their Korean counterparts continued to approach the imperial capital with humble palace memorials and tributes. Although the Korean emissaries also pursued the secret mission of obtaining intelligence in China in order to enable the Korean court to assess the situation there, their frequent presence in Beijing provided the Qing with a steady stream of resources to maintain its conventional ritual code, politico-cultural hierarchy, and imperial norms, which were under fire from the British and the French. However, the Korean emissaries never again saw the Xianfeng emperor, who died in Rehe in August and became the last emperor who refused to allow the Western barbarians to stand before him without kowtowing.⁶⁸
It was not until 1873 that Xianfeng’s son, Tongzhi, gave foreign ministers their first imperial audience at which the ministers did not kowtow. The audience took place at the Purple Light Pavilion (Ch., Ziguang ge) in the Forbidden City, the same venue at which the Qing emperor had met with emissaries of China’s outer fan since 1761—the year in which the Qing institutionalized the status of all other countries within its own imperial norms, as described in chapter 2. In 1873 the pavilion no longer witnessed the ritual of kowtow, but the politico-cultural significance of the imperial audience in that location remained essentially the same. Interestingly, and ironically, since 1949 the state leaders of the People’s Republic of China, who converted part of the Qing imperial palace into their living quarters and political headquarters, have used the pavilion to meet with foreign guests from other, equal states of the world—if no longer in the sense of all-under-Heaven.
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3 JUSTIFYING THE CIVILIZED The Qing’s Contacts with Chosŏn, Annam, and Britain, 1762–1861 As Chosŏn carefully maintained its political subordination to the Qing on the surface, and the Manchu ruling house used this submission to reinforce the Qing’s centrality and Chineseness, Chosŏn simultaneously constructed its own Chineseness within its borders by depicting the Qing as barbarians in particular mo- ments. The civilized–barbarian discourse pervaded Chosŏn, nourishing a strong pro-Ming and anti-Qing attitude among the educated in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century. Chosŏn entered the contest for civilized status in a cultural sense, and its perennial missions to the Qing served this domestic construc- tion of identity. As the Qing was proclaiming Chineseness in the post-Ming era, Chosŏn, too, sought to establish itself as the exclusive legitimate successor to the Ming. In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, a group of Korean scholars who observed the Qing’s prosperity and the economic gap between the Qing and Chosŏn dared to voice their support for the Qing’s claim to civilized status. Their arguments counterbalanced the prevalent anti-Qing attitude among Korean scholars and helped Chosŏn cope with the paradox of the civilized–barbarian discourse in a practical sense. This chapter examines the interior aspects and function of the Zongfan order by showing how the Qing’s rule of “cherishing the men from afar” operated in the ritual protocol and presentations of diplomatic missions between the Qing, Chosŏn, and other countries from 1762 to 1861. The chapter discusses several cases of emissary exchanges between the Qing and Chosŏn against the background of the sharp reversal of the civilized–barbarian discourse that both sides exploited intensively for their own domestic politico-cultural legitimacy. It suggests that the Qing eventually prevailed over Chosŏn. By introducing Annam’s and Britain’s missions to China as a point of comparison for those from Chosŏn, the chapter further explores how the Manchu ruling house navigated the balance between the Chinese rhetoric commensurate with China’s claimed preeminence in the cosmopolitan world and the practical consequences of this superiority in bilateral com- munications. This balance illustrates the Qing state-craft and helps explain why, in the second half of the nineteenth century, both the Qing and Chosŏn, along with Vietnam and Ryukyu, encountered such tremendous difficulty in defining the nature of their relationship in accordance with the newly imported international law, a topic examined in part 2 of this book. Historical Memory of the Civilized: Chosŏn’s Anti-Manchu Mentality The Perception of a Barbarous Qing within Little China after 1644 With the irreversible downfall of the Ming in 1644, Chosŏn intensified its efforts to identify itself as the exclusive and genuine heir to Chinese civilization. In their daily training and practices, Korean intellectuals who were followers of Neo-Confucianism shared a consensus that the Manchu conquest of China proper in 1644 marked the “fall of the central civilized country” (K., Chunghwa hamnak).¹ In Chosŏn, numerous scholars used the regnal title of the last emperor of the Ming, Chongzhen, to date their personal letters and domestic documents. Their attitude was consolidated in the “Little China” discourse that emphasized the succes- sion of Confucian orthodox legitimacy (K., tot’ong) instead of denying explicitly that the Qing possessed political orthodox legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom. Thus, within its borders Chosŏn presented itself as the successor to Confucius, Mencius, and Zhu Xi after the demise of the Ming. On the Qing side, Chosŏn’s status as Little China was widely accepted by both ethnic Han and Manchu scholars. The Chinese officials and intelligentsia did not treat their Korean counterparts as barbarians, as they did many Europeans. On occasion, the Qing court explicitly appraised Chosŏn as “a country of rituals
and literature” (Ch., wenwu zhi bang; Ma., doro yoso i gurun), a statement also endorsed by many Chinese scholars of the Qing.² Yet when it came to locating Chosŏn within the multilevel structure of all-under-Heaven in the Qing’s political and cultural discourse, Chosŏn was inevitably designated a country of barbar- ians on China’s periphery. As this chapter shows, Korean scholars who visited Beijing had to face the challenge of reconciling their country’s putative barbarity with their conviction in its superior cultural pedigree. In late seventeenth-century Chosŏn, in particular during the reigns of King Hyojong and King Hyŏngjong, anti-Qing sentiment was widespread among intel- lectuals. Song Si-yŏl (1607–89), a leading scholar and King Hyojong’s mentor, zealously proposed a northern expedition (K., bukpŏl) against the Manchus in order to “recover the central plain” on behalf of the Ming.³ Song’s plan was never put into practice, but it won strong moral support from the court and from Confucian scholars and contributed to the rise of a Korean national identity in the post-Ming period when the country was struggling for a new episteme.⁴ Another scholar, Sin Yu-han (1681–1752), in a letter to a friend who was about to visit Beijing as a member of a tributary mission, claimed that “we are also Chinese” (K., uri yŏk Chunggukin) and that Chosŏn was “China”—a “China with Classic of Poetry and Book of Documents ” (K., sisŏ Chungguk) and a “China with [Chinese-style] clothes and belts” (K., ŭidae Chungguk). Sin went on to claim that since the fall of the Ming in 1644 China had not had a Son of Heaven, implying that political orthodox legitimacy also lay in Chosŏn, the successor to Kija (Jizi).⁵ The cases of Song and Sin reveal a pronounced victim mentality within the Korean ruling house and intellectual stratum after the humiliating Manchu invasions and the fall of the Ming. Highlighting Korea’s filial duty to the deposed Ming became an ideological tool to maintain Chosŏn’s domestic order and raise the morale of the learned class. On the one hand, the king presented himself as a loyal subordinate of the Qing for the sake of the political orthodox legitimacy grant- ed by the Qing; but on the other hand, he was the moral sponsor of the anti-Qing movement inside Chosŏn, seeking to capture the political orthodox legitimacy embedded in the connection between his rulership and his subjects. Like the Qing emperors, the Korean kings had to deal with grave challenges arising from the framework of the civilized–barbarian discourse. Against the background of this volatile balance, Chosŏn entered a more radical period of actively commemorating the “imperial Ming” during the reign of King Sukchong, when the Qing’s control over Chosŏn was loosened as the Kangxi emperor was preoccupied with suppressing the revolt of the Three Feudatories in the 1680s. In April 1704, on the sixtieth anniversary of Emperor Chongzhen’s suicide, the king established an altar near the palace in Hansŏng and performed a new ceremony to commemorate Chongzhen. Although it was the forty-third year of Kangxi, the king called the moment the “seventy-seventh year of Chongzhen,” setting the starting year to 1628, when Chongzhen ascended the throne. The king declared that the “imperial Ming” was the “owner of the civilized and the barbar- ians” (K., Hwa–I ju) but that the “northern barbarians”—that is, the Manchus—had taken the opportunity to “occupy our central plain” (K., kŏ a chungwŏn), with the result that the “rituals and clothes” (K., yeak ŭigwan)—the traditional metaphor for civilization—had become barbarous. Chosŏn, the king claimed, was the only place that still loyally worshipped the “old motherland” (K., koguk). Reciting these words at the ceremony, the king burst into tears. All of the officials around him wept too. Soon thereafter, in October of the same year, the king had a long discussion with several ministers about building a temple to Wanli, the Ming emperor who saved Chosŏn from the Japanese invasion in the 1590s. The ministers endorsed the king’s pro-Ming attitude but pointed out that it was inappropriate for a “vas- sal” to offer sacrifices to the “Son of Heaven,” so the king instead constructed a nine-floor altar and named it the Great Altar for Gratitude (K., Taebodan), where a state ceremony would be performed twice a year, in spring and autumn. The altar was completed in January 1705.⁶ Thereafter, Chosŏn continued to commemorate the Ming for another 190 years until 1895, when it declared independence from the Qing. The altar was permanently closed in 1908, three years after Chosŏn
became a protectorate of Japan and two years before it was annexed by Japan. Korean emissaries to Beijing continuously fed the popular antipathy toward the Qing in Chosŏn by providing firsthand accounts of their dealings with the bar- barous usurpers of the Ming. For these emissaries, the trip to Beijing was a journey for mourning the Ming, deprecating the Qing, and strengthening Chosŏn’s identity as Little China. As they reached various landmarks—the Yalu River, Fenghuang Gate, Liaoyang, the Korean compound in Mukden where Crown Prince So- hyŏn had been detained between 1637 and 1644, Shanhai Pass, and the Forbidden City in Beijing, where the Ming emperors had resided for centuries—the emis- saries often wrote poems lamenting the fall of the Ming. These poems became part of their journals, which were widely circulated in Chosŏn and were generically known as Yŏnhaengnok (The records of the journey to Beijing).⁷ From the second half of the eighteenth century, however, some Korean intellectuals, having witnessed the Qing’s prosperity on their journeys to Beijing and having engaged in extensive conversations with Han Chinese and Manchu scholars in Beijing, started to reconsider their entrenched view of the barbarous Qing. Disillusioned with Chosŏn’s self-proclaimed cultural superiority, these pundits recognized the Qing as a civilized country and called for Chosŏn to learn from Qing China for its own good, beyond the popular doctrine of “revering China and expelling the barbarians.” These scholars constituted the School of Northern Learning (K., Pukhak p’ae), focusing on “practical knowledge” (K., Sirhak). They successfully resumed contacts between the literati of Korea and those of China that had been suspended for more than 120 years since 1644. Among these scholars, three in particular stood out: Hong Tae-yong, Pak Che-ka (1750–1805), and Pak Chi-wŏn (1737–1805). Honoring the Great Ming: Hong Tae-yong’s Perception of the Qing Hong Tae-yong was born in Hansŏng in 1731 into Chosŏn’s ruling gentry and the hereditary class of yangban (lit. “two branches [of the ruling class]”), and he studied with Kim Wŏn-haeng (1702–72), a leading scholar of the time. In late 1765, when his uncle was appointed the secretary of the annual tributary mission to Beijing, Hong became affiliated with the mission as an officer of the emissaries’ junior relatives (K., chaje gungwan).⁸ Although Hong regarded the Qing as a bar- barous country, he was excited about the trip and was eager to exchange ideas with his Chinese counterparts. After arriving in Beijing in early 1766, Hong put al- most all his time and energy into getting to know Chinese scholars, mainly through written conversations (K., p’iltam, “conversing by writing Chinese char- acters”). These dialogues led him to conclude that the Qing, no matter how barbarous in Chosŏn’s eyes, was indeed the civilized Middle Kingdom, whereas Chosŏn, no matter how superior in its own mind, nonetheless fell into the category of barbarians. Hong, like other Koreans, was extremely proud of Chosŏn’s fashion of Ming-style clothes and hats and disparaged the Manchu hairstyle and robes. His choice of dress signaled that he maintained the true way of Chinese culture. In his conversations with Chinese intellectuals in the first weeks of his stay in Beijing, Hong frequently used his clothing to highlight Chosŏn’s cultural superiority over the Qing.⁹ Shortly thereafter, however, Hong entered into dialogue with other Chinese intellectuals, in particular Yan Cheng and Pan Tingyun (1743–?), and these highly trained scholars dramatically changed his view of the Qing. Yan and Pan, both Han Chinese, were from Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province, where they had successfully passed the imperial civil-service examinations and won the title of Juren (a qualified graduate at the provincial level). They were determined to pass the last round of imperial exams in Beijing to realize their dream of serving their country as officials. To enhance their communications with Hong, they shared with him their provincial exam essays. In the first conversation among Hong, Yan, Pan, and their Korean and Chinese peers, another Korean, Kim P’yŏng-jung, asked Pan why he had said in his exam essay that people should worship only the Zhou Dynasty—a statement that, Kim felt, could be seen as an expression of nostalgia for the deposed Ming and as an act of defiance against the Manchus. Pan explained that his words referred to the “central civilized country,” which was the “patriarch for myriad countries” (Ch., wanguo suozong), and
he emphasized that the current Son of Heaven, the Qianlong emperor, was so great that all subjects should show him obedience and respect. Worshipping the Zhou, Pan concluded, was akin to worshipping the current dynasty. Hong, for the first time in his life, heard the Qing called the central civilized country. Seeing Pan’s response as a consequence of the sensitive Manchu–Han Chinese ethnic relationship, Hong disregarded his claim and instead responded by highlighting Chosŏn’s identity as Little China. But by the end of the conversation, the two sides had found common ground in celebrating the Qing conceit that “all-under- Heav- is one unified family” (Ch., tianxia yijia).¹⁰ Hong did not reveal his sense of cultural superiority until his second conversation with Yan and Pan at the Korean residence. The conversation included a long discussion about clothes and hats, in which the Korean hosts and the Chinese guests articulated their respective understandings of the Ming-Qing transition and the Qing’s position in Chinese history. Hong emphasized several times that Koreans wore Ming-style garments, which in China by this time were worn only on the opera stage. Hong indicated that the garments served as a visible reminder of the “dignified manner of Han Chinese officials” (Ch., hanguan weiyi). The Ko- rean hosts asked Pan and Yan critical questions regarding the Manchu hair-style, clothes, and hats, and about the Ming’s stories. Pan, who was in charge of recording the conversation, answered their questions carefully and praised the Qing volubly.¹¹ Pan later became an official in Beijing and never gave Hong the copies of their correspondence that Hong had requested after returning to Hansŏng, although the two maintained a good relationship.¹² In another long conversation with Yan, Hong again used Chosŏn’s style of dress to criticize the Qing and mourn the Ming. Hong told Yan he felt extremely sad that China had lost itself with its adoption of Manchu fashions in hair and clothes and that China’s situation was in his view even worse than it had been under the Jin and Yuan Dynasties. In comparison, Hong proudly noted Chosŏn’s loyalty to the Ming, which he called the “parent nation.” Yan, however, argued that in 1644 the Qing had legitimately become the ruler of the country by defeating the rebels and defending and enacting justice. At the end of the conversation, Hong acknowledged that whereas the Ming had exploited his country, the Qing was much more generous toward Chosŏn.¹³ Hong realized that Han Chinese scholars identified the Qing both as a legitimate successor to the Ming in the political sense and as a legitimate heir to Confucianism in the cultural sense. Although the Han Chinese had adopted the Manchu queue and clothes, Hong concluded, they were still the “offspring of the old home of the central civilized country” (K., Chunghwa koga chi ye). By contrast, Hong conceded that although Koreans took pride in their Ming-style dress, on a fundamental level they still belonged to the “barbarians by the sea.” By arguing that “the civilized and the barbarians are the same,” he acknowledged the Qing’s civilized status.¹⁴ Hong returned to Chosŏn with a new perception of Qing China, and he made an immense contribution to the School of Northern Learning. Learning from the North: The Korean Visitors’ New Tone toward the Qing Revisiting the Civilized–Barbarian Discourse: Pak Che-ka’s Visit to Beijing After Hong returned to Hansŏng in 1766, his strong relationships with Pan, Yan, and other Chinese friends, and his continuous correspondence with them, swiftly became legend among his fellow scholars in Chosŏn. One of them was Pak Che-ka, born in 1750 in Hansŏng, where his father served as a minister at the court. Because his mother was a concubine, Pak was not allowed to take the civil-service examinations, but he won fame as a poet when he was young and joined a wide aristocratic and intellectual social network, through which he became acquainted with Hong. Pak was fascinated by the contacts between Hong and Chinese scholars and hoped to visit Beijing himself. His opportunity came in the spring of 1778, when the emissary Ch’ae Che-gong (1720–99) invited Pak and another fa- mous young scholar, Yi Tŏng-mu (1741–93), to join him on a tributary mission to Beijing. This trip helped transform Pak into a leading proponent of Sirhak—“practical knowledge.”
In Beijing Pak exchanged poems or conducted written conversations with more than fifty famous Han Chinese and Manchu scholars, almost all of them high- ranking officials at court, including Ji Yun (1724–1805), Pan Tingyun, Tiyeboo (1752–1824), and Fengšen Yendehe (1775–1810). He also conversed with a Muslim prince from Central Asia. After returning to Chosŏn, he spent three months composing a treatise entitled “Discussions on Northern Learning” (K., Pukhak ŭi), in which he discussed what Chosŏn could learn from the Qing in matters ranging from the construction of bridges, roads, ships, and cities to the production of porcelain, paper, bows, and brushes, as well as language and medicine.¹⁵ On each of these matters and many others, Pak described how advanced the Qing was, then compared it to Chosŏn. He suggested that it was Chosŏn’s self-imposed isolation, informed by the civilized–barbarian discourse, that prevented the country from perceiving the Qing’s accomplishments and embracing the Qing’s sophisticated practical skills. For example, he pointed out that Korean emissaries to Bei- jing did not directly contact local Chinese officials on their journey from Fenghuang Gate to Beijing but rather commissioned Korean interpreters to do so, which caused much inconvenience. Pak passionately urged his fellow scholars to study the Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, and Japanese languages. Proposals such as this one came very close to calling for a comprehensive reform of Chosŏn’s daily practices and statecraft. At the end of his treatise, Pak wrote a short piece under the title “On Worshipping the Zhou” (K., Chonju non), addressing Chosŏn’s understanding of the Qing based on the civilized–barbarian discourse. Pak followed the popular anti-Qing trend in acknowledging that the Qing were among the barbarians, but he critically pointed out that Chosŏn could nonetheless learn from the Qing in many aspects. Otherwise, Pak warned, Chosŏn could neither expel “China’s barbarians” nor transform the “eastern country’s barbarians.” “If we want to expel the barbarians,” Pak stated, “we had better know who the barbarians are first.” Pak stressed that it would not be too late for Chosŏn to seek revenge for the Ming’s demise after first carefully learning from the Qing for twenty years. Pak followed this piece with “Debate on Northern Learning” (K., Pukhak pyŏl), in which he justified his call to learn from the Qing on the basis of Neo-Confucian principles. He divided those Korean scholars who denigrated the Qing while acclaiming Chosŏn into three groups: the “lower savants” (K., hasa), focused on grains and foods; the “middle sa- vants” (K., chongsa), who were concerned with literature; and the “upper savants” (K., sangsa), who concentrated on Neo-Confucian principles. Pak argued that Chosŏn’s perception of Qing China was based on woefully incomplete knowledge of it and that Chosŏn was in fact underdeveloped compared to the prosperous Qing. Citing Zhu Xi, Pak expressed a wish that Chosŏn had more people who truly understood the principles as he did.¹⁶ Pak’s proposal that Chosŏn learn from the Qing before it fought against the Qing bore a striking resemblance to the strategy of “learning the superior techniques of the barbarians to constrain the bar- barians” (Ch., shiyi changji yi zhiyi) put forward by the Chinese scholar Wei Yuan (1794–1857) in the 1840s, although Wei’s “barbarians” referred to Europeans. Pak’s acknowledgment that the Qing was the civilized country disillusioned many of his fellow scholars. For those who had never seen the Qing, Pak described a society prosperous beyond their imaginations. Following Hong, Pak constructed a new image of the Qing, one the upper savants were reluctant to accept. Ch’ae Che-gong, the emissary who had invited Pak to Beijing, was one such upper savant. Ch’ae mourned the fall of the Ming and called the Manchu general of Fenghuang Gate “barbarous.” When he arrived in Beijing and saw the artificial hill next to the Forbidden City on which Chongzhen had committed suicide in 1644, Ch’ae composed a poem commemorating the Ming. He lamented that Chinese children on the street jeered at his Ming-style clothing. After the summer solstice rituals at the Temple of Earth, the Qianlong emperor praised the Korean mission for the best ritual performance among the outer fan. Ch’ae interpreted this as evidence that the Manchu emperor, whom he sometimes referred to as “khan,” tacitly approved of the “Han Chinese clothes and hats” that he and the other Korean visitors wore.¹⁷ When he returned to Chosŏn, Ch’ae collected the poems he had written on the trip into an anthology entitled Records of Enduring Contempt and Insults (K., Ham’in nok). In stark contrast, Korean scholars at the middle and lower levels found Pak’s proposal to “use techniques to benefit peo- ple’s livelihoods” (K., iyong husaeng) very attractive. Seeking to avoid pedanticism, these scholars contributed to the remarkable rise and dissemination of
northern learning. One of them was Pak Chi-wŏn. Reenvisioning the Barbarous Qing: Pak Chi-wŏn’s Trip to Beijing Pak Chi-wŏn was also of an aristocratic yangban background. In 1780, his cousin Pak Myŏng-wŏn (1725–90) was appointed the emissary to Beijing for Emperor Qianlong’s seventieth birthday, providing Pak Chi-wŏn an opportunity for “tourism in the upper country.” Shocked by the Qing’s wealth, evident everywhere from small towns on the Sino-Korean border to the metropolitan areas of Mukden and Beijing, Pak realized that the stereotypical perception of the Qing among the meritocracy of Chosŏn had become an obstacle to progress. Pak found it difficult to overcome the prejudices rooted in the hegemonic assumption of the Qing’s barbarity, although he was deeply influenced by Hong and had an open mind. In his Rehe Diary (K., Yŏlha ilgi), Pak frequently struggled with the moral correctness of the pro-Ming, anti-Qing principles, on the one hand, and his desire to learn from the Qing, on the other. He was uncomfortable, even pained, by any admission of the achievements of the Qing, which implied that the Qing was civilized but Chosŏn was not, just as Pak Che-ka had painfully suggested. Pak Chi-wŏn’s astonishment began on the first day of his journey, when he reached Fenghuang Gate and saw the small town inside the fence. Pak noticed that the houses, walls, doors, and streets of the town were well designed and maintained, and that the town bore no “indication of inferior rural style.” He realized that a scene like this at the “eastern end” of the Qing’s territory could only portend still more prosperous vistas in the inner reaches of the empire. How could the Manchu barbarians manage the land so efficiently, in such an impressive way, and to such a significant degree of control? Pak felt so unsettled that he wanted to return to Hansŏng. He asked his private servant, Chang Bok, “How would it be if you were born in China?” Chang, an illiterate boy, immediately answered, “China is barbarian [K., Chungguk ho ya], so I would not want to be born in China.”¹⁸ The boy’s answer was exactly the reassurance his master needed. It also reflects the prevalence among Koreans of the perception of the Qing as barbarians. Nevertheless, Pak realized that his journey would not be as peaceful as he had wished. Indeed, after he entered Fenghuang Gate, Pak’s preconceptions about the barbarous Qing crumbled a little more each day. As he passed by Liaoyang, Mukden, and many small towns and villages, Pak was confronted by beautiful buildings, thriving markets, and flourishing urban and rural communities where local civil- ians and officials treated him in a friendly manner. He enjoyed written conversations with Han Chinese and Manchu scholars and officials and appreciated local scenery and historical sites. In the course of these experiences, the charge that the Qing was barbarous completely vanished from Pak’s diary. Rather, Pak began to discern a gap between himself and his Chinese counterparts in practical terms that had been caused by Chosŏn’s cultural isolation from the Qing after 1644. His experience in two villages illustrates this point vividly. When Pak visited a pawnshop in a village called Xinmin, he was invited by the owner to write some Chinese characters as an honorable gift. Pak recalled that he had seen four big characters denoting “exceeding frost, surpassing snow” (Ch., qishuang saixue) on the front doors of some shops in Mukden and Liaoyang, so he wrote these down, assuming that they must mean that a businessman’s heart should be as pure as frost and snow. However, the four characters were actually a metaphor for the high quality of flour. The confused shop owner shook his head and murmured that the characters were not at all related to his business. Pak left the store in anger. The next day, when he camped at Xiaoheishan Village, he wrote the same four characters for a jewelry shop owner. Just as puzzled as the Xin- min merchant had been, the jeweler said, “I am selling women’s jewelry, not flour, so why did you write these characters for me?” Pak, suddenly aware of the char- acters’ actual meaning, overcame his embarrassment and calmly wrote other characters that won him high praise from the shop owner.¹⁹ Frustrated by this episode, Pak took a critical look at Chosŏn’s perception of the Qing and put forward the idea of “using techniques to benefit people’s liveli- hoods” by comparing different attitudes toward the Qing among his fellow Korean intellectuals. Like Pak Che-ka, he divided Korean scholars into upper savants, middle savants, and lower savants. He began with a scenario in which Korean people who had never visited the Qing would ask those returning from Beijing
about the impressive things they had observed on their journey. According to Pak, whereas many visitors would list without hesitation such things as the White Pagoda in Liaodong, Chinese markets, and Shanhai Pass, the upper savants would instead insist that “nothing is impressive” because the people in China, from the Son of Heaven to the common subjects, were “barbarians as long as they shaved their foreheads.” Since “barbarians are dogs and sheep,” nothing of theirs was worth praising. The middle savants would also argue that “the mountains and lands became barbarous and nothing over there is impressive until we lead a hundred thousand troops to cross Shanhai Pass to recover China.” Identifying himself as one of the lower savants who shared with the upper and middle savants the belief in “revering China and expelling the barbarians,” Pak nevertheless passionately called on his colleagues to “learn the good ways and useful systems [of the Qing] as long as they benefit our people and country, even if they are created by barbarians.” He argued, “If we want to expel the barbarians, we should learn all the good Chinese systems to change ours, after which we might be able to say that China has nothing impressive.”²⁰ Pak tried to separate recognition of the Qing’s superior practical techniques from the cultural and moral charges against the Qing. Yet this approach, which meant blurring the boundaries between civi- lized and barbarian, was a double-edged sword not only for himself but also for the general moral foundation of his country. On August 30, 1780, when Pak arrived in Beijing, he was stunned by the grandness of the splendid metropolis. In his diary, for the first time, he embraced the Qing regnal title to express the date—“the first day of the eighth month of the forty-fifth year of Qianlong”—thus incorporating himself into the Zongfan mindset by identifying the Qing as the center of the world. On that day, Pak completely overlooked the fact that he was in a country of “barbarians.”²¹ Identifying Chosŏn as a Loyal Subordinate of the Qing: Pak Chi-wŏn at Rehe When Pak Chi-wŏn and his fellow Koreans arrived in Beijing, they learned that the emperor had moved to the summer palace at Rehe, where the sixth Panchen Er- deni (1738–80) and Mongol princes would convene to celebrate the imperial birthday on September 11. On September 2, the emperor instructed the Ministry of Rites to ask the Korean emissaries to visit Rehe and ordered a minister of the Grand Council (Ch., Junjichu) to Beijing to welcome them, an act of “extraordinary imperial benevolence.” The Koreans immediately organized a special ad hoc team to travel to Rehe, to which Pak Chi-wŏn was attached. Five days later, the group arrived at Rehe, where it quickly became involved in subtle conflicts with the Chinese side. The emperor and his officials were keen to showcase Chosŏn’s sub- servience as a model outer fan, but the Koreans were equally keen to avoid this role, given their ambivalence about the Qing. However, Chosŏn’s subordinate position in the bilateral framework meant that the emissaries had few alternatives. The first incident that revealed this tension took place upon the emissaries’ arrival, when the emperor informed the emissaries that they would stand at the end of the right wing of China’s second-rank civil officials during the grand ceremony on the celebration day. This was a “special and unprecedented grace” from the emperor, because the ritual code generally required the emissaries to stand at the end of the left wing of civil officials. The ministers of the Ministry of Rites asked the emissaries to submit a memorial showing their sincere appreciation. The emissaries hesitated, as it would have been inappropriate to do so without the king’s authorization, but the ministers pushed them to draft the memorial. Pak commented that as the aged emperor became more suspicious, the ministers had to work harder to meet his wishes.²² On a subsequent occasion, the emperor sent a minister of the Grand Council to inquire whether the two emissaries would like to visit “the saintly monk from the western area” (Ch., xifan shengseng), referring to the Panchen Erdeni. The Koreans replied that they never stopped communicating with “people of China” (K., Chungguk insa), but that they did not dare to communicate with “people of other countries” (K., taguk in). Undeterred, the emperor ordered the emissaries to visit the lama at his monastery. At the monastery, the communications between the Korean emissaries and the Panchen Erdeni followed a labyrinthine path: the Erdeni spoke to the Mongol prince next to him, who relayed the message to the minister of the Grand Council, who forwarded it to the Qing interpreter, who passed it to
the interpreter from Chosŏn, who finally translated the words into Korean for the emissaries. The conversation involved Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, Chinese, and Korean, highlighting the multiethnic and multicultural nature of the unified empire, but the extent to which the Panchen Erdeni and the Korean emissaries could actually understand each other and grasp the political meanings behind the words used remains unclear. Acting on the guidance of the minister of the Grand Council, the emissaries, who were as stiff as “clay dolls and wooden puppets,” presented the Panchen Erdeni with silk handkerchiefs, and the Panchen Er- deni gave the Koreans three small bronze figurines of the Buddha and some Hada, Pulu, and Tibetan incense in return. Since the figurines contravened Confucian beliefs, the emissaries traded them for silver that they then distributed among their servants instead of bringing the figurines back to Chosŏn.²³ Behind the envoys’ reluctance to visit the Panchen Erdeni was the problem of the ritual of kowtow: the Korean emissaries refused to perform the ceremony to the lama. Pak later defended their behavior in a written conversation with a Manchu official: “Our humble country is in the same family with the big country, and there is no difference between inside and outside between us. Yet the lama is a man of the western area, so how could our envoys dare go and visit him? There is a rule that ‘subordinates have no right to conduct diplomacy’ [K., insin mu oegyo].”²⁴ Chosŏn was demonstrating its loyalty as China’s fan and subordinate. The principle that a subordinate country had no right to conduct diplomacy would be emphasized by the king of Chosŏn again and again when Western states tried to open direct lines of contact with Chosŏn between the 1830s and the 1870s. Their overtures created a tremendous and insurmountable dilemma for the scholars of Chosŏn. Although they viewed the Qing as a barbarous place and themselves as the civilized successors of the Ming within a Chosŏn-centric cultural world, as soon as another political entity approached Chosŏn, they would identify the Qing as China and hew to the Qing’s Zongfan line to embrace their unique role as the representatives of the men from afar cherished by China.²⁵ At a banquet held for representatives of the Qing’s subordinates and attended by the Panchen Erdeni, Mongol princes from Mongolia, Muslim princes from Xinjiang, emissaries from Chosŏn, and indigenous chiefs from southwestern China, the emperor lauded Chosŏn’s fealty, declaring to those gathered at the ban- quet that “Chosŏn has been serving as a fan for generations and has always been loyal. It pays its annual tribute on time, and that is truly worth praising.” The em- peror added, “We, the monarch and the subordinates, trust each other fully and belong to the same family inside and outside China, so we should not bother our- selves with these overelaborate rituals.” He then issued an edict according to which Chosŏn needed to present only an annual tribute; all other tributes, along with humble memorials, would be permanently canceled, reflecting the Qing’s policy of “cherishing men from afar with substantial measures rather than rhetoric” (Ch., rouhui yuanren, yishi bu yiwen).²⁶ Again, the Korean emissaries served as the typical men from afar for the purposes of imperial discourse extolling the Qing’s civilization and centrality. After returning home, Pak Chi-wŏn, like Pak Che-ka before him, called on his fellow scholars to learn from the Qing. In 1781 he wrote a foreword to Pak Cheka’s “Discussions on Northern Learning,” in which he reiterated that Chosŏn should abandon its incorrect assumptions about the Qing.²⁷ As other Korean scholars followed in Pak’s footsteps and made their own visits to Beijing, the Koreans’ perceptions about the Ming and the Qing continued to evolve. The Way of the Heavenly Dynasty: The Qing and the Tributary Missions of 1790 and 1793 The Imperial Grand Banquet and the Korean Mission of 1790 The Chosŏn meritocracy increasingly realized that it could not restore the Ming in China, and this recognition helped normalize its service to the Qing under the rubric of “serving the great.” Compared to Pak Che-ka in 1778 and Pak Chi-wŏn in 1780, Sŏ Ho-su (1736–99), who visited Rehe as an associate envoy to celebrate Emperor Qianlong’s eightieth birthday in 1790, described Chosŏn’s Zongfan contacts with the Qing in very moderate terms. The mission, led by envoy Hwang
In-jŏm (?–1802), associate envoy Sŏ, and secretary Yi Paek-hyŏng (1737–?), left Hansŏng on July 9 and two weeks later arrived at Ŭiju, where it could not cross the Yalu River because of flooding. During his sojourn in Ŭiju, Sŏ commented in one of his poems that “the Yalu River is the boundary between the civilized and the barbarians” (K., Hwa–I bungye), but in his diary he used the Qing’s regnal title for the date.²⁸ The Qianlong emperor was concerned about the time it would take for the Koreans to reach the celebration at Rehe. As the representatives of the Qing’s outer and inner fan convened again at Rehe, the emperor saw the attendance of Chosŏn’s emissaries as an indispensable part of the “system,” “way,” or “funda- mentals” (Ch., tizhi) of the big family. On August 1, the Korean emissaries, still in Ŭiju, received an official note from the Ministry of Rites in Beijing via the Manchu general of Mukden. The message had traveled 500 li (about 155 miles) per day, one of the fastest rates possible for the Qing mail system. The ministry in- structed the Koreans to head directly to Rehe, as they needed to arrive by August 19, the same deadline that the emperor had set for the king of Annam and the emissaries of Lanchang and Burma. When the mission crossed the river the next day, a second note from Beijing arrived, urging the envoys to meet the deadline because Chosŏn’s presence was “particularly crucial to the system” (Ch., shu yu tizhi youguan). They subsequently received a third note in a completely different tone, saying that it would be fine if the mission could not reach Rehe in time. The emissaries, perceiving the reversal as a subtle way of cherishing the men from afar, immediately organized a special team that would head directly for Rehe with humble palace memorials and selected tributes, while the rest of the mission would go to Beijing as planned. Covering more than 260 miles after passing Mukden, the emissaries reached Rehe on August 24 and learned that the emperor had changed the date of the grand banquet to August 25 to accommodate Chosŏn’s mission. The Mongol and Muslim princes, the emissaries of Burma and Lanchang, the indigenous chiefs of Taiwan, and the king of Annam had all ar- rived several days earlier.²⁹ The emperor’s decision conveyed eloquently that Chosŏn’s position was irreplaceable in the Qing-centric world. The following day, the Ministry of Rites guided Chosŏn’s emissaries to the imperial palace for an audience with the Qianlong emperor. After asking for the emissaries’ names and ranks, the emperor instructed them to attend the grand banquet and to watch the Peking opera. In further illustration of Chosŏn’s prom- inent status, the Korean emissaries were arranged in first position in the wing of the “emissaries of other countries,” while those of Annam were in second posi- tion, those of Lanchang in third, those of Burma in fourth, and the indigenous chiefs in fifth. In addition, Chosŏn’s well-written humble palace memorials were considered exemplary. Hešen (1750–99), the most influential Manchu minister in the Grand Council, showed one of the Korean memorials to the king of Annam, Nguyễn Huệ, and commented, “Chosŏn serves the great in such a good manner that it is the model for other fan .” The Vietnamese king inspected the memo- rial several times and praised it highly.³⁰ With the move of the grand meeting from Rehe to Beijing in early September, the emissaries of Chosŏn retained their prominent role in all ritual performances in the palaces of Yuan-Ming-Yuan and the Forbidden City. The emperor frequently granted the emissaries audiences, invited them to watch operas, treated them to Manchu banquets, and gave them gifts. On October 11 the Korean mission finally left Beijing for their homeland after a successful stay. Local Banquets and the Vietnamese Mission in 1790 The Qing expected the tributary emissaries from its other fan to accept and follow the imperial etiquette as readily as those from Chosŏn did. Any deviation from the prescribed practices would not only cause conflict between the Qing and the specific fan but also result in internal tension between the Qing monarch and his local officials. Such an instance occurred during the visit to Beijing of the king of Annam, Nguyễn Huệ, in 1790. Annam experienced a turbulent period toward the end of the eighteenth century, and the Qing was drawn into the turmoil. In 1771, in what was called the Tây- so’n Rebellion, Nguyễn Huệ and his two brothers overthrew the Nguyễn family, which controlled the south of Vietnam, and restored the later Lê Dynasty
(1428–1788). In 1788, worried about Nguyễn’s growing power, the young king, Lê Duy Kỳ (1765–93), fled the capital. At Lê’s request, Emperor Qianlong sent troops to Annam, which had been the Qing’s “outer fan for more than one hundred years.” Under the command of the governor-general of Liangguang, Sun Shiyi (1720–96), the Chinese army quickly occupied Hanoi and restored the government of Lê Duy Kỳ. But the Chinese forces were defeated in an unexpected attack by Nguyễn in January 1789, and Lê fled Hanoi again. Emperor Qianlong appointed his favorite Manchu general, Fuk’anggan (1753–96), who had just suppressed a rebellion in Taiwan, to replace Sun and organize a counterattack. However, the emperor was not interested in conquering Vietnam through a large-scale war, and he instructed Fuk’anggan and Sun to be receptive to any attempts by Nguyễn to sue for peace. The emperor reviewed China’s frustrating experience with “con- verting Vietnam into China’s prefectures and counties” (Ch., junxian qi di) in pre-Qing history and stressed that the Qing would not “integrate Annam into China’s map and register” (Ch., shouru bantu) by imitating the case of Xinjiang, where the court had had to dispatch numerous officials to manage the land after the mili- tary conquest, in particular after the war with the Zunghar Mongols.³¹ Qing policymakers thus clearly understood that policies were to be applied flexibly in dif- ferent parts of the Qing frontier. As it turned out, Nguyễn was not ready for another fight with the Qing either, so in the same month he presented Sun with “a humble palace memorial” to express his willingness to become a subordinate of the “Heavenly Dynasty,” marking the end of the conflict on the battlefield. Recognizing the motivation behind Nguyễn’s act of submission to the Qing, Qianlong issued an edict on May 15, declaring that he would not use force against the country for the sake of the “barbarian people of Annam.” Believing that “Heaven has abandoned the Lê,” the emperor settled the Lê family and its loyal fol- lowers in the city of Guilin in Guangxi, a Chinese province bordering Vietnam.³² This arrangement signaled that the Qing was preparing to support a new Viet- namese regime. To that end, the emperor indicated that he might invest Nguyễn as king if Nguyễn visited Beijing in person. This, according to the emperor, was precisely how he managed foreign barbarians—with mercy and discipline. The emperor also confirmed that Lê and his followers would not be sent back to Annam for restoration, and to prove his intentions he ordered them to cut their hair according to the Qing style and to wear Qing clothes. In Guilin, Fuk’anggan and Sun Shiyi told the desperate young king, “You are in the land of the central civilized country [Ch., Zhonghua zhi tu], so you should follow China’s system [Ch., Zhongguo zhi zhi] and change your hairstyle and clothes.”³³ As the manager of communications at the border, Fuk’anggan understood the mood of his aging and vainglorious master in Beijing, so he impressed on the emperor Nguyễn’s willingness to visit Beijing. In August the emperor quickly invested Nguyễn as the new king in order to provide him with the necessary ortho- dox legitimacy to govern and stabilize Annam domestically. In the book of investiture, the emperor emphasized the importance of the principle of “serving the great” on the part of an outer fan and that of “cherishing the small” on the part of China, highlighting the same ideological reciprocity that existed between Chosŏn and the Qing. The emperor took four steps to welcome the new king to Beijing. First, he instructed the Grand Secretariat and the Ministry of Rites to cre- ate new “guest-host rituals” (Ch., binzhu zhi li) between the king and the Qing’s governors-general and governors. He also endowed the king with a golden belt that was reserved for the Qing’s “royal vassals” (Ch., Zongfan).³⁴ Second, he moved the dethroned Lê to Beijing and appointed him a hereditary major in the Han Eight Banners. The 376 followers who had accompanied Lê were registered with the banner household system, and many were moved to Jiangnan, Zhejiang, Sichuan, and other provinces. Third, the emperor allowed the new Nguyễn regime to pick up their Chinese calendar books every year from the governor of Guangxi instead of traveling to Beijing for them. And fourth, he promised to open a border market after Nguyễn had visited Beijing, in recognition of the idea that “the barbarian people of that country are all loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty.” All of these measures were aimed at encouraging Nguyễn’s “sincerity in transforming into a subordinate of the civilized” (Ch., xianghua zhi cheng).³⁵ On May 26, 1790, the king and his mission of 150 members reached the Qing border, where he performed the highest level of kowtow to the imperial edicts and
gifts.³⁶ Fuk’anggan then accompanied Nguyễn to Rehe, passing through Guangxi, Guangdong, Hunan, Jiangxi, Hubei, Henan, and Zhili Provinces. In early June the mission arrived in the port of Guangzhou, and the “Western barbarians” of the Cohongs (referring to local factories through which the Western merchants traded with the Chinese side) gathered to witness the homage paid to the Qing by the king of an outer fan.³⁷ Two months later the Qing court invested Nguyễn’s son as crown prince, and the emperor applauded the father-son relationship between the emperor and Nguyễn. Following the precedents set by his reception of the king of Chosŏn and the Mongol khan of Korcin, the emperor dispatched a minister from the Ministry of Rites to welcome the king to a tea ceremony at Liangx- iang, a few miles south of Beijing. The practice of the policy of cherishing the men from afar went smoothly until a report from Rehe in late July made the emperor uncomfortable. The officials there sent word that they had received an unofficial note (Ch., chuandan) saying that the daily cost of entertaining and accommodating the Vietnamese mission in Jiangxi was around four thousand taels of silver—an astounding sum. The officials were worried that it would be inappropriate for them to host the mission with less luxury once it reached Rehe, but they could only work with the funds they had available. The emperor, too, was shocked by the cost, as he had treated Mongol princes and emissaries of other countries to annual banquets for less than one thousand taels. An expense of 4,000 taels per day meant that the total amount spent on the king and his entourage would reach 0.8 million taels during their two-hundred-day sojourn in China. Believing that this issue “deeply concerned the way of the Heavenly Dynasty,” the emperor lectured his officials that “the great Heavenly Dynasty should not welcome one or two subordinates from the remote lands in a luxurious way.” In addition, said the emperor, if the king were entertained too lavishly in the prov- inces, he would not sufficiently appreciate the imperial grace when treated with less opulence in Rehe. Chosŏn’s missions illustrated the emperor’s point. The Koreans prepared their own meals at each transfer station, but once they arrived in Beijing or Rehe, their daily logistics were entirely taken over by Qing personnel and the emissaries were hosted in a sumptuous manner. This substantial difference in hospitality between the provinces and Beijing created exactly the effect that the emperor sought. The danger posed by the luxurious treatment of Annam’s emissaries along their route lay in its potential to undermine the spectacle of impe- rial generosity that the emperor, informed by the Chosŏn model, wished to present at the mission’s final destination. Thus, the emperor instructed the provincial authorities in Jiangxi, Hubei, Henan, and Zhili to tone down the extravagance of their receptions, as this was the only way that “the mean between abundance and scarcity” (Ch., fengjian shizhong) could be realized. It was the first time in the Qianlong period that the emperor gave orders to temper the level of luxury in enter- taining foreign dignitaries.³⁸ The event created an opportunity for the emperor to discipline his officials. He listed two possible reasons for the astonishing costs: either local officials delib- erately spent too much in order to seek profitable reimbursement from the imperial coffers in the future, or the Chinese escorts extorted too much money from the provinces they passed through. Either possibility could damage the “way of the Heavenly Dynasty.” The emperor ordered governors in Guangdong, Jiangxi, Hubei, Anhui, and Zhili to investigate how the four-thousand-tael figure had come about. None of the officials claimed responsibility, but the emperor insisted that the origin of the unofficial note be identified and suggested it might have come from Zhili. Liang Kentang (1715–1802), the governor-general of Zhili, immedi- ately reported that the note was wrongly printed in his province. The emperor condemned Liang and closed the case, but he did not punish Liang, who was appar- ently the scapegoat of the emperor’s face-saving inquiry.³⁹ When the mission from Annam arrived in Rehe on August 20, 1790, Nguyễn was granted an imperial audience together with the indigenous chiefs of south- western China and Taiwan, the khan of Kazak, the princes of Mongolia and the Muslim tributaries, and the emissaries of Burma and Lanchang. The emperor be- stowed official Qing robes on the king and his followers. On August 25, as described in the previous section, Chosŏn’s bedraggled emissaries reached Rehe, and
all the men from afar could finally convene at the imperial hall for the grand banquet. There and later in Beijing, the envoys from the Qing’s periphery kowtowed to their shared Son of Heaven in China. What Qianlong saw and experienced was indeed a harmonious picture of the Heavenly Dynasty. The Way of the Heavenly Dynasty: The British Mission in 1793 Three years later, the emperor would receive a very different group of men from afar. This mission came from England, known in China as Yingjili. In September 1792 Lord Macartney (1737–1806) left Portsmouth for China to seek greater commercial opportunities in the name of celebrating Qianlong’s birthday. In July 1793 the mission reached Dagu Harbor in Tianjin and was welcomed by Liang Kentang and by Zhengrui, the salt tax commissioner of Changlu. On September 14 Macartney and his assistants, who were called “British tributary emissaries” (Ch., Yingjili guo gongshi), were granted an audience with Qianlong at Rehe, after which the mission was sent back to Guangzhou via the overland route. Scholars have described the visit as an epoch-making collision of two different cultural, social, and imperial systems and as the beginning of the East-West encounter that eventually led to the Opium War of 1839–42.⁴⁰ Rather than reviewing the entire event, which has been well examined, this section focuses on the connection between the British mission and the legacy of Annam’s mission in 1790 against the historical backdrop of the Qing’s institutional barbarianization of all other countries, including Britain. Until 1793 the Qing did not have a clear sense of the British presence in India and failed to connect the British activities on the Tibetan frontier with those in India.⁴¹ The Qing court saw the British embassy of 1793 as a tributary mission from an outer fan, so all bilateral contacts had to be conducted in accordance with imperial codes just like those that applied to Chosŏn, Annam, and Ryukyu. This time, the emperor made a point of instructing his local officials to treat the “for- eign barbarians” of the British tributary mission appropriately “between abundance and scarcity.” Such treatment, said the emperor, would befit “the way” of the “upper country” and ensure that the “men from afar” would not disdain China. Of the officials involved in hosting the mission, Liang Kentang, still smarting from the scandal of the overly extravagant hospitality shown to Annam in 1790, was perhaps the only one who thoroughly understood what the emperor meant. The emperor, too, might have taken the precedent of Annam as a standard for testing his officials. The game between the emperor and his officials was back on. In Au- gust, after learning that Zhejiang, Shandong, and Tianjin had lavished food on the British envoys, the emperor admonished his officials on the proper balance to be observed in welcoming the men from afar. Too little generosity, he explained, might “prevent them from transforming into the civilized,” while too much might “result in their contempt for the way and dignity of the Heavenly Dynasty.” The point was to show “neither inferiority nor superiority” in entertaining, but to “re- main in accord with the way and highlight the act of cherishing.” He reminded Liang several times of this “proper way.”⁴² When the mission reached Rehe on September 8, Macartney and his assistants refused to prostrate themselves before the emperor. The next day the emperor issued an edict to Liang and his colleagues, expressing his disappointment in the British envoys. The edict attributed the envoys’ shocking lack of respect to the extravagant treatment they had received in the provinces, which must have encouraged the barbarians’ arrogance and overshadowed the impression that Rehe ought to have made on them. To remedy the matter and punish the provinces, the emperor ordered that the mission return to Guangdong by the overland route and along interior rivers, and that all accommodations and meals at transfer stations be provided in strict conformity with tributary precedents for “such rude for- eign barbarians.” The emperor further stressed that the hospitality extended to the envoys in Beijing should be moderated in order to highlight the Chinese sys- tem through this punishment and to show the “[appropriate] way to manage an outer fan ” (Ch., jiayu waifan zhi dao).⁴³ From the emperor’s perspective, the ac- commodations and meals were meant to reflect the way of the dynasty, a point the British visitors and many local Chinese officials completely missed. For the emperor, an essential aspect of controlling the envoys of outer fan was the skillful deployment of the bureaucratic apparatus to cherish the men from afar appro- priately.
After negotiations concerning the performance of rituals, the British group—consisting of Macartney; his deputy, George Staunton (1737–1801); Staunton’s twelve-year-old son, George Thomas Staunton (1781–1859); and other members of the mission—was granted an imperial audience at the grand tent on September 14. Instead of kowtowing, the members of the mission knelt down on one knee and bowed their heads nine times. The British performed the same compromise ritual again on September 17, the imperial birthday, and days after that both in Rehe and in Beijing.⁴⁴ Simultaneously, the Manchu and Mongol princes and Burmese emissaries performed the rituals in strict observance of the imperial codes. After the ceremony, the emperor endowed the British mission with many gifts, including Korean clothing that had been piling up in Beijing as a result of Chosŏn’s annual tributes. For their part, the British submitted to the emperor their version of a “humble palace memorial,” which, among other things, asked him to station a permanent representative in Beijing and to begin trading outside Guangzhou. In reply, the emperor issued a long edict to King George III, refusing all of their requests. He ex- plained that no precedents beyond the “established rules” existed, so Britain could not hope to change China’s “way of cherishing the men from afar and the bar- barians in the four directions of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao jiahui yuanren fuyu siyi zhi dao). The emperor explained that he understood that Yingjili was so far from China that it was unfamiliar with the magnificent “way of the Heavenly Dynasty” (Ch., tianchao tizhi), but he stressed that the British could not live and trade in Beijing because “the civilized–barbarian distinction is extremely strict” (Ch., Hua–Yi zhi bian shenyan). The Jesuit missionaries in Beijing, the emperor said, were not allowed to contact Chinese people either.⁴⁵ Macartney failed to obtain any trade concessions and thus shared the fate of his predecessors, James Flint in 1759 and Nicholas Skottowe in 1761. Instead the British embassy’s visit to China, which the Qing considered a tributary mission, strengthened the Qing’s position as the civilized center and reinforced its institutionalized norms regarding its foreign relations. After all, it was Qing China that, as Li Chen observes, “maintained a dominant position in deciding the terms of the Sino-Western economic, cultural, and political relationships.”⁴⁶ The British thus had no effect on the Qing’s worldview. On January 8, 1794, Macartney departed Guangzhou for Calcutta. The next day, three emissaries from Ryukyu were granted an audience with Qianlong in the Forbidden City, where they kowtowed to the emperor as usual. On January 22 the Mongol and Muslim princes and the chieftains of indigenous tribes from southwestern China were granted an imperial audience in which they too kowtowed to the Son of Heaven in the traditional manner. Three days later the Korean emissaries of the annual tributary mission prostrated themselves in front of the emperor. Then came New Year’s Day, and all princes and tributary emissaries convened in the Forbidden City to attend the grand assembly and lavish banquets together with Chinese offi- cials, all performing the highest level of kowtow again.⁴⁷ After the British mission left, then, the Zongfan mechanism between the Qing and its outer fan continued to operate in its accustomed seamless manner. Rebellious Western and Loyal Eastern Barbarians in the 1840s The First Opium War and the Diplomatic Paradox of Qing China Britain did not give up. In 1816 Lord Amherst (1783–1857) visited China as an ambassador. George Thomas Staunton, who had met with Qianlong as part of the Macartney mission and later served as the director of the British East India Company in Guangzhou, acted as Amherst’s deputy. By this time, China was ruled by Qianlong’s son, Jiaqing. When the British mission arrived in Tianjin and contacted local officials, the deputy governor-general of Zhili, Tojin (1755–1835), adopted the tone of the provincial hosts during the Vietnamese mission in 1790 and the British mission in 1793, assuring Jiaqing that he would adhere to precedent and welcome the tributary mission in order to prevent the foreigners from disdaining China. The crisis over kowtow, however, erupted again between the two sides. Because the dispute remained unsettled by the time the mission arrived in Beijing in late
August, the British did not immediately visit the emperor. The emperor read their absence as a sign of British contempt that “China as the common leader under the Heaven” (Ch., Zhongguo wei tianxia gongzhu) could not tolerate. The emperor also did not trust Staunton, saying that the latter should remember what cere- monies he had performed to Qianlong in 1793. In the end, the emperor refused to accept Amherst’s “humble palace memorial,” returned the British “tributes,” and ordered the envoys to be sent back to their homeland with token gifts from China.⁴⁸ The second British mission had also failed. In 1821 Staunton published a translation of the travelogue of Tulišen, the official who had visited Russia as the Qing envoy in 1712. In the preface, Staunton pointed out that the Chinese government followed an “anti-social system” in their intercourse with other nations and that China would consequently “rank very low indeed in the scale of civilized nations.”⁴⁹ Staunton’s ranking of civilization from his Eurocentric point of view served well the British strategy in China at the time. As the British-dominated opium trade reached new heights, the large inflows of opium and the dramatic outflows of silver were creating a financial crisis in China, forcing Beijing to consider banning the opium trade. In April 1840 Staunton, by then a member of the British Parliament, urged his colleagues to use force against China.⁵⁰ The ensuing Opium War between the two countries ended with the conclusion of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, the twenty-second year of Daoguang, Qianlong’s grandson. According to the Treaty of Nanjing and the Supplementary Treaty of Bogue, which was negotiated according to Western norms and signed in 1843, Britain gained the right of extraterritoriality and “most favored nation” status in China. The treaties thus planted the seeds of European imperi- alism in the Chinese world through the emerging treaty port framework. In 1844 the Qing established the position of superintendent of trade for the five ports (Ch., Wukou tongshang dachen) to manage contacts with Britain, France, the United States, and other Western countries. On the surface, the new post moved these treaty nations out of the orbit of the Ministry of Rites and the scope of the Zongfan framework. But the first official to hold the post was Qiying (1787–1858), a Manchu and a signatory of the Treaty of Nanjing who soon after became governor-general of Liangguang, where he was in charge of China’s contacts not only with Western countries in Guangzhou but also with Annam, Siam, and sev- eral other outer fan. This new post was thus added to the established Zongfan system without changing the nature of the system per se. Likewise, nothing really changed in other parts of the Qing periphery after the war. Keeping the West out of the Ritual: Qing Envoys to Chosŏn After Queen Kim of Chosŏn passed away in late 1843, the Daoguang emperor appointed two Manchu officials, Baijun (?–1859) and Hengxing, as envoys to deliver his condolences to Hansŏng. In February 1844 the two envoys left Beijing for Chosŏn with the imperial book of condolences and other items. After crossing Fenghuang Gate and marching toward the Yalu River, they found that the Koreans had set up several shanties to welcome them. In Ŭiju more Korean officials, in- cluding one with the king’s name card, greeted the envoys. On April 7 the envoys arrived in Hongjewŏn, in the suburbs of Hansŏng, where a high-ranking official with the king’s name card and a minister of the Ŭijŏngbu, the Korean cabinet, welcomed them. The grand ceremony was held the next day. In the morning the envoys were escorted to the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country outside the West Gate of the capital. The king came out through the West Gate to receive the imperial edict and returned to his palace first. The envoys were then escorted through the South Gate and dismounted from their horses near a gate to the palace. Baijun was guided by an usher to the grand hall, where he placed the imperial book of condolences and the condolence money on a desk on the east side of the hall and stood next to the desk. The king, at the foot of the steps to the hall, kowtowed to the imperial items and then proceeded to the mourning hall. There the two envoys in turn made offerings to the spirit of the dead. The king led the royal family members into the hall and knelt down in front of the envoys to receive the emperor’s condolences. Following ritual wailing, the last step of the ceremony, the imperial book of condolences was burned.⁵¹
The king then invited the envoys to the grand hall for a tea ceremony, after which the envoys went to their residence, the South Palace Annex. The next day the king visited the envoys to treat them to a tea banquet, and Korean officials visited the envoys to ask them to write Chinese characters, keeping the guests busy. The envoys also distributed 300 taels of silver and 490 felt caps among local servants. On April 12 the king sent off the envoys, giving each a gift of 2,500 taels of silver. After they returned to Beijing, the envoys reported on their mission to the emperor and suggested that the emperor preserve the 5,000 taels of silver in the Ministry of Rites, which could return the silver to Chosŏn through the country’s next mission to Beijing to show the imperial kindness of cherishing the men from afar.⁵² During their three-day sojourn in Hansŏng, the envoys did not talk with the king about any events in China related to the Opium War, the treaties signed with Western countries, or the changes in China’s foreign policies in South China, nor did the king ask about these matters. Their interactions were confined to the performance of minutely prescribed rituals that undergirded the longstanding mutual dependence of their legitimacy as Zhongguo and its outer fan, respec- tively. This primacy of ritual was demonstrated again soon afterward, in 1845. In April 1845 Emperor Daoguang appointed Huashana (1806–59), a Manchu minister of the Ministry of Revenue, and Deshun, an associate general of the Mon- gol Eight Banners, as envoys to Hansŏng to invest a new queen. The envoys arrived in Hansŏng in late May. The king went outside the city to welcome the envoys and the imperial books of investiture, after which the envoys were taken in sedan chairs to the palace, where they alighted in front of the grand hall and carried in the books of investiture. The king entered the hall to receive the imperial books by performing the kowtow. An usher read the books aloud to Chosŏn’s officials outside the hall, and then the king led his officials in three cheers of “Long live the emperor” (Ch., shanhu wansui). After a stay of three days, the envoys left the capital.⁵³ When the envoys reported to Beijing, the emperor asked them about the distance they had traveled, the king’s clothes, and the gifts sent by the king, but no mention was made of Chosŏn’s politics or other domestic Korean issues. For the emperor, the crises and challenges imposed by the war with Britain and the opening of treaty ports in Southeast China were entirely outside the purview of Qing-Chosŏn relations. At the top of the Qing administration, the Sinocentric cos- mopolitan order and the Qing’s identity as the Heavenly Dynasty remained untouched. Chosŏn, the prototypical outer fan, still maintained its loyalty to the Great Qing. Ministers and Emissaries: The British and Korean Missions to Beijing, 1860 and 1861 The Permanent Residence of Western Representatives in Beijing In 1856 the Second Opium War erupted in Guangzhou. The Chinese governor-general and imperial commissioner, Ye Mingchen (1807–59), who was in charge of foreign affairs, was captured in his office in the city in January 1858 by the Anglo-French forces under the leadership of Lord Elgin (1811–63). Part of a family that had enjoyed close contacts with Korean visitors in Beijing, Ye shared with Koreans the discourse of the civilized–barbarian distinction.⁵⁴ He had served in Guangzhou for more than a decade as one of the strongest opponents of allowing British representatives and merchants to move into the walled city. In his last memorial to the Xianfeng emperor before he was captured, Ye analyzed his negotiations with the British, French, and American ministers in Guangzhou and underlined his strategy of “secretly preparing for crises and publicly cherishing the barbarians.”⁵⁵ The Western colonial states’ expansion to East Asia remained incomprehensible to Ye, who still conceptualized all international contacts, including conflicts, skirmishes, and even the ongoing war, within the Zongfan frame- work. The emperor, with no better understanding than Ye, regarded the behavior of the British and French as “rebellion” and emphasized that China’s first imper- ative was to “cherish” these wayward subordinates to “preserve the national polity and refuse their requests.” The rationale was the same as that behind Qian- long’s instructions regarding the Macartney embassy in 1793. Neither the emperor nor his ministers at court nor his governors at the border realized that they
were dealing with several global powers engaging in gunboat diplomacy from Africa to East Asia. The war situation continued to escalate. In April 1858 the British, French, American, and Russian ministers convened in Tianjin and dispatched an ultimatum to Beijing, demanding negotiations with Chinese “plenipotentiaries” (Ch., bianyi xingshi). Among the requests made by these states, such as expanding trade to the Chinese interior and opening more ports, the most offensive to the Qing was the demand to lodge permanent representatives in Beijing, precisely as Macartney had proposed in 1793. The court instructed the governor-general of Zhili, Tan Tingxiang (?–1870), who was negotiating with the European ministers in Tianjin, to clarify that “all contacts between China and foreign countries have always been conducted at the borders, and only countries among China’s subordinates [Ch., shuguo] can visit Beijing to pay tribute [Ch., chaogong]. No commissioner from those countries has ever been allowed to reside in Beijing permanently.” The court also refused to appoint any plenipotentiaries. The emperor argued that his stance was not xenophobic because “China is not afraid of the visit of the barbarians to Beijing, however many people were to come; the problem is that such a visit does not fit the system.” Along the same lines, he refused to allow the American min- ister, William Reed (1806–76), to visit Beijing because “the United States is a friendly country [Ch., yuguo], but the imperial collection of precedents does not record how we should treat a friendly country, so the practice of entertaining might be inappropriate.”⁵⁶ The emperor asked that the ministers return to Guangzhou and discuss such issues as tariffs with the governor-general there, suggesting that the negotiations should be conducted with the superintendent of trade for the five ports at the border rather than in Beijing. The location of the negotiations was an integral aspect of the Sinocentric world order and thus mattered greatly in the eyes of the Qing rulers. The Anglo-French Alliance ignored the emperor’s instructions and occupied the Dagu Forts on May 20, after which they forwarded Tan Tingxiang a note re- questing that the four nations be allowed entry into Tianjin for negotiations with the Chinese plenipotentiaries as well as entry into Beijing, where they would ei- ther pay a visit to the emperor or meet with grand secretaries. On May 28 the emperor appointed the Manchu grand secretary, Guiliang (1785–62), as minister ex- traordinary and the Manchu minister Huashana as plenipotentiary and sent them to Tianjin for negotiations. Huashana, who had served as the deputy of the Son of Heaven on the mission to Chosŏn in 1845, now became a diplomatic representative of the Chinese sovereign who was equal to the monarchs of Britain and France. The emperor particularly instructed Tan to inform the foreign ministers that there was no need for them to visit Beijing. In the meantime, he ordered Prince Sengge Rinchen (1811–65) of the Korcin Mongols to use his Mongol warriors to reinforce the garrison between Tianjin and Beijing. The Sino-British negotiations reached a deadlock over the issue of a permanent representative in Beijing. At court, many high-ranking officials, such as Prince Yi (Dzai Yūwan, 1816–61), firmly refused the Western request to place representatives in Beijing. They suggested instead that Britain could follow the established practice of the “Russian barbarians” (Ch., E yi) and station students rather than commissioners in Beijing. The students would dress in “the clothes and caps of China” (Ch., Zhongguo yiguan), abide by local rules, and refrain from involvement in official affairs. Britain could negotiate with Chinese governors-general and governors over trade affairs at treaty ports. If the British insisted on visiting Beijing, the emperor said that they would have to travel from Shanghai via the over- land route, escorted by Chinese officials, with all accommodations and meals covered by China. They could visit Beijing once every three or five years, not annually.⁵⁷ Not coincidentally, this proposal fit precisely into the existing tributary ritual codes: Beijing was trying to draw Britain into the established Zongfan sys- tem. From 1761 to 1793, then to 1858, the Qing court’s understanding of Britain remained the same because the Qing’s institutionalized Zongfan norms never changed. This ideal model was soon partly—if opaquely—realized in the treaty with the United States, concluded on June 18, 1858, in Tianjin. Article 5 of the treaty regu- lated the visit of the American minister to Beijing in accordance with the specific ritual codes for the Qing’s outer fan.⁵⁸ The regulations specified the frequency of
the Americans’ visits to Beijing, the overland route they were to take from Tianjin to Beijing, their entertainment by local authorities, the requisite written notice to the Ministry of Rites, and especially the size of the mission—twenty members, which was the maximum head count of tributary missions allowed for Ryukyu, Lan- chang, Burma, and the Netherlands. Although the treaty granted the United States the status of a most favored nation, Beijing saw this status simply as a special favor for foreign barbarians, unrelated to China’s statehood and sovereignty. In this sense, the Qing court treated the United States as a tributary state, which the latter, of course, completely failed to realize. Within the domestic Confucianism-centered intellectual framework, neither the Qing ruling house nor the majority of its officials who had passed the imperial civil-service examinations thought beyond the framework of the civilized–barbarian distinction. The new knowledge imported from the West by American and European missionaries who were active in Southeast Asia and South China had not yet had an impact on the Chinese intellectual forces behind the post-Qianlong institutionalized order. On June 23, 1858, the Chinese minister Zhou Zupei (1793– 1867) and thirty of his colleagues submitted memorials against the permanent residence of “barbarous emissaries” in Beijing. Among the “eight evils” of such residence highlighted in Zhou’s memorial was the preaching of the gospel by the foreigners, which would “turn our manner of clothes, caps, rituals, and music into something fit for beasts” (Ch., yiguan liyue zhi zu, yi yu qinshou). He also warned that “if countries such as Chosŏn and Ryukyu, which have been loyal to China for a long time and sincerely send emissaries and pay tribute to the court, saw the disobedience of these barbarians, they, too, would despise the Heavenly Dynasty.” This argument was further underscored by Chen Rui, who emphasized the “fundamental divide between China and the others” (Ch., Zhong Wai zhi dafang).⁵⁹ In terms of their thinking, these officials were no different from Ye Mingchen, who at the time was detained by the British in Calcutta. Despite such keen resistance, Guiliang and Huashana accepted the British-drafted treaty after they realized the situation was beyond China’s control. The treaty with Britain, signed on June 26, allowed Britain to appoint diplomatic agents to the court in Beijing, where they would not kowtow to the emperor. According to article 3, the British ambassador, minister, or other diplomatic agent “shall not be called upon to perform any ceremony derogatory to him as representing the Sovereign of an independent nation, on a footing of equality with that of China. On the other hand, he shall use the same forms of ceremony and respect to His Majesty the Emperor as are employed by the Ambassadors, Ministers, or Diplomatic Agents of Her Majesty toward the Sovereigns of independent and equal European nations.”⁶⁰ In retrospect, this article opened the gates of Beijing to the representatives of Britain and other treaty nations and marked the beginning of the collapse of the centuries-long ritual system and the erosion of the Zongfan infrastructure. Being forced to fundamentally change its time-honored ritual norms, even if only in part, the Great Qing moved toward its eventual transformation from a cosmopolitan empire to a state equal to Britain according to post- Westphalian political and diplomatic norms. Historic though the change was, the Chinese may not have fully understood the treaty’s importance because of linguistic discrepancies. The Chinese version of the treaty, for instance, states that “Britain is a nation of zizhu on a footing of equality with China” (Ch., Yingguo zizhu zhi bang, yu Zhongguo pingdeng). The term zizhu, which meant self-rule or autonomy, was usually used in a Zongfan context. China regarded its outer fan as possessing this right, so it was different from the British understanding of the term “independence.” This divergence would become apparent in the following years, when China and the Western states as well as Japan tried to define the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship and Chosŏn’s international position. The seeds of further conflicts between the norms of the Chi- nese Zongfan system and those of European international law were thus planted directly in these treaties. What further shook the foundation of the civilized–barbarian discourse was article 51 of the Sino-British treaty of 1858, which decreed that the character yi (“bar- barian”) “shall not be applied to the Government or subjects of Her Britannic Majesty in any Chinese official document issued by the Chinese Authorities either in
the Capital or in the Provinces.”⁶¹ Britain and other Western nations that were eligible to invoke the most-favored-nation clause thus broke away legally and in- stitutionally from the category of barbarians in Chinese diplomatic discourse. From then on, in Chinese official narratives the character yi was increasingly re- placed by yang (“overseas,” “foreign”) and the term “barbarians” (Ch., yiren) by “foreigners” (Ch., yangren). This amendment, however, applied only to Western treaty nations that had never occupied an essential position in the Zongfan system. The Qing still consid- ered its major outer fan, such as Chosŏn, Vietnam, and Ryukyu, countries of barbarians. In this sense, the treaty port system, although it was expanding rapidly at the end of the 1850s, merely complicated the Qing’s view of the countries in the “Western Ocean.” In other words, the disintegration of Sinocentrism as a result of the 1858 treaties occurred on the Qing’s intellectual periphery, not at the core of its intellectual and ideological structure as informed and represented by the Qing’s principal outer fan. The ministers of the treaty nations residing in Beijing would soon be confronted with the complexity and perplexity of this distinction. Who Were the Barbarians Now? The British and Korean Missions to Beijing Treaties in hand, the ministers of Britain, France, Russia, and the United States left Tianjin for Shanghai, where they and Chinese representatives signed additional treaties on tariffs. The war would have been over had the British and French ministers in the summer of 1859 followed the Qing’s designated route to enter Beijing after they landed at Tianjin for the ratification of the treaties. But the ministers refused to follow Qing instructions, and their rash entry into the firth of the Beihe River near the Dagu Forts led to Chinese bombardment. The war resumed less than a year after the British Crown imposed direct control over India by nation- alizing the British East India Company in August 1858. Under the leadership of Lord Elgin, who was determined to employ gunboat diplomacy against Beijing, the Anglo-French alliance returned to China in the summer of 1860 and reoccupied the Dagu Forts. There the alliance almost annihilated the Mongol cavalry of Prince Sengge Rinchen with the Armstrong gun, a weapon created by Britain and employed in combat for the first time. The Qing succumbed not only to the joint colo- nialism of the European states but also to revolutionary post–Crimean War European military technology. The alliance occupied Tianjin and marched toward Beijing in late August. Although the Beijing court sent representatives to Tongzhou, near Beijing, for negoti- ations, on September 18 Prince Sengge Rinchen captured Harry Parkes (1828–85), the British commissioner in Guangzhou, as well as Henry Loch (1827–1900), Elgin’s private secretary, and twenty-four British and thirteen French officers and soldiers. Only half of these prisoners of war—including Parkes and Loch— survived and were eventually released on October 8, when the alliance gained control of Beijing’s suburbs and started looting the imperial palace of Yuan-Ming- Yuan. The frightened Son of Heaven, Emperor Xianfeng, had fled to Rehe on September 22 after appointing his younger brother Prince Gong (a.k.a. Prince Kung, 1833–98) as the envoy extraordinary and plenipotentiary to supervise the uncertain peace negotiations. On October 13 the Western forces took over the Anding Gate of the city. The Qing saw this as a more serious threat than it did the ongoing Taiping Rebellion in South China, as the court in Rehe and the caretaker admi- nistration in Beijing were extremely vulnerable to the aggressive European alliance and their powerful cannons positioned on the city’s old walls. From October 12 to 16, the survivors and bodies of the prisoners of war were returned to the alliance. The evident cruelty inflicted on the corpses, mutilated be- yond recognition, shocked Elgin and his fellow commanders. Elgin “at once notified to Prince Kung that he was too horrified by what had occurred to hold further communication with a government guilty of such deeds of treachery and bloodshed, until by some great punishment inflicted upon the Emperor and the gov- erning classes, he had made apparent … the detestation with which the Allies viewed such conduct.” The “great punishment” turned out to be the immolation of Yuan-Ming-Yuan. On October 18, the second day after the alliance buried the former prisoners, flames engulfed the magnificent imperial garden that had been co- designed by European Jesuit missionaries. Loch recorded that “during the whole of Friday the 19th, Yuen-Ming-Yuen was still burning; the clouds of smoke driven by the wind, hung like a vast black pall over Pekin.”⁶² Numerous buildings in which the Qing emperors had given audience to emissaries of its outer fan—once
including Britain and always including Chosŏn—were burned to the ground. On October 20 Prince Gong offered Elgin China’s submission to the alliance’s de- mands. The capital was fully opened to the alliance. Parkes and Loch entered the city the next day and ironically selected the grand hall of the Ministry of Rites as the site for the signing of the convention. Elgin departed for the grand hall on October 24, carried in a sedan chair by sixteen Chinese footmen—an honor previously reserved for the emperor—and accompanied by an escort of more than six hundred men. When the procession reached the hall, according to Loch, Prince Gong “advanced to receive Lord Elgin with an anxious, hesitating salutation,” while the latter “bowed, and at once walked forward to his seat, motioning Prince Kung to take the one on the right.” After they signed the convention, exchanged treaties, and talked briefly about maintaining friendship, “Lord Elgin rose to take leave; Prince Kung accompanied him a short distance, and then stopped; but on Lord Elgin doing so likewise, the principal mandarins in attendance urgently beckoned Prince Kung to move forward, and after a few moments of hesitation he walked with Lord Elgin to the edge of the steps.” Prince Gong was apparently adjusting to a new etiquette that he had never before performed. Witnessing the entire procedure, Loch enthusiastically claimed, “Thus was happily concluded an event which was the commencement of a new era, not only in the history of the Empire of China, but of the world, by the introduction of four hundred millions of the human race into the family of civi- lized nations.”⁶³ Like George Thomas Staunton’s, Loch’s judgment on civilization was thoroughly Eurocentric. Loch was correct in asserting that China had entered a new era. In January 1861 the Qing court established a temporary “office in charge of affairs concerning all countries” (Ch., Zongli geguo shiwu yamen, hereafter “the Zongli Yamen”) under Prince Gong’s supervision. The Yamen was responsible for China’s foreign rela- tions only with Britain, France, the United States, Russia, and other treaty nations, not with Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Vietnam, and other outer fan, whose contacts with Beijing were still under the auspices of the Ministry of Rites. The new institution was designed with the goal of expediency to meet challenges in a time of crisis, and it was modeled on the Grand Council.⁶⁴ The officials who served in the Yamen did so only on a part-time basis. The official tablet hanging at the main en- trance of the institution read, “Goodness and happiness between the center and the outside” (Ch., Zhong Wai tifu), highlighting the key Confucian doctrine of the mean. More importantly, the Yamen was deemed an imitation of the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations and was consequently categorized as part of the established Zongfan system. According to the court’s plan, once the momentary crisis had passed, foreign affairs would revert to the management of the Min- istry of Rites as usual, for the sake of “cherishing the outer fan .”⁶⁵ Yet like the Grand Council, the Zongli Yamen continued to serve the court after the crisis, and in 1901 it became the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ch., Waiwu bu). The Yamen survived primarily because China’s treaty partners always treated it as a ministry of foreign affairs at which Western diplomats could apply the con- cepts of international law to their negotiations with the Chinese side; still, the diplomats were not blind to the fact that the Yamen was different from a ministry of foreign affairs in the Western sense.⁶⁶ Beijing also realized that it was impossible to disband the Zongli Yamen, in particular after March 1861, when the French, British, Russian, and American ministers arrived in Beijing and established their offices next to the Forbidden City. In response, Beijing quickly organized a diplo- matic network from the top down by appointing superintendents of trade for Tianjin and Shanghai. So began a new era. As noted earlier, these institutional changes to the Zongfan framework affected only those parts that governed relations with treaty nations; beyond those, the Zongfan system stood unchanged. As ever, Chosŏn played an exemplary role in maintaining the Qing’s superiority within this established system. After learning from the 1860 annual tributary mission to Beijing that the emperor had moved to Rehe, the king of Chosŏn immediately sent a special mission to China with the aim of visiting the emperor at Rehe and demonstrating to him Chosŏn’s concern as a loyal subordinate of the imperial dynasty. In early 1861 the Korean emis- saries reached postwar Beijing, bearing various tributes. The Ministry of Rites asked the emperor whether the emissaries should visit Rehe, following the
precedents of Annam’s mission in 1790, Lanchang’s and Burma’s missions in 1795, and Annam’s mission in 1803. The emperor responded that there was no need for the Korean emissaries to travel to Rehe, but he instructed the ministry to follow convention by treating the emissaries to banquets and endowing them and the king with generous gifts in order to show his “ultimate kindness of cherishing the fan in a favored way.”⁶⁷ In fact, between November 1858 and May 1861, Chosŏn dispatched five tributary missions to Beijing in spite of the war in China. In the early 1790s, Chosŏn and British emissaries had convened in Rehe and Beijing as representatives of two outer fan—both of them nations of barbarians in the Qing’s eyes. But whereas the British emissaries had violently changed their status in the Chinese world by the early 1860s by entering Beijing under the cover of cannons, their Korean counter- parts continued to approach the imperial capital with humble palace memorials and tributes. Although the Korean emissaries also pursued the secret mission of obtaining intelligence in China in order to enable the Korean court to assess the situation there, their frequent presence in Beijing provided the Qing with a steady stream of resources to maintain its conventional ritual code, politico-cultural hierarchy, and imperial norms, which were under fire from the British and the French. However, the Korean emissaries never again saw the Xianfeng emperor, who died in Rehe in August and became the last emperor who refused to allow the Western barbarians to stand before him without kowtowing.⁶⁸ It was not until 1873 that Xianfeng’s son, Tongzhi, gave foreign ministers their first imperial audience at which the ministers did not kowtow. The audience took place at the Purple Light Pavilion (Ch., Ziguang ge) in the Forbidden City, the same venue at which the Qing emperor had met with emissaries of China’s outer fan since 1761—the year in which the Qing institutionalized the status of all other countries within its own imperial norms, as described in chapter 2. In 1873 the pavil- ion no longer witnessed the ritual of kowtow, but the politico-cultural significance of the imperial audience in that location remained essentially the same. Inter- estingly, and ironically, since 1949 the state leaders of the People’s Republic of China, who converted part of the Qing imperial palace into their living quarters and political headquarters, have used the pavilion to meet with foreign guests from other, equal states of the world—if no longer in the sense of all-under-Heaven.
3
JUSTIFYING THE CIVILIZED
The Qing’s Contacts with Chosŏn, Annam, and Britain, 1762–1861
As Chosŏn carefully maintained its political subordination to the Qing on the surface, and the Manchu ruling house used this submission to reinforce the Qing’s centrality and Chineseness, Chosŏn simultaneously constructed its own Chineseness within its borders by depicting the Qing as barbarians in particular moments. The civilized–barbarian discourse pervaded Chosŏn, nourishing a strong pro-Ming and anti-Qing attitude among the educated in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century. Chosŏn entered the contest for civilized status in a cultural sense, and its perennial missions to the Qing served this domestic construction of identity. As the Qing was proclaiming Chineseness in the post-Ming era, Chosŏn, too, sought to establish itself as the exclusive legitimate successor to the Ming. In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, a group of Korean scholars who observed the Qing’s prosperity and the economic gap between the Qing and Chosŏn dared to voice their support for the Qing’s claim to civilized status. Their arguments counterbalanced the prevalent anti-Qing attitude among Korean scholars and helped Chosŏn cope with the paradox of the civilized–barbarian discourse in a practical sense.
This chapter examines the interior aspects and function of the Zongfan order by showing how the Qing’s rule of cherishing the men from afar operated in the ritual protocol and presentations of diplomatic missions between the Qing, Chosŏn, and other countries from 1762 to 1861. The chapter discusses several cases of emissary exchanges between the Qing and Chosŏn against the background of the sharp reversal of the civilized–barbarian discourse that both sides exploited intensively for their own domestic politico-cultural legitimacy. It suggests that the Qing eventually prevailed over Chosŏn. By introducing Annam’s and Britain’s missions to China as a point of comparison for those from Chosŏn, the chapter further explores how the Manchu ruling house navigated the balance between the Chinese rhetoric commensurate with China’s claimed preeminence in the cosmopolitan world and the practical consequences of this superiority in bilateral communications. This balance illustrates the Qing state-craft and helps explain why, in the second half of the nineteenth century, both the Qing and Chosŏn, along with Vietnam and Ryukyu, encountered such tremendous difficulty in defining the nature of their relationship in accordance with the newly imported international law, a topic examined in part 2 of this book.
Historical Memory of the Civilized: Chosŏn’s Anti-Manchu Mentality
The Perception of a Barbarous Qing within Little China after 1644
With the irreversible downfall of the Ming in 1644, Chosŏn intensified its efforts to identify itself as the exclusive and genuine heir to Chinese civilization. In their daily training and practices, Korean intellectuals who were followers of Neo-Confucianism shared a consensus that the Manchu conquest of China proper in 1644 marked the fall of the central civilized country (K., Chunghwa hamnak).¹ In Chosŏn, numerous scholars used the regnal title of the last emperor of the Ming, Chongzhen, to date their personal letters and domestic documents. Their attitude was consolidated in the Little China discourse that emphasized the succession of Confucian orthodox legitimacy (K., tot’ong) instead of denying explicitly that the Qing possessed political orthodox legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom. Thus, within its borders Chosŏn presented itself as the successor to Confucius, Mencius, and Zhu Xi after the demise of the Ming.
On the Qing side, Chosŏn’s status as Little China was widely accepted by both ethnic Han and Manchu scholars. The Chinese officials and intelligentsia did not treat their Korean counterparts as barbarians, as they did many Europeans. On occasion, the Qing court explicitly appraised Chosŏn as "a country of rituals
and literature" (Ch., wenwu zhi bang; Ma., doro yoso i gurun), a statement also endorsed by many Chinese scholars of the Qing.² Yet when it came to locating Chosŏn within the multilevel structure of all-under-Heaven in the Qing’s political and cultural discourse, Chosŏn was inevitably designated a country of barbarians on China’s periphery. As this chapter shows, Korean scholars who visited Beijing had to face the challenge of reconciling their country’s putative barbarity with their conviction in its superior cultural pedigree.
In late seventeenth-century Chosŏn, in particular during the reigns of King Hyojong and King Hyŏngjong, anti-Qing sentiment was widespread among intellectuals. Song Si-yŏl (1607–89), a leading scholar and King Hyojong’s mentor, zealously proposed a northern expedition (K., bukpŏl) against the Manchus in order to recover the central plain on behalf of the Ming.³ Song’s plan was never put into practice, but it won strong moral support from the court and from Confucian scholars and contributed to the rise of a Korean national identity in the post-Ming period when the country was struggling for a new episteme.⁴ Another scholar, Sin Yu-han (1681–1752), in a letter to a friend who was about to visit Beijing as a member of a tributary mission, claimed that we are also Chinese (K., uri yŏk Chunggukin) and that Chosŏn was China—a "China with Classic of Poetry and Book of Documents " (K., sisŏ Chungguk) and a China with [Chinese-style] clothes and belts (K., ŭidae Chungguk). Sin went on to claim that since the fall of the Ming in 1644 China had not had a Son of Heaven, implying that political orthodox legitimacy also lay in Chosŏn, the successor to Kija (Jizi).⁵
The cases of Song and Sin reveal a pronounced victim mentality within the Korean ruling house and intellectual stratum after the humiliating Manchu invasions and the fall of the Ming. Highlighting Korea’s filial duty to the deposed Ming became an ideological tool to maintain Chosŏn’s domestic order and raise the morale of the learned class. On the one hand, the king presented himself as a loyal subordinate of the Qing for the sake of the political orthodox legitimacy granted by the Qing; but on the other hand, he was the moral sponsor of the anti-Qing movement inside Chosŏn, seeking to capture the political orthodox legitimacy embedded in the connection between his rulership and his subjects. Like the Qing emperors, the Korean kings had to deal with grave challenges arising from the framework of the civilized–barbarian discourse.
Against the background of this volatile balance, Chosŏn entered a more radical period of actively commemorating the imperial Ming during the reign of King Sukchong, when the Qing’s control over Chosŏn was loosened as the Kangxi emperor was preoccupied with suppressing the revolt of the Three Feudatories in the 1680s. In April 1704, on the sixtieth anniversary of Emperor Chongzhen’s suicide, the king established an altar near the palace in Hansŏng and performed a new ceremony to commemorate Chongzhen. Although it was the forty-third year of Kangxi, the king called the moment the seventy-seventh year of Chongzhen, setting the starting year to 1628, when Chongzhen ascended the throne. The king declared that the imperial Ming was the owner of the civilized and the barbarians (K., Hwa–I ju) but that the northern barbarians—that is, the Manchus—had taken the opportunity to occupy our central plain (K., kŏ a chungwŏn), with the result that the rituals and clothes (K., yeak ŭigwan)—the traditional metaphor for civilization—had become barbarous. Chosŏn, the king claimed, was the only place that still loyally worshipped the old motherland (K., koguk). Reciting these words at the ceremony, the king burst into tears. All of the officials around him wept too.
Soon thereafter, in October of the same year, the king had a long discussion with several ministers about building a temple to Wanli, the Ming emperor who saved Chosŏn from the Japanese invasion in the 1590s. The ministers endorsed the king’s pro-Ming attitude but pointed out that it was inappropriate for a vassal to offer sacrifices to the Son of Heaven, so the king instead constructed a nine-floor altar and named it the Great Altar for Gratitude (K., Taebodan), where a state ceremony would be performed twice a year, in spring and autumn. The altar was completed in January 1705.⁶ Thereafter, Chosŏn continued to commemorate the Ming for another 190 years until 1895, when it declared independence from the Qing. The altar was permanently closed in 1908, three years after Chosŏn
became a protectorate of Japan and two years before it was annexed by Japan.
Korean emissaries to Beijing continuously fed the popular antipathy toward the Qing in Chosŏn by providing firsthand accounts of their dealings with the barbarous usurpers of the Ming. For these emissaries, the trip to Beijing was a journey for mourning the Ming, deprecating the Qing, and strengthening Chosŏn’s identity as Little China. As they reached various landmarks—the Yalu River, Fenghuang Gate, Liaoyang, the Korean compound in Mukden where Crown Prince Sohyŏn had been detained between 1637 and 1644, Shanhai Pass, and the Forbidden City in Beijing, where the Ming emperors had resided for centuries—the emissaries often wrote poems lamenting the fall of the Ming. These poems became part of their journals, which were widely circulated in Chosŏn and were generically known as Yŏnhaengnok (The records of the journey to Beijing).⁷
From the second half of the eighteenth century, however, some Korean intellectuals, having witnessed the Qing’s prosperity on their journeys to Beijing and having engaged in extensive conversations with Han Chinese and Manchu scholars in Beijing, started to reconsider their entrenched view of the barbarous Qing. Disillusioned with Chosŏn’s self-proclaimed cultural superiority, these pundits recognized the Qing as a civilized country and called for Chosŏn to learn from Qing China for its own good, beyond the popular doctrine of revering China and expelling the barbarians. These scholars constituted the School of Northern Learning (K., Pukhak p’ae), focusing on practical knowledge (K., Sirhak). They successfully resumed contacts between the literati of Korea and those of China that had been suspended for more than 120 years since 1644. Among these scholars, three in particular stood out: Hong Tae-yong, Pak Che-ka (1750–1805), and Pak Chi-wŏn (1737–1805).
Honoring the Great Ming: Hong Tae-yong’s Perception of the Qing
Hong Tae-yong was born in Hansŏng in 1731 into Chosŏn’s ruling gentry and the hereditary class of yangban (lit. two branches [of the ruling class]), and he studied with Kim Wŏn-haeng (1702–72), a leading scholar of the time. In late 1765, when his uncle was appointed the secretary of the annual tributary mission to Beijing, Hong became affiliated with the mission as an officer of the emissaries’ junior relatives (K., chaje gungwan).⁸ Although Hong regarded the Qing as a barbarous country, he was excited about the trip and was eager to exchange ideas with his Chinese counterparts. After arriving in Beijing in early 1766, Hong put almost all his time and energy into getting to know Chinese scholars, mainly through written conversations (K., p’iltam, conversing by writing Chinese characters). These dialogues led him to conclude that the Qing, no matter how barbarous in Chosŏn’s eyes, was indeed the civilized Middle Kingdom, whereas Chosŏn, no matter how superior in its own mind, nonetheless fell into the category of barbarians.
Hong, like other Koreans, was extremely proud of Chosŏn’s fashion of Ming-style clothes and hats and disparaged the Manchu hairstyle and robes. His choice of dress signaled that he maintained the true way of Chinese culture. In his conversations with Chinese intellectuals in the first weeks of his stay in Beijing, Hong frequently used his clothing to highlight Chosŏn’s cultural superiority over the Qing.⁹ Shortly thereafter, however, Hong entered into dialogue with other Chinese intellectuals, in particular Yan Cheng and Pan Tingyun (1743–?), and these highly trained scholars dramatically changed his view of the Qing.
Yan and Pan, both Han Chinese, were from Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province, where they had successfully passed the imperial civil-service examinations and won the title of Juren (a qualified graduate at the provincial level). They were determined to pass the last round of imperial exams in Beijing to realize their dream of serving their country as officials. To enhance their communications with Hong, they shared with him their provincial exam essays. In the first conversation among Hong, Yan, Pan, and their Korean and Chinese peers, another Korean, Kim P’yŏng-jung, asked Pan why he had said in his exam essay that people should worship only the Zhou Dynasty—a statement that, Kim felt, could be seen as an expression of nostalgia for the deposed Ming and as an act of defiance against the Manchus. Pan explained that his words referred to the central civilized country, which was the patriarch for myriad countries (Ch., wanguo suozong), and
he emphasized that the current Son of Heaven, the Qianlong emperor, was so great that all subjects should show him obedience and respect. Worshipping the Zhou, Pan concluded, was akin to worshipping the current dynasty. Hong, for the first time in his life, heard the Qing called the central civilized country. Seeing Pan’s response as a consequence of the sensitive Manchu–Han Chinese ethnic relationship, Hong disregarded his claim and instead responded by highlighting Chosŏn’s identity as Little China. But by the end of the conversation, the two sides had found common ground in celebrating the Qing conceit that all-under-Heaven is one unified family (Ch., tianxia yijia).¹⁰
Hong did not reveal his sense of cultural superiority until his second conversation with Yan and Pan at the Korean residence. The conversation included a long discussion about clothes and hats, in which the Korean hosts and the Chinese guests articulated their respective understandings of the Ming-Qing transition and the Qing’s position in Chinese history. Hong emphasized several times that Koreans wore Ming-style garments, which in China by this time were worn only on the opera stage. Hong indicated that the garments served as a visible reminder of the dignified manner of Han Chinese officials (Ch., hanguan weiyi). The Korean hosts asked Pan and Yan critical questions regarding the Manchu hair-style, clothes, and hats, and about the Ming’s stories. Pan, who was in charge of recording the conversation, answered their questions carefully and praised the Qing volubly.¹¹ Pan later became an official in Beijing and never gave Hong the copies of their correspondence that Hong had requested after returning to Hansŏng, although the two maintained a good relationship.¹²
In another long conversation with Yan, Hong again used Chosŏn’s style of dress to criticize the Qing and mourn the Ming. Hong told Yan he felt extremely sad that China had lost itself with its adoption of Manchu fashions in hair and clothes and that China’s situation was in his view even worse than it had been under the Jin and Yuan Dynasties. In comparison, Hong proudly noted Chosŏn’s loyalty to the Ming, which he called the parent nation. Yan, however, argued that in 1644 the Qing had legitimately become the ruler of the country by defeating the rebels and defending and enacting justice. At the end of the conversation, Hong acknowledged that whereas the Ming had exploited his country, the Qing was much more generous toward Chosŏn.¹³ Hong realized that Han Chinese scholars identified the Qing both as a legitimate successor to the Ming in the political sense and as a legitimate heir to Confucianism in the cultural sense. Although the Han Chinese had adopted the Manchu queue and clothes, Hong concluded, they were still the offspring of the old home of the central civilized country (K., Chunghwa koga chi ye). By contrast, Hong conceded that although Koreans took pride in their Ming-style dress, on a fundamental level they still belonged to the barbarians by the sea. By arguing that the civilized and the barbarians are the same, he acknowledged the Qing’s civilized status.¹⁴ Hong returned to Chosŏn with a new perception of Qing China, and he made an immense contribution to the School of Northern Learning.
Learning from the North: The Korean Visitors’ New Tone toward the Qing
Revisiting the Civilized–Barbarian Discourse: Pak Che-ka’s Visit to Beijing
After Hong returned to Hansŏng in 1766, his strong relationships with Pan, Yan, and other Chinese friends, and his continuous correspondence with them, swiftly became legend among his fellow scholars in Chosŏn. One of them was Pak Che-ka, born in 1750 in Hansŏng, where his father served as a minister at the court. Because his mother was a concubine, Pak was not allowed to take the civil-service examinations, but he won fame as a poet when he was young and joined a wide aristocratic and intellectual social network, through which he became acquainted with Hong. Pak was fascinated by the contacts between Hong and Chinese scholars and hoped to visit Beijing himself. His opportunity came in the spring of 1778, when the emissary Ch’ae Che-gong (1720–99) invited Pak and another famous young scholar, Yi Tŏng-mu (1741–93), to join him on a tributary mission to Beijing. This trip helped transform Pak into a leading proponent of Sirhak—practical knowledge.
In Beijing Pak exchanged poems or conducted written conversations with more than fifty famous Han Chinese and Manchu scholars, almost all of them high-ranking officials at court, including Ji Yun (1724–1805), Pan Tingyun, Tiyeboo (1752–1824), and Fengšen Yendehe (1775–1810). He also conversed with a Muslim prince from Central Asia. After returning to Chosŏn, he spent three months composing a treatise entitled Discussions on Northern Learning (K., Pukhak ŭi), in which he discussed what Chosŏn could learn from the Qing in matters ranging from the construction of bridges, roads, ships, and cities to the production of porcelain, paper, bows, and brushes, as well as language and medicine.¹⁵ On each of these matters and many others, Pak described how advanced the Qing was, then compared it to Chosŏn. He suggested that it was Chosŏn’s self-imposed isolation, informed by the civilized–barbarian discourse, that prevented the country from perceiving the Qing’s accomplishments and embracing the Qing’s sophisticated practical skills. For example, he pointed out that Korean emissaries to Beijing did not directly contact local Chinese officials on their journey from Fenghuang Gate to Beijing but rather commissioned Korean interpreters to do so, which caused much inconvenience. Pak passionately urged his fellow scholars to study the Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, and Japanese languages. Proposals such as this one came very close to calling for a comprehensive reform of Chosŏn’s daily practices and statecraft.
At the end of his treatise, Pak wrote a short piece under the title On Worshipping the Zhou (K., Chonju non), addressing Chosŏn’s understanding of the Qing based on the civilized–barbarian discourse. Pak followed the popular anti-Qing trend in acknowledging that the Qing were among the barbarians, but he critically pointed out that Chosŏn could nonetheless learn from the Qing in many aspects. Otherwise, Pak warned, Chosŏn could neither expel China’s barbarians nor transform the eastern country’s barbarians. If we want to expel the barbarians, Pak stated, we had better know who the barbarians are first. Pak stressed that it would not be too late for Chosŏn to seek revenge for the Ming’s demise after first carefully learning from the Qing for twenty years. Pak followed this piece with Debate on Northern Learning (K., Pukhak pyŏl), in which he justified his call to learn from the Qing on the basis of Neo-Confucian principles. He divided those Korean scholars who denigrated the Qing while acclaiming Chosŏn into three groups: the lower savants (K., hasa), focused on grains and foods; the middle savants (K., chongsa), who were concerned with literature; and the upper savants (K., sangsa), who concentrated on Neo-Confucian principles. Pak argued that Chosŏn’s perception of Qing China was based on woefully incomplete knowledge of it and that Chosŏn was in fact underdeveloped compared to the prosperous Qing. Citing Zhu Xi, Pak expressed a wish that Chosŏn had more people who truly understood the principles as he did.¹⁶ Pak’s proposal that Chosŏn learn from the Qing before it fought against the Qing bore a striking resemblance to the strategy of learning the superior techniques of the barbarians to constrain the barbarians (Ch., shiyi changji yi zhiyi) put forward by the Chinese scholar Wei Yuan (1794–1857) in the 1840s, although Wei’s barbarians referred to Europeans.
Pak’s acknowledgment that the Qing was the civilized country disillusioned many of his fellow scholars. For those who had never seen the Qing, Pak described a society prosperous beyond their imaginations. Following Hong, Pak constructed a new image of the Qing, one the upper savants were reluctant to accept. Ch’ae Che-gong, the emissary who had invited Pak to Beijing, was one such upper savant. Ch’ae mourned the fall of the Ming and called the Manchu general of Fenghuang Gate barbarous. When he arrived in Beijing and saw the artificial hill next to the Forbidden City on which Chongzhen had committed suicide in 1644, Ch’ae composed a poem commemorating the Ming. He lamented that Chinese children on the street jeered at his Ming-style clothing. After the summer solstice rituals at the Temple of Earth, the Qianlong emperor praised the Korean mission for the best ritual performance among the outer fan. Ch’ae interpreted this as evidence that the Manchu emperor, whom he sometimes referred to as khan, tacitly approved of the Han Chinese clothes and hats that he and the other Korean visitors wore.¹⁷ When he returned to Chosŏn, Ch’ae collected the poems he had written on the trip into an anthology entitled Records of Enduring Contempt and Insults (K., Ham’in nok). In stark contrast, Korean scholars at the middle and lower levels found Pak’s proposal to use techniques to benefit people’s livelihoods (K., iyong husaeng) very attractive. Seeking to avoid pedanticism, these scholars contributed to the remarkable rise and dissemination of
northern learning. One of them was Pak Chi-wŏn.
Reenvisioning the Barbarous Qing: Pak Chi-wŏn’s Trip to Beijing
Pak Chi-wŏn was also of an aristocratic yangban background. In 1780, his cousin Pak Myŏng-wŏn (1725–90) was appointed the emissary to Beijing for Emperor Qianlong’s seventieth birthday, providing Pak Chi-wŏn an opportunity for tourism in the upper country. Shocked by the Qing’s wealth, evident everywhere from small towns on the Sino-Korean border to the metropolitan areas of Mukden and Beijing, Pak realized that the stereotypical perception of the Qing among the meritocracy of Chosŏn had become an obstacle to progress. Pak found it difficult to overcome the prejudices rooted in the hegemonic assumption of the Qing’s barbarity, although he was deeply influenced by Hong and had an open mind. In his Rehe Diary (K., Yŏlha ilgi), Pak frequently struggled with the moral correctness of the pro-Ming, anti-Qing principles, on the one hand, and his desire to learn from the Qing, on the other. He was uncomfortable, even pained, by any admission of the achievements of the Qing, which implied that the Qing was civilized but Chosŏn was not, just as Pak Che-ka had painfully suggested.
Pak Chi-wŏn’s astonishment began on the first day of his journey, when he reached Fenghuang Gate and saw the small town inside the fence. Pak noticed that the houses, walls, doors, and streets of the town were well designed and maintained, and that the town bore no indication of inferior rural style. He realized that a scene like this at the eastern end of the Qing’s territory could only portend still more prosperous vistas in the inner reaches of the empire. How could the Manchu barbarians manage the land so efficiently, in such an impressive way, and to such a significant degree of control? Pak felt so unsettled that he wanted to return to Hansŏng. He asked his private servant, Chang Bok, How would it be if you were born in China? Chang, an illiterate boy, immediately answered, "China is barbarian [K., Chungguk ho ya], so I would not want to be born in China."¹⁸ The boy’s answer was exactly the reassurance his master needed. It also reflects the prevalence among Koreans of the perception of the Qing as barbarians. Nevertheless, Pak realized that his journey would not be as peaceful as he had wished.
Indeed, after he entered Fenghuang Gate, Pak’s preconceptions about the barbarous Qing crumbled a little more each day. As he passed by Liaoyang, Mukden, and many small towns and villages, Pak was confronted by beautiful buildings, thriving markets, and flourishing urban and rural communities where local civilians and officials treated him in a friendly manner. He enjoyed written conversations with Han Chinese and Manchu scholars and officials and appreciated local scenery and historical sites. In the course of these experiences, the charge that the Qing was barbarous completely vanished from Pak’s diary. Rather, Pak began to discern a gap between himself and his Chinese counterparts in practical terms that had been caused by Chosŏn’s cultural isolation from the Qing after 1644. His experience in two villages illustrates this point vividly.
When Pak visited a pawnshop in a village called Xinmin, he was invited by the owner to write some Chinese characters as an honorable gift. Pak recalled that he had seen four big characters denoting exceeding frost, surpassing snow (Ch., qishuang saixue) on the front doors of some shops in Mukden and Liaoyang, so he wrote these down, assuming that they must mean that a businessman’s heart should be as pure as frost and snow. However, the four characters were actually a metaphor for the high quality of flour. The confused shop owner shook his head and murmured that the characters were not at all related to his business. Pak left the store in anger. The next day, when he camped at Xiaoheishan Village, he wrote the same four characters for a jewelry shop owner. Just as puzzled as the Xinmin merchant had been, the jeweler said, I am selling women’s jewelry, not flour, so why did you write these characters for me? Pak, suddenly aware of the characters’ actual meaning, overcame his embarrassment and calmly wrote other characters that won him high praise from the shop owner.¹⁹
Frustrated by this episode, Pak took a critical look at Chosŏn’s perception of the Qing and put forward the idea of using techniques to benefit people’s livelihoods by comparing different attitudes toward the Qing among his fellow Korean intellectuals. Like Pak Che-ka, he divided Korean scholars into upper savants, middle savants, and lower savants. He began with a scenario in which Korean people who had never visited the Qing would ask those returning from Beijing
about the impressive things they had observed on their journey. According to Pak, whereas many visitors would list without hesitation such things as the White Pagoda in Liaodong, Chinese markets, and Shanhai Pass, the upper savants would instead insist that nothing is impressive because the people in China, from the Son of Heaven to the common subjects, were barbarians as long as they shaved their foreheads. Since barbarians are dogs and sheep, nothing of theirs was worth praising. The middle savants would also argue that the mountains and lands became barbarous and nothing over there is impressive until we lead a hundred thousand troops to cross Shanhai Pass to recover China. Identifying himself as one of the lower savants who shared with the upper and middle savants the belief in revering China and expelling the barbarians, Pak nevertheless passionately called on his colleagues to learn the good ways and useful systems [of the Qing] as long as they benefit our people and country, even if they are created by barbarians. He argued, If we want to expel the barbarians, we should learn all the good Chinese systems to change ours, after which we might be able to say that China has nothing impressive.²⁰ Pak tried to separate recognition of the Qing’s superior practical techniques from the cultural and moral charges against the Qing. Yet this approach, which meant blurring the boundaries between civilized and barbarian, was a double-edged sword not only for himself but also for the general moral foundation of his country.
On August 30, 1780, when Pak arrived in Beijing, he was stunned by the grandness of the splendid metropolis. In his diary, for the first time, he embraced the Qing regnal title to express the date—the first day of the eighth month of the forty-fifth year of Qianlong—thus incorporating himself into the Zongfan mindset by identifying the Qing as the center of the world. On that day, Pak completely overlooked the fact that he was in a country of barbarians.²¹
Identifying Chosŏn as a Loyal Subordinate of the Qing: Pak Chi-wŏn at Rehe
When Pak Chi-wŏn and his fellow Koreans arrived in Beijing, they learned that the emperor had moved to the summer palace at Rehe, where the sixth Panchen Erdeni (1738–80) and Mongol princes would convene to celebrate the imperial birthday on September 11. On September 2, the emperor instructed the Ministry of Rites to ask the Korean emissaries to visit Rehe and ordered a minister of the Grand Council (Ch., Junjichu) to Beijing to welcome them, an act of extraordinary imperial benevolence. The Koreans immediately organized a special ad hoc team to travel to Rehe, to which Pak Chi-wŏn was attached. Five days later, the group arrived at Rehe, where it quickly became involved in subtle conflicts with the Chinese side. The emperor and his officials were keen to showcase Chosŏn’s subservience as a model outer fan, but the Koreans were equally keen to avoid this role, given their ambivalence about the Qing. However, Chosŏn’s subordinate position in the bilateral framework meant that the emissaries had few alternatives.
The first incident that revealed this tension took place upon the emissaries’ arrival, when the emperor informed the emissaries that they would stand at the end of the right wing of China’s second-rank civil officials during the grand ceremony on the celebration day. This was a special and unprecedented grace from the emperor, because the ritual code generally required the emissaries to stand at the end of the left wing of civil officials. The ministers of the Ministry of Rites asked the emissaries to submit a memorial showing their sincere appreciation. The emissaries hesitated, as it would have been inappropriate to do so without the king’s authorization, but the ministers pushed them to draft the memorial. Pak commented that as the aged emperor became more suspicious, the ministers had to work harder to meet his wishes.²²
On a subsequent occasion, the emperor sent a minister of the Grand Council to inquire whether the two emissaries would like to visit the saintly monk from the western area (Ch., xifan shengseng), referring to the Panchen Erdeni. The Koreans replied that they never stopped communicating with people of China (K., Chungguk insa), but that they did not dare to communicate with people of other countries (K., taguk in). Undeterred, the emperor ordered the emissaries to visit the lama at his monastery. At the monastery, the communications between the Korean emissaries and the Panchen Erdeni followed a labyrinthine path: the Erdeni spoke to the Mongol prince next to him, who relayed the message to the minister of the Grand Council, who forwarded it to the Qing interpreter, who passed it to
the interpreter from Chosŏn, who finally translated the words into Korean for the emissaries. The conversation involved Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, Chinese, and Korean, highlighting the multiethnic and multicultural nature of the unified empire, but the extent to which the Panchen Erdeni and the Korean emissaries could actually understand each other and grasp the political meanings behind the words used remains unclear. Acting on the guidance of the minister of the Grand Council, the emissaries, who were as stiff as clay dolls and wooden puppets, presented the Panchen Erdeni with silk handkerchiefs, and the Panchen Erdeni gave the Koreans three small bronze figurines of the Buddha and some Hada, Pulu, and Tibetan incense in return. Since the figurines contravened Confucian beliefs, the emissaries traded them for silver that they then distributed among their servants instead of bringing the figurines back to Chosŏn.²³
Behind the envoys’ reluctance to visit the Panchen Erdeni was the problem of the ritual of kowtow: the Korean emissaries refused to perform the ceremony to the lama. Pak later defended their behavior in a written conversation with a Manchu official: "Our humble country is in the same family with the big country, and there is no difference between inside and outside between us. Yet the lama is a man of the western area, so how could our envoys dare go and visit him? There is a rule that ‘subordinates have no right to conduct diplomacy’ [K., insin mu oegyo]."²⁴ Chosŏn was demonstrating its loyalty as China’s fan and subordinate. The principle that a subordinate country had no right to conduct diplomacy would be emphasized by the king of Chosŏn again and again when Western states tried to open direct lines of contact with Chosŏn between the 1830s and the 1870s. Their overtures created a tremendous and insurmountable dilemma for the scholars of Chosŏn. Although they viewed the Qing as a barbarous place and themselves as the civilized successors of the Ming within a Chosŏn-centric cultural world, as soon as another political entity approached Chosŏn, they would identify the Qing as China and hew to the Qing’s Zongfan line to embrace their unique role as the representatives of the men from afar cherished by China.²⁵
At a banquet held for representatives of the Qing’s subordinates and attended by the Panchen Erdeni, Mongol princes from Mongolia, Muslim princes from Xinjiang, emissaries from Chosŏn, and indigenous chiefs from southwestern China, the emperor lauded Chosŏn’s fealty, declaring to those gathered at the banquet that "Chosŏn has been serving as a fan for generations and has always been loyal. It pays its annual tribute on time, and that is truly worth praising. The emperor added, We, the monarch and the subordinates, trust each other fully and belong to the same family inside and outside China, so we should not bother ourselves with these overelaborate rituals. He then issued an edict according to which Chosŏn needed to present only an annual tribute; all other tributes, along with humble memorials, would be permanently canceled, reflecting the Qing’s policy of cherishing men from afar with substantial measures rather than rhetoric" (Ch., rouhui yuanren, yishi bu yiwen).²⁶ Again, the Korean emissaries served as the typical men from afar for the purposes of imperial discourse extolling the Qing’s civilization and centrality.
After returning home, Pak Chi-wŏn, like Pak Che-ka before him, called on his fellow scholars to learn from the Qing. In 1781 he wrote a foreword to Pak Cheka’s Discussions on Northern Learning, in which he reiterated that Chosŏn should abandon its incorrect assumptions about the Qing.²⁷ As other Korean scholars followed in Pak’s footsteps and made their own visits to Beijing, the Koreans’ perceptions about the Ming and the Qing continued to evolve.
The Way of the Heavenly Dynasty: The Qing and the Tributary Missions of 1790 and 1793
The Imperial Grand Banquet and the Korean Mission of 1790
The Chosŏn meritocracy increasingly realized that it could not restore the Ming in China, and this recognition helped normalize its service to the Qing under the rubric of serving the great. Compared to Pak Che-ka in 1778 and Pak Chi-wŏn in 1780, Sŏ Ho-su (1736–99), who visited Rehe as an associate envoy to celebrate Emperor Qianlong’s eightieth birthday in 1790, described Chosŏn’s Zongfan contacts with the Qing in very moderate terms. The mission, led by envoy Hwang
In-jŏm (?–1802), associate envoy Sŏ, and secretary Yi Paek-hyŏng (1737–?), left Hansŏng on July 9 and two weeks later arrived at Ŭiju, where it could not cross the Yalu River because of flooding. During his sojourn in Ŭiju, Sŏ commented in one of his poems that the Yalu River is the boundary between the civilized and the barbarians (K., Hwa–I bungye), but in his diary he used the Qing’s regnal title for the date.²⁸
The Qianlong emperor was concerned about the time it would take for the Koreans to reach the celebration at Rehe. As the representatives of the Qing’s outer and inner fan convened again at Rehe, the emperor saw the attendance of Chosŏn’s emissaries as an indispensable part of the system, way, or fundamentals (Ch., tizhi) of the big family. On August 1, the Korean emissaries, still in Ŭiju, received an official note from the Ministry of Rites in Beijing via the Manchu general of Mukden. The message had traveled 500 li (about 155 miles) per day, one of the fastest rates possible for the Qing mail system. The ministry instructed the Koreans to head directly to Rehe, as they needed to arrive by August 19, the same deadline that the emperor had set for the king of Annam and the emissaries of Lanchang and Burma. When the mission crossed the river the next day, a second note from Beijing arrived, urging the envoys to meet the deadline because Chosŏn’s presence was particularly crucial to the system (Ch., shu yu tizhi youguan). They subsequently received a third note in a completely different tone, saying that it would be fine if the mission could not reach Rehe in time.
The emissaries, perceiving the reversal as a subtle way of cherishing the men from afar, immediately organized a special team that would head directly for Rehe with humble palace memorials and selected tributes, while the rest of the mission would go to Beijing as planned. Covering more than 260 miles after passing Mukden, the emissaries reached Rehe on August 24 and learned that the emperor had changed the date of the grand banquet to August 25 to accommodate Chosŏn’s mission. The Mongol and Muslim princes, the emissaries of Burma and Lanchang, the indigenous chiefs of Taiwan, and the king of Annam had all arrived several days earlier.²⁹ The emperor’s decision conveyed eloquently that Chosŏn’s position was irreplaceable in the Qing-centric world.
The following day, the Ministry of Rites guided Chosŏn’s emissaries to the imperial palace for an audience with the Qianlong emperor. After asking for the emissaries’ names and ranks, the emperor instructed them to attend the grand banquet and to watch the Peking opera. In further illustration of Chosŏn’s prominent status, the Korean emissaries were arranged in first position in the wing of the emissaries of other countries, while those of Annam were in second position, those of Lanchang in third, those of Burma in fourth, and the indigenous chiefs in fifth. In addition, Chosŏn’s well-written humble palace memorials were considered exemplary. Hešen (1750–99), the most influential Manchu minister in the Grand Council, showed one of the Korean memorials to the king of Annam, Nguyễn Huệ, and commented, "Chosŏn serves the great in such a good manner that it is the model for other fan ." The Vietnamese king inspected the memorial several times and praised it highly.³⁰
With the move of the grand meeting from Rehe to Beijing in early September, the emissaries of Chosŏn retained their prominent role in all ritual performances in the palaces of Yuan-Ming-Yuan and the Forbidden City. The emperor frequently granted the emissaries audiences, invited them to watch operas, treated them to Manchu banquets, and gave them gifts. On October 11 the Korean mission finally left Beijing for their homeland after a successful stay.
Local Banquets and the Vietnamese Mission in 1790
The Qing expected the tributary emissaries from its other fan to accept and follow the imperial etiquette as readily as those from Chosŏn did. Any deviation from the prescribed practices would not only cause conflict between the Qing and the specific fan but also result in internal tension between the Qing monarch and his local officials. Such an instance occurred during the visit to Beijing of the king of Annam, Nguyễn Huệ, in 1790.
Annam experienced a turbulent period toward the end of the eighteenth century, and the Qing was drawn into the turmoil. In 1771, in what was called the Tây-so’n Rebellion, Nguyễn Huệ and his two brothers overthrew the Nguyễn family, which controlled the south of Vietnam, and restored the later Lê Dynasty
(1428–1788). In 1788, worried about Nguyễn’s growing power, the young king, Lê Duy Kỳ (1765–93), fled the capital. At Lê’s request, Emperor Qianlong sent troops to Annam, which had been the Qing’s "outer fan for more than one hundred years. Under the command of the governor-general of Liangguang, Sun Shiyi (1720–96), the Chinese army quickly occupied Hanoi and restored the government of Lê Duy Kỳ. But the Chinese forces were defeated in an unexpected attack by Nguyễn in January 1789, and Lê fled Hanoi again. Emperor Qianlong appointed his favorite Manchu general, Fuk’anggan (1753–96), who had just suppressed a rebellion in Taiwan, to replace Sun and organize a counterattack. However, the emperor was not interested in conquering Vietnam through a large-scale war, and he instructed Fuk’anggan and Sun to be receptive to any attempts by Nguyễn to sue for peace. The emperor reviewed China’s frustrating experience with converting Vietnam into China’s prefectures and counties" (Ch., junxian qi di) in pre-Qing history and stressed that the Qing would not integrate Annam into China’s map and register (Ch., shouru bantu) by imitating the case of Xinjiang, where the court had had to dispatch numerous officials to manage the land after the military conquest, in particular after the war with the Zunghar Mongols.³¹ Qing policymakers thus clearly understood that policies were to be applied flexibly in different parts of the Qing frontier. As it turned out, Nguyễn was not ready for another fight with the Qing either, so in the same month he presented Sun with a humble palace memorial to express his willingness to become a subordinate of the Heavenly Dynasty, marking the end of the conflict on the battlefield.
Recognizing the motivation behind Nguyễn’s act of submission to the Qing, Qianlong issued an edict on May 15, declaring that he would not use force against the country for the sake of the barbarian people of Annam. Believing that Heaven has abandoned the Lê, the emperor settled the Lê family and its loyal followers in the city of Guilin in Guangxi, a Chinese province bordering Vietnam.³² This arrangement signaled that the Qing was preparing to support a new Vietnamese regime. To that end, the emperor indicated that he might invest Nguyễn as king if Nguyễn visited Beijing in person. This, according to the emperor, was precisely how he managed foreign barbarians—with mercy and discipline. The emperor also confirmed that Lê and his followers would not be sent back to Annam for restoration, and to prove his intentions he ordered them to cut their hair according to the Qing style and to wear Qing clothes. In Guilin, Fuk’anggan and Sun Shiyi told the desperate young king, "You are in the land of the central civilized country [Ch., Zhonghua zhi tu], so you should follow China’s system [Ch., Zhongguo zhi zhi] and change your hairstyle and clothes."³³
As the manager of communications at the border, Fuk’anggan understood the mood of his aging and vainglorious master in Beijing, so he impressed on the emperor Nguyễn’s willingness to visit Beijing. In August the emperor quickly invested Nguyễn as the new king in order to provide him with the necessary orthodox legitimacy to govern and stabilize Annam domestically. In the book of investiture, the emperor emphasized the importance of the principle of serving the great on the part of an outer fan and that of cherishing the small on the part of China, highlighting the same ideological reciprocity that existed between Chosŏn and the Qing. The emperor took four steps to welcome the new king to Beijing. First, he instructed the Grand Secretariat and the Ministry of Rites to create new guest-host rituals (Ch., binzhu zhi li) between the king and the Qing’s governors-general and governors. He also endowed the king with a golden belt that was reserved for the Qing’s royal vassals (Ch., Zongfan).³⁴ Second, he moved the dethroned Lê to Beijing and appointed him a hereditary major in the Han Eight Banners. The 376 followers who had accompanied Lê were registered with the banner household system, and many were moved to Jiangnan, Zhejiang, Sichuan, and other provinces. Third, the emperor allowed the new Nguyễn regime to pick up their Chinese calendar books every year from the governor of Guangxi instead of traveling to Beijing for them. And fourth, he promised to open a border market after Nguyễn had visited Beijing, in recognition of the idea that the barbarian people of that country are all loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty. All of these measures were aimed at encouraging Nguyễn’s sincerity in transforming into a subordinate of the civilized (Ch., xianghua zhi cheng).³⁵
On May 26, 1790, the king and his mission of 150 members reached the Qing border, where he performed the highest level of kowtow to the imperial edicts and
gifts.³⁶ Fuk’anggan then accompanied Nguyễn to Rehe, passing through Guangxi, Guangdong, Hunan, Jiangxi, Hubei, Henan, and Zhili Provinces. In early June the mission arrived in the port of Guangzhou, and the Western barbarians of the Cohongs (referring to local factories through which the Western merchants traded with the Chinese side) gathered to witness the homage paid to the Qing by the king of an outer fan.³⁷ Two months later the Qing court invested Nguyễn’s son as crown prince, and the emperor applauded the father-son relationship between the emperor and Nguyễn. Following the precedents set by his reception of the king of Chosŏn and the Mongol khan of Korcin, the emperor dispatched a minister from the Ministry of Rites to welcome the king to a tea ceremony at Liangxiang, a few miles south of Beijing.
The practice of the policy of cherishing the men from afar went smoothly until a report from Rehe in late July made the emperor uncomfortable. The officials there sent word that they had received an unofficial note (Ch., chuandan) saying that the daily cost of entertaining and accommodating the Vietnamese mission in Jiangxi was around four thousand taels of silver—an astounding sum. The officials were worried that it would be inappropriate for them to host the mission with less luxury once it reached Rehe, but they could only work with the funds they had available. The emperor, too, was shocked by the cost, as he had treated Mongol princes and emissaries of other countries to annual banquets for less than one thousand taels. An expense of 4,000 taels per day meant that the total amount spent on the king and his entourage would reach 0.8 million taels during their two-hundred-day sojourn in China.
Believing that this issue deeply concerned the way of the Heavenly Dynasty, the emperor lectured his officials that the great Heavenly Dynasty should not welcome one or two subordinates from the remote lands in a luxurious way. In addition, said the emperor, if the king were entertained too lavishly in the provinces, he would not sufficiently appreciate the imperial grace when treated with less opulence in Rehe. Chosŏn’s missions illustrated the emperor’s point. The Koreans prepared their own meals at each transfer station, but once they arrived in Beijing or Rehe, their daily logistics were entirely taken over by Qing personnel and the emissaries were hosted in a sumptuous manner. This substantial difference in hospitality between the provinces and Beijing created exactly the effect that the emperor sought. The danger posed by the luxurious treatment of Annam’s emissaries along their route lay in its potential to undermine the spectacle of imperial generosity that the emperor, informed by the Chosŏn model, wished to present at the mission’s final destination. Thus, the emperor instructed the provincial authorities in Jiangxi, Hubei, Henan, and Zhili to tone down the extravagance of their receptions, as this was the only way that the mean between abundance and scarcity (Ch., fengjian shizhong) could be realized. It was the first time in the Qianlong period that the emperor gave orders to temper the level of luxury in entertaining foreign dignitaries.³⁸
The event created an opportunity for the emperor to discipline his officials. He listed two possible reasons for the astonishing costs: either local officials deliberately spent too much in order to seek profitable reimbursement from the imperial coffers in the future, or the Chinese escorts extorted too much money from the provinces they passed through. Either possibility could damage the way of the Heavenly Dynasty. The emperor ordered governors in Guangdong, Jiangxi, Hubei, Anhui, and Zhili to investigate how the four-thousand-tael figure had come about. None of the officials claimed responsibility, but the emperor insisted that the origin of the unofficial note be identified and suggested it might have come from Zhili. Liang Kentang (1715–1802), the governor-general of Zhili, immediately reported that the note was wrongly printed in his province. The emperor condemned Liang and closed the case, but he did not punish Liang, who was apparently the scapegoat of the emperor’s face-saving inquiry.³⁹
When the mission from Annam arrived in Rehe on August 20, 1790, Nguyễn was granted an imperial audience together with the indigenous chiefs of southwestern China and Taiwan, the khan of Kazak, the princes of Mongolia and the Muslim tributaries, and the emissaries of Burma and Lanchang. The emperor bestowed official Qing robes on the king and his followers. On August 25, as described in the previous section, Chosŏn’s bedraggled emissaries reached Rehe, and
all the men from afar could finally convene at the imperial hall for the grand banquet. There and later in Beijing, the envoys from the Qing’s periphery kowtowed to their shared Son of Heaven in China. What Qianlong saw and experienced was indeed a harmonious picture of the Heavenly Dynasty.
The Way of the Heavenly Dynasty: The British Mission in 1793
Three years later, the emperor would receive a very different group of men from afar. This mission came from England, known in China as Yingjili. In September 1792 Lord Macartney (1737–1806) left Portsmouth for China to seek greater commercial opportunities in the name of celebrating Qianlong’s birthday. In July 1793 the mission reached Dagu Harbor in Tianjin and was welcomed by Liang Kentang and by Zhengrui, the salt tax commissioner of Changlu. On September 14 Macartney and his assistants, who were called British tributary emissaries (Ch., Yingjili guo gongshi), were granted an audience with Qianlong at Rehe, after which the mission was sent back to Guangzhou via the overland route. Scholars have described the visit as an epoch-making collision of two different cultural, social, and imperial systems and as the beginning of the East-West encounter that eventually led to the Opium War of 1839–42.⁴⁰ Rather than reviewing the entire event, which has been well examined, this section focuses on the connection between the British mission and the legacy of Annam’s mission in 1790 against the historical backdrop of the Qing’s institutional barbarianization of all other countries, including Britain.
Until 1793 the Qing did not have a clear sense of the British presence in India and failed to connect the British activities on the Tibetan frontier with those in India.⁴¹ The Qing court saw the British embassy of 1793 as a tributary mission from an outer fan, so all bilateral contacts had to be conducted in accordance with imperial codes just like those that applied to Chosŏn, Annam, and Ryukyu. This time, the emperor made a point of instructing his local officials to treat the foreign barbarians of the British tributary mission appropriately between abundance and scarcity. Such treatment, said the emperor, would befit the way of the upper country and ensure that the men from afar would not disdain China. Of the officials involved in hosting the mission, Liang Kentang, still smarting from the scandal of the overly extravagant hospitality shown to Annam in 1790, was perhaps the only one who thoroughly understood what the emperor meant. The emperor, too, might have taken the precedent of Annam as a standard for testing his officials. The game between the emperor and his officials was back on. In August, after learning that Zhejiang, Shandong, and Tianjin had lavished food on the British envoys, the emperor admonished his officials on the proper balance to be observed in welcoming the men from afar. Too little generosity, he explained, might prevent them from transforming into the civilized, while too much might result in their contempt for the way and dignity of the Heavenly Dynasty. The point was to show neither inferiority nor superiority in entertaining, but to remain in accord with the way and highlight the act of cherishing. He reminded Liang several times of this proper way.⁴²
When the mission reached Rehe on September 8, Macartney and his assistants refused to prostrate themselves before the emperor. The next day the emperor issued an edict to Liang and his colleagues, expressing his disappointment in the British envoys. The edict attributed the envoys’ shocking lack of respect to the extravagant treatment they had received in the provinces, which must have encouraged the barbarians’ arrogance and overshadowed the impression that Rehe ought to have made on them. To remedy the matter and punish the provinces, the emperor ordered that the mission return to Guangdong by the overland route and along interior rivers, and that all accommodations and meals at transfer stations be provided in strict conformity with tributary precedents for such rude foreign barbarians. The emperor further stressed that the hospitality extended to the envoys in Beijing should be moderated in order to highlight the Chinese system through this punishment and to show the "[appropriate] way to manage an outer fan " (Ch., jiayu waifan zhi dao).⁴³ From the emperor’s perspective, the accommodations and meals were meant to reflect the way of the dynasty, a point the British visitors and many local Chinese officials completely missed. For the emperor, an essential aspect of controlling the envoys of outer fan was the skillful deployment of the bureaucratic apparatus to cherish the men from afar appropriately.
After negotiations concerning the performance of rituals, the British group—consisting of Macartney; his deputy, George Staunton (1737–1801); Staunton’s twelve-year-old son, George Thomas Staunton (1781–1859); and other members of the mission—was granted an imperial audience at the grand tent on September 14. Instead of kowtowing, the members of the mission knelt down on one knee and bowed their heads nine times. The British performed the same compromise ritual again on September 17, the imperial birthday, and days after that both in Rehe and in Beijing.⁴⁴ Simultaneously, the Manchu and Mongol princes and Burmese emissaries performed the rituals in strict observance of the imperial codes. After the ceremony, the emperor endowed the British mission with many gifts, including Korean clothing that had been piling up in Beijing as a result of Chosŏn’s annual tributes.
For their part, the British submitted to the emperor their version of a humble palace memorial, which, among other things, asked him to station a permanent representative in Beijing and to begin trading outside Guangzhou. In reply, the emperor issued a long edict to King George III, refusing all of their requests. He explained that no precedents beyond the established rules existed, so Britain could not hope to change China’s way of cherishing the men from afar and the barbarians in the four directions of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao jiahui yuanren fuyu siyi zhi dao). The emperor explained that he understood that Yingjili was so far from China that it was unfamiliar with the magnificent way of the Heavenly Dynasty (Ch., tianchao tizhi), but he stressed that the British could not live and trade in Beijing because the civilized–barbarian distinction is extremely strict (Ch., Hua–Yi zhi bian shenyan). The Jesuit missionaries in Beijing, the emperor said, were not allowed to contact Chinese people either.⁴⁵ Macartney failed to obtain any trade concessions and thus shared the fate of his predecessors, James Flint in 1759 and Nicholas Skottowe in 1761. Instead the British embassy’s visit to China, which the Qing considered a tributary mission, strengthened the Qing’s position as the civilized center and reinforced its institutionalized norms regarding its foreign relations. After all, it was Qing China that, as Li Chen observes, maintained a dominant position in deciding the terms of the Sino-Western economic, cultural, and political relationships.⁴⁶
The British thus had no effect on the Qing’s worldview. On January 8, 1794, Macartney departed Guangzhou for Calcutta. The next day, three emissaries from Ryukyu were granted an audience with Qianlong in the Forbidden City, where they kowtowed to the emperor as usual. On January 22 the Mongol and Muslim princes and the chieftains of indigenous tribes from southwestern China were granted an imperial audience in which they too kowtowed to the Son of Heaven in the traditional manner. Three days later the Korean emissaries of the annual tributary mission prostrated themselves in front of the emperor. Then came New Year’s Day, and all princes and tributary emissaries convened in the Forbidden City to attend the grand assembly and lavish banquets together with Chinese officials, all performing the highest level of kowtow again.⁴⁷ After the British mission left, then, the Zongfan mechanism between the Qing and its outer fan continued to operate in its accustomed seamless manner.
Rebellious Western and Loyal Eastern Barbarians in the 1840s
The First Opium War and the Diplomatic Paradox of Qing China
Britain did not give up. In 1816 Lord Amherst (1783–1857) visited China as an ambassador. George Thomas Staunton, who had met with Qianlong as part of the Macartney mission and later served as the director of the British East India Company in Guangzhou, acted as Amherst’s deputy. By this time, China was ruled by Qianlong’s son, Jiaqing. When the British mission arrived in Tianjin and contacted local officials, the deputy governor-general of Zhili, Tojin (1755–1835), adopted the tone of the provincial hosts during the Vietnamese mission in 1790 and the British mission in 1793, assuring Jiaqing that he would adhere to precedent and welcome the tributary mission in order to prevent the foreigners from disdaining China.
The crisis over kowtow, however, erupted again between the two sides. Because the dispute remained unsettled by the time the mission arrived in Beijing in late
August, the British did not immediately visit the emperor. The emperor read their absence as a sign of British contempt that China as the common leader under the Heaven (Ch., Zhongguo wei tianxia gongzhu) could not tolerate. The emperor also did not trust Staunton, saying that the latter should remember what ceremonies he had performed to Qianlong in 1793. In the end, the emperor refused to accept Amherst’s humble palace memorial, returned the British tributes, and ordered the envoys to be sent back to their homeland with token gifts from China.⁴⁸ The second British mission had also failed.
In 1821 Staunton published a translation of the travelogue of Tulišen, the official who had visited Russia as the Qing envoy in 1712. In the preface, Staunton pointed out that the Chinese government followed an anti-social system in their intercourse with other nations and that China would consequently rank very low indeed in the scale of civilized nations.⁴⁹ Staunton’s ranking of civilization from his Eurocentric point of view served well the British strategy in China at the time. As the British-dominated opium trade reached new heights, the large inflows of opium and the dramatic outflows of silver were creating a financial crisis in China, forcing Beijing to consider banning the opium trade. In April 1840 Staunton, by then a member of the British Parliament, urged his colleagues to use force against China.⁵⁰ The ensuing Opium War between the two countries ended with the conclusion of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, the twenty-second year of Daoguang, Qianlong’s grandson. According to the Treaty of Nanjing and the Supplementary Treaty of Bogue, which was negotiated according to Western norms and signed in 1843, Britain gained the right of extraterritoriality and most favored nation status in China. The treaties thus planted the seeds of European imperialism in the Chinese world through the emerging treaty port framework.
In 1844 the Qing established the position of superintendent of trade for the five ports (Ch., Wukou tongshang dachen) to manage contacts with Britain, France, the United States, and other Western countries. On the surface, the new post moved these treaty nations out of the orbit of the Ministry of Rites and the scope of the Zongfan framework. But the first official to hold the post was Qiying (1787–1858), a Manchu and a signatory of the Treaty of Nanjing who soon after became governor-general of Liangguang, where he was in charge of China’s contacts not only with Western countries in Guangzhou but also with Annam, Siam, and several other outer fan. This new post was thus added to the established Zongfan system without changing the nature of the system per se. Likewise, nothing really changed in other parts of the Qing periphery after the war.
Keeping the West out of the Ritual: Qing Envoys to Chosŏn
After Queen Kim of Chosŏn passed away in late 1843, the Daoguang emperor appointed two Manchu officials, Baijun (?–1859) and Hengxing, as envoys to deliver his condolences to Hansŏng. In February 1844 the two envoys left Beijing for Chosŏn with the imperial book of condolences and other items. After crossing Fenghuang Gate and marching toward the Yalu River, they found that the Koreans had set up several shanties to welcome them. In Ŭiju more Korean officials, including one with the king’s name card, greeted the envoys. On April 7 the envoys arrived in Hongjewŏn, in the suburbs of Hansŏng, where a high-ranking official with the king’s name card and a minister of the Ŭijŏngbu, the Korean cabinet, welcomed them.
The grand ceremony was held the next day. In the morning the envoys were escorted to the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country outside the West Gate of the capital. The king came out through the West Gate to receive the imperial edict and returned to his palace first. The envoys were then escorted through the South Gate and dismounted from their horses near a gate to the palace. Baijun was guided by an usher to the grand hall, where he placed the imperial book of condolences and the condolence money on a desk on the east side of the hall and stood next to the desk. The king, at the foot of the steps to the hall, kowtowed to the imperial items and then proceeded to the mourning hall. There the two envoys in turn made offerings to the spirit of the dead. The king led the royal family members into the hall and knelt down in front of the envoys to receive the emperor’s condolences. Following ritual wailing, the last step of the ceremony, the imperial book of condolences was burned.⁵¹
The king then invited the envoys to the grand hall for a tea ceremony, after which the envoys went to their residence, the South Palace Annex. The next day the king visited the envoys to treat them to a tea banquet, and Korean officials visited the envoys to ask them to write Chinese characters, keeping the guests busy. The envoys also distributed 300 taels of silver and 490 felt caps among local servants. On April 12 the king sent off the envoys, giving each a gift of 2,500 taels of silver. After they returned to Beijing, the envoys reported on their mission to the emperor and suggested that the emperor preserve the 5,000 taels of silver in the Ministry of Rites, which could return the silver to Chosŏn through the country’s next mission to Beijing to show the imperial kindness of cherishing the men from afar.⁵² During their three-day sojourn in Hansŏng, the envoys did not talk with the king about any events in China related to the Opium War, the treaties signed with Western countries, or the changes in China’s foreign policies in South China, nor did the king ask about these matters. Their interactions were confined to the performance of minutely prescribed rituals that undergirded the longstanding mutual dependence of their legitimacy as Zhongguo and its outer fan, respectively. This primacy of ritual was demonstrated again soon afterward, in 1845.
In April 1845 Emperor Daoguang appointed Huashana (1806–59), a Manchu minister of the Ministry of Revenue, and Deshun, an associate general of the Mongol Eight Banners, as envoys to Hansŏng to invest a new queen. The envoys arrived in Hansŏng in late May. The king went outside the city to welcome the envoys and the imperial books of investiture, after which the envoys were taken in sedan chairs to the palace, where they alighted in front of the grand hall and carried in the books of investiture. The king entered the hall to receive the imperial books by performing the kowtow. An usher read the books aloud to Chosŏn’s officials outside the hall, and then the king led his officials in three cheers of Long live the emperor (Ch., shanhu wansui). After a stay of three days, the envoys left the capital.⁵³ When the envoys reported to Beijing, the emperor asked them about the distance they had traveled, the king’s clothes, and the gifts sent by the king, but no mention was made of Chosŏn’s politics or other domestic Korean issues. For the emperor, the crises and challenges imposed by the war with Britain and the opening of treaty ports in Southeast China were entirely outside the purview of Qing-Chosŏn relations. At the top of the Qing administration, the Sinocentric cosmopolitan order and the Qing’s identity as the Heavenly Dynasty remained untouched. Chosŏn, the prototypical outer fan, still maintained its loyalty to the Great Qing.
Ministers and Emissaries: The British and Korean Missions to Beijing, 1860 and 1861
The Permanent Residence of Western Representatives in Beijing
In 1856 the Second Opium War erupted in Guangzhou. The Chinese governor-general and imperial commissioner, Ye Mingchen (1807–59), who was in charge of foreign affairs, was captured in his office in the city in January 1858 by the Anglo-French forces under the leadership of Lord Elgin (1811–63). Part of a family that had enjoyed close contacts with Korean visitors in Beijing, Ye shared with Koreans the discourse of the civilized–barbarian distinction.⁵⁴ He had served in Guangzhou for more than a decade as one of the strongest opponents of allowing British representatives and merchants to move into the walled city. In his last memorial to the Xianfeng emperor before he was captured, Ye analyzed his negotiations with the British, French, and American ministers in Guangzhou and underlined his strategy of secretly preparing for crises and publicly cherishing the barbarians.⁵⁵ The Western colonial states’ expansion to East Asia remained incomprehensible to Ye, who still conceptualized all international contacts, including conflicts, skirmishes, and even the ongoing war, within the Zongfan framework. The emperor, with no better understanding than Ye, regarded the behavior of the British and French as rebellion and emphasized that China’s first imperative was to cherish these wayward subordinates to preserve the national polity and refuse their requests. The rationale was the same as that behind Qianlong’s instructions regarding the Macartney embassy in 1793. Neither the emperor nor his ministers at court nor his governors at the border realized that they
were dealing with several global powers engaging in gunboat diplomacy from Africa to East Asia.
The war situation continued to escalate. In April 1858 the British, French, American, and Russian ministers convened in Tianjin and dispatched an ultimatum to Beijing, demanding negotiations with Chinese plenipotentiaries (Ch., bianyi xingshi). Among the requests made by these states, such as expanding trade to the Chinese interior and opening more ports, the most offensive to the Qing was the demand to lodge permanent representatives in Beijing, precisely as Macartney had proposed in 1793. The court instructed the governor-general of Zhili, Tan Tingxiang (?–1870), who was negotiating with the European ministers in Tianjin, to clarify that "all contacts between China and foreign countries have always been conducted at the borders, and only countries among China’s subordinates [Ch., shuguo] can visit Beijing to pay tribute [Ch., chaogong]. No commissioner from those countries has ever been allowed to reside in Beijing permanently. The court also refused to appoint any plenipotentiaries. The emperor argued that his stance was not xenophobic because China is not afraid of the visit of the barbarians to Beijing, however many people were to come; the problem is that such a visit does not fit the system. Along the same lines, he refused to allow the American minister, William Reed (1806–76), to visit Beijing because the United States is a friendly country [Ch., yuguo], but the imperial collection of precedents does not record how we should treat a friendly country, so the practice of entertaining might be inappropriate."⁵⁶ The emperor asked that the ministers return to Guangzhou and discuss such issues as tariffs with the governor-general there, suggesting that the negotiations should be conducted with the superintendent of trade for the five ports at the border rather than in Beijing. The location of the negotiations was an integral aspect of the Sinocentric world order and thus mattered greatly in the eyes of the Qing rulers.
The Anglo-French Alliance ignored the emperor’s instructions and occupied the Dagu Forts on May 20, after which they forwarded Tan Tingxiang a note requesting that the four nations be allowed entry into Tianjin for negotiations with the Chinese plenipotentiaries as well as entry into Beijing, where they would either pay a visit to the emperor or meet with grand secretaries. On May 28 the emperor appointed the Manchu grand secretary, Guiliang (1785–62), as minister extraordinary and the Manchu minister Huashana as plenipotentiary and sent them to Tianjin for negotiations. Huashana, who had served as the deputy of the Son of Heaven on the mission to Chosŏn in 1845, now became a diplomatic representative of the Chinese sovereign who was equal to the monarchs of Britain and France. The emperor particularly instructed Tan to inform the foreign ministers that there was no need for them to visit Beijing. In the meantime, he ordered Prince Sengge Rinchen (1811–65) of the Korcin Mongols to use his Mongol warriors to reinforce the garrison between Tianjin and Beijing.
The Sino-British negotiations reached a deadlock over the issue of a permanent representative in Beijing. At court, many high-ranking officials, such as Prince Yi (Dzai Yūwan, 1816–61), firmly refused the Western request to place representatives in Beijing. They suggested instead that Britain could follow the established practice of the Russian barbarians (Ch., E yi) and station students rather than commissioners in Beijing. The students would dress in the clothes and caps of China (Ch., Zhongguo yiguan), abide by local rules, and refrain from involvement in official affairs. Britain could negotiate with Chinese governors-general and governors over trade affairs at treaty ports. If the British insisted on visiting Beijing, the emperor said that they would have to travel from Shanghai via the overland route, escorted by Chinese officials, with all accommodations and meals covered by China. They could visit Beijing once every three or five years, not annually.⁵⁷ Not coincidentally, this proposal fit precisely into the existing tributary ritual codes: Beijing was trying to draw Britain into the established Zongfan system. From 1761 to 1793, then to 1858, the Qing court’s understanding of Britain remained the same because the Qing’s institutionalized Zongfan norms never changed.
This ideal model was soon partly—if opaquely—realized in the treaty with the United States, concluded on June 18, 1858, in Tianjin. Article 5 of the treaty regulated the visit of the American minister to Beijing in accordance with the specific ritual codes for the Qing’s outer fan.⁵⁸ The regulations specified the frequency of
the Americans’ visits to Beijing, the overland route they were to take from Tianjin to Beijing, their entertainment by local authorities, the requisite written notice to the Ministry of Rites, and especially the size of the mission—twenty members, which was the maximum head count of tributary missions allowed for Ryukyu, Lanchang, Burma, and the Netherlands. Although the treaty granted the United States the status of a most favored nation, Beijing saw this status simply as a special favor for foreign barbarians, unrelated to China’s statehood and sovereignty. In this sense, the Qing court treated the United States as a tributary state, which the latter, of course, completely failed to realize.
Within the domestic Confucianism-centered intellectual framework, neither the Qing ruling house nor the majority of its officials who had passed the imperial civil-service examinations thought beyond the framework of the civilized–barbarian distinction. The new knowledge imported from the West by American and European missionaries who were active in Southeast Asia and South China had not yet had an impact on the Chinese intellectual forces behind the post-Qianlong institutionalized order. On June 23, 1858, the Chinese minister Zhou Zupei (1793– 1867) and thirty of his colleagues submitted memorials against the permanent residence of barbarous emissaries in Beijing. Among the eight evils of such residence highlighted in Zhou’s memorial was the preaching of the gospel by the foreigners, which would turn our manner of clothes, caps, rituals, and music into something fit for beasts (Ch., yiguan liyue zhi zu, yi yu qinshou). He also warned that if countries such as Chosŏn and Ryukyu, which have been loyal to China for a long time and sincerely send emissaries and pay tribute to the court, saw the disobedience of these barbarians, they, too, would despise the Heavenly Dynasty. This argument was further underscored by Chen Rui, who emphasized the fundamental divide between China and the others (Ch., Zhong Wai zhi dafang).⁵⁹ In terms of their thinking, these officials were no different from Ye Mingchen, who at the time was detained by the British in Calcutta.
Despite such keen resistance, Guiliang and Huashana accepted the British-drafted treaty after they realized the situation was beyond China’s control. The treaty with Britain, signed on June 26, allowed Britain to appoint diplomatic agents to the court in Beijing, where they would not kowtow to the emperor. According to article 3, the British ambassador, minister, or other diplomatic agent shall not be called upon to perform any ceremony derogatory to him as representing the Sovereign of an independent nation, on a footing of equality with that of China. On the other hand, he shall use the same forms of ceremony and respect to His Majesty the Emperor as are employed by the Ambassadors, Ministers, or Diplomatic Agents of Her Majesty toward the Sovereigns of independent and equal European nations.⁶⁰ In retrospect, this article opened the gates of Beijing to the representatives of Britain and other treaty nations and marked the beginning of the collapse of the centuries-long ritual system and the erosion of the Zongfan infrastructure. Being forced to fundamentally change its time-honored ritual norms, even if only in part, the Great Qing moved toward its eventual transformation from a cosmopolitan empire to a state equal to Britain according to post-Westphalian political and diplomatic norms.
Historic though the change was, the Chinese may not have fully understood the treaty’s importance because of linguistic discrepancies. The Chinese version of the treaty, for instance, states that "Britain is a nation of zizhu on a footing of equality with China" (Ch., Yingguo zizhu zhi bang, yu Zhongguo pingdeng). The term zizhu, which meant self-rule or autonomy, was usually used in a Zongfan context. China regarded its outer fan as possessing this right, so it was different from the British understanding of the term independence. This divergence would become apparent in the following years, when China and the Western states as well as Japan tried to define the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship and Chosŏn’s international position. The seeds of further conflicts between the norms of the Chinese Zongfan system and those of European international law were thus planted directly in these treaties.
What further shook the foundation of the civilized–barbarian discourse was article 51 of the Sino-British treaty of 1858, which decreed that the character yi (barbarian) "shall not be applied to the Government or subjects of Her Britannic Majesty in any Chinese official document issued by the Chinese Authorities either in
the Capital or in the Provinces."⁶¹ Britain and other Western nations that were eligible to invoke the most-favored-nation clause thus broke away legally and institutionally from the category of barbarians in Chinese diplomatic discourse. From then on, in Chinese official narratives the character yi was increasingly replaced by yang (overseas, foreign) and the term barbarians (Ch., yiren) by foreigners (Ch., yangren).
This amendment, however, applied only to Western treaty nations that had never occupied an essential position in the Zongfan system. The Qing still considered its major outer fan, such as Chosŏn, Vietnam, and Ryukyu, countries of barbarians. In this sense, the treaty port system, although it was expanding rapidly at the end of the 1850s, merely complicated the Qing’s view of the countries in the Western Ocean. In other words, the disintegration of Sinocentrism as a result of the 1858 treaties occurred on the Qing’s intellectual periphery, not at the core of its intellectual and ideological structure as informed and represented by the Qing’s principal outer fan. The ministers of the treaty nations residing in Beijing would soon be confronted with the complexity and perplexity of this distinction.
Who Were the Barbarians Now? The British and Korean Missions to Beijing
Treaties in hand, the ministers of Britain, France, Russia, and the United States left Tianjin for Shanghai, where they and Chinese representatives signed additional treaties on tariffs. The war would have been over had the British and French ministers in the summer of 1859 followed the Qing’s designated route to enter Beijing after they landed at Tianjin for the ratification of the treaties. But the ministers refused to follow Qing instructions, and their rash entry into the firth of the Beihe River near the Dagu Forts led to Chinese bombardment. The war resumed less than a year after the British Crown imposed direct control over India by nationalizing the British East India Company in August 1858. Under the leadership of Lord Elgin, who was determined to employ gunboat diplomacy against Beijing, the Anglo-French alliance returned to China in the summer of 1860 and reoccupied the Dagu Forts. There the alliance almost annihilated the Mongol cavalry of Prince Sengge Rinchen with the Armstrong gun, a weapon created by Britain and employed in combat for the first time. The Qing succumbed not only to the joint colonialism of the European states but also to revolutionary post–Crimean War European military technology.
The alliance occupied Tianjin and marched toward Beijing in late August. Although the Beijing court sent representatives to Tongzhou, near Beijing, for negotiations, on September 18 Prince Sengge Rinchen captured Harry Parkes (1828–85), the British commissioner in Guangzhou, as well as Henry Loch (1827–1900), Elgin’s private secretary, and twenty-four British and thirteen French officers and soldiers. Only half of these prisoners of war—including Parkes and Loch—survived and were eventually released on October 8, when the alliance gained control of Beijing’s suburbs and started looting the imperial palace of Yuan-Ming-Yuan. The frightened Son of Heaven, Emperor Xianfeng, had fled to Rehe on September 22 after appointing his younger brother Prince Gong (a.k.a. Prince Kung, 1833–98) as the envoy extraordinary and plenipotentiary to supervise the uncertain peace negotiations. On October 13 the Western forces took over the Anding Gate of the city. The Qing saw this as a more serious threat than it did the ongoing Taiping Rebellion in South China, as the court in Rehe and the caretaker administration in Beijing were extremely vulnerable to the aggressive European alliance and their powerful cannons positioned on the city’s old walls.
From October 12 to 16, the survivors and bodies of the prisoners of war were returned to the alliance. The evident cruelty inflicted on the corpses, mutilated beyond recognition, shocked Elgin and his fellow commanders. Elgin at once notified to Prince Kung that he was too horrified by what had occurred to hold further communication with a government guilty of such deeds of treachery and bloodshed, until by some great punishment inflicted upon the Emperor and the governing classes, he had made apparent … the detestation with which the Allies viewed such conduct. The great punishment turned out to be the immolation of Yuan-Ming-Yuan. On October 18, the second day after the alliance buried the former prisoners, flames engulfed the magnificent imperial garden that had been co-designed by European Jesuit missionaries. Loch recorded that during the whole of Friday the 19th, Yuen-Ming-Yuen was still burning; the clouds of smoke driven by the wind, hung like a vast black pall over Pekin.⁶² Numerous buildings in which the Qing emperors had given audience to emissaries of its outer fan—once
including Britain and always including Chosŏn—were burned to the ground. On October 20 Prince Gong offered Elgin China’s submission to the alliance’s demands. The capital was fully opened to the alliance. Parkes and Loch entered the city the next day and ironically selected the grand hall of the Ministry of Rites as the site for the signing of the convention.
Elgin departed for the grand hall on October 24, carried in a sedan chair by sixteen Chinese footmen—an honor previously reserved for the emperor—and accompanied by an escort of more than six hundred men. When the procession reached the hall, according to Loch, Prince Gong advanced to receive Lord Elgin with an anxious, hesitating salutation, while the latter bowed, and at once walked forward to his seat, motioning Prince Kung to take the one on the right. After they signed the convention, exchanged treaties, and talked briefly about maintaining friendship, Lord Elgin rose to take leave; Prince Kung accompanied him a short distance, and then stopped; but on Lord Elgin doing so likewise, the principal mandarins in attendance urgently beckoned Prince Kung to move forward, and after a few moments of hesitation he walked with Lord Elgin to the edge of the steps. Prince Gong was apparently adjusting to a new etiquette that he had never before performed. Witnessing the entire procedure, Loch enthusiastically claimed, Thus was happily concluded an event which was the commencement of a new era, not only in the history of the Empire of China, but of the world, by the introduction of four hundred millions of the human race into the family of civilized nations.⁶³ Like George Thomas Staunton’s, Loch’s judgment on civilization was thoroughly Eurocentric.
Loch was correct in asserting that China had entered a new era. In January 1861 the Qing court established a temporary office in charge of affairs concerning all countries (Ch., Zongli geguo shiwu yamen, hereafter the Zongli Yamen) under Prince Gong’s supervision. The Yamen was responsible for China’s foreign relations only with Britain, France, the United States, Russia, and other treaty nations, not with Chosŏn, Ryukyu, Vietnam, and other outer fan, whose contacts with Beijing were still under the auspices of the Ministry of Rites. The new institution was designed with the goal of expediency to meet challenges in a time of crisis, and it was modeled on the Grand Council.⁶⁴ The officials who served in the Yamen did so only on a part-time basis. The official tablet hanging at the main entrance of the institution read, Goodness and happiness between the center and the outside (Ch., Zhong Wai tifu), highlighting the key Confucian doctrine of the mean. More importantly, the Yamen was deemed an imitation of the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations and was consequently categorized as part of the established Zongfan system. According to the court’s plan, once the momentary crisis had passed, foreign affairs would revert to the management of the Ministry of Rites as usual, for the sake of "cherishing the outer fan ."⁶⁵
Yet like the Grand Council, the Zongli Yamen continued to serve the court after the crisis, and in 1901 it became the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ch., Waiwu bu). The Yamen survived primarily because China’s treaty partners always treated it as a ministry of foreign affairs at which Western diplomats could apply the concepts of international law to their negotiations with the Chinese side; still, the diplomats were not blind to the fact that the Yamen was different from a ministry of foreign affairs in the Western sense.⁶⁶ Beijing also realized that it was impossible to disband the Zongli Yamen, in particular after March 1861, when the French, British, Russian, and American ministers arrived in Beijing and established their offices next to the Forbidden City. In response, Beijing quickly organized a diplomatic network from the top down by appointing superintendents of trade for Tianjin and Shanghai. So began a new era.
As noted earlier, these institutional changes to the Zongfan framework affected only those parts that governed relations with treaty nations; beyond those, the Zongfan system stood unchanged. As ever, Chosŏn played an exemplary role in maintaining the Qing’s superiority within this established system. After learning from the 1860 annual tributary mission to Beijing that the emperor had moved to Rehe, the king of Chosŏn immediately sent a special mission to China with the aim of visiting the emperor at Rehe and demonstrating to him Chosŏn’s concern as a loyal subordinate of the imperial dynasty. In early 1861 the Korean emissaries reached postwar Beijing, bearing various tributes. The Ministry of Rites asked the emperor whether the emissaries should visit Rehe, following the
precedents of Annam’s mission in 1790, Lanchang’s and Burma’s missions in 1795, and Annam’s mission in 1803. The emperor responded that there was no need for the Korean emissaries to travel to Rehe, but he instructed the ministry to follow convention by treating the emissaries to banquets and endowing them and the king with generous gifts in order to show his "ultimate kindness of cherishing the fan in a favored way."⁶⁷
In fact, between November 1858 and May 1861, Chosŏn dispatched five tributary missions to Beijing in spite of the war in China. In the early 1790s, Chosŏn and British emissaries had convened in Rehe and Beijing as representatives of two outer fan—both of them nations of barbarians in the Qing’s eyes. But whereas the British emissaries had violently changed their status in the Chinese world by the early 1860s by entering Beijing under the cover of cannons, their Korean counterparts continued to approach the imperial capital with humble palace memorials and tributes. Although the Korean emissaries also pursued the secret mission of obtaining intelligence in China in order to enable the Korean court to assess the situation there, their frequent presence in Beijing provided the Qing with a steady stream of resources to maintain its conventional ritual code, politico-cultural hierarchy, and imperial norms, which were under fire from the British and the French. However, the Korean emissaries never again saw the Xianfeng emperor, who died in Rehe in August and became the last emperor who refused to allow the Western barbarians to stand before him without kowtowing.⁶⁸
It was not until 1873 that Xianfeng’s son, Tongzhi, gave foreign ministers their first imperial audience at which the ministers did not kowtow. The audience took place at the Purple Light Pavilion (Ch., Ziguang ge) in the Forbidden City, the same venue at which the Qing emperor had met with emissaries of China’s outer fan since 1761—the year in which the Qing institutionalized the status of all other countries within its own imperial norms, as described in chapter 2. In 1873 the pavilion no longer witnessed the ritual of kowtow, but the politico-cultural significance of the imperial audience in that location remained essentially the same. Interestingly, and ironically, since 1949 the state leaders of the People’s Republic of China, who converted part of the Qing imperial palace into their living quarters and political headquarters, have used the pavilion to meet with foreign guests from other, equal states of the world—if no longer in the sense of all-under-Heaven.
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Part II SAVING OUR CHOSŎN
Part II
SAVING OUR CHOSŎN
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