Presents and Tribute: Exploration of the Presents Given to the Qianlong Emperor by the British Macartney Embassy

2020 ◽  
pp. 143-172
Author(s):  
Fuxiang Guo 郭福祥
Keyword(s):  
Qianlong Emperor

The Golden Mirror in the Imperial Court of the Qianlong Emperor, 1739-1742

2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Hanson
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Modern China ◽  
The Third ◽  
Southern Chinese ◽  
Regional Trends ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
Chinese Scholars ◽  
Qianlong Emperor

AbstractIn the last month of 1739, the third of the Manchu rulers, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-1795), ordered the compilation of a treatise on medicine "to rectify medical knowledge" throughout the empire. By the end of 1742, eighty participants chosen from several offices within the palace bureaucracy based in Beijing completed the Golden Mirror of the Orthodox Lineage of Medicine, the only imperially commissioned medical text the Qing government's Imperial Printing Office published. The Golden Mirror represents both the limitations in the power of the Qianlong emperor and the dominance in the Manchu court of Chinese scholarship from the Jiangnan region during the first decade of his reign. Chinese scholars participating in the compilation of the Golden Mirror fashioned a medical orthodoxy for the empire in the mid-eighteenth century from regional trends in scholarship on history and the classics centered in the Jiangnan region since the sixteenth century. The Golden Mirror is an illuminating example of how medical scholars participated in the formation of evidential scholarship in early-modern China and why Manchu patronage, southern Chinese scholarship, and medical orthodoxy coalesced in the imperial court of the Qianlong emperor.

Commemorating War in Eighteenth-Century China

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 869-899 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Waley-Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
The Past ◽  
Qianlong Emperor

Reviewing his long reign in 1792, the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736–1795) hailed his military triumphs as one of its central accomplishments. To underscore the importance he ascribed to these successes, he began to style himself ‘Old Man of the Ten Complete Victories’ (Shi Quan Lao Ren), after an essay in which he boldly declared he had surpassed, in ‘Ten Complete Military Victories’ (Shi Quan Wu Gong), the far-reaching westward expansions of the great Han (206 BCE–220 CE) and Tang (618–907) empires. Such an assertion, together with the program of commemoration discussed below, served to justify the immense expense incurred by frequent long-distance campaigning; to elevate all these wars to an unimpeachable level of splendor even though some were distinctly less glorious than others; and to align the Manchu Qing dynasty (16–191 i) with two of the greatest native dynasties of Chinese history and the Qianlong Emperor personally with some of the great figures of the past.

The Finance of Imperial Munificence: How Simple Quantitative Work Can Help Us Rethink High-Qing History

T oung Pao ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 100 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 164-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Dunstan
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Data ◽  
Fiscal Health ◽  
Provincial Level ◽  
Fiscal System ◽  
Principal Source ◽  
Qing History ◽  
Qianlong Emperor ◽  
Organizational Competence

This article takes the management of provincial finance during the years (1746–1748) of the Qianlong emperor’s first universal tax remission as a window through which to peer inquisitively at the fiscal system of the high-Qing era. How did that system work at provincial level, and how can we use the copious statistical data in archival sources to address questions that are hard to answer precisely because of that system’s routine operating procedures? This article moves from a naive question – how did provincial governments cope when the Qianlong emperor munificently cancelled their staple source of income for a year? – to a re-examination of the Chinese realm’s strategic geography, a methodology for measuring the fiscal health of individual provinces, and a demonstration of the organizational competence of the high-Qing Board of Revenue.
Dans cet article, la gestion des finances provinciales pendant les années de la première exemption fiscale universelle (1746–1748) accordée par l’empereur Qianlong ouvre une fenêtre à travers laquelle il devient possible d’observer de près le système fiscal à l’apogée des Qing. Comment ce système fonctionnait-il au niveau des provinces, et comment peut-on mettre à contribution l’abondance de données statistiques fournie par les archives pour aborder des questions auxquelles il est difficile de répondre de façon précise en raison des procédures habituelles de gestion? Partant d’une question naïve – comment les gouvernements provinciaux s’en sortaient-ils lorsque l’empereur dans sa grande générosité supprimait leur principal source de revenu pendant une année entière ? –, l’article réexamine la géographie stratégique de l’empire, propose une méthodologie pour évaluer la santé fiscale des différentes provinces et met en évidence la compétence organisationnelle du ministère des Finances à l’époque.


A Disguised Defeat: The Myanmar Campaign of the Qing Dynasty

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yingcong Dai
Keyword(s):  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
Endemic Diseases ◽  
Regional Conflict ◽  
Border Trade ◽  
Border Areas ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Commander In Chief ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
Qianlong Emperor

The Qing Myanmar campaign (1765-1770) was the most disastrous frontier war that the Qing dynasty had ever waged. In the beginning, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735-1795) of the Qing dynasty had envisaged winning this war in one easy stroke, as he deemed Myanmar no more than a remote barbarian tribe without any power. But he was wrong. After the Green Standard troops in Yunnan failed to bring the Myanmar to their knees, Qianlong sent his elite Manchu troops in. A regional conflict was thus escalated into a major frontier war that involved military maneuvers nationwide. At the front, the Manchu Bannermen had to deal with the unfamiliar tropical jungles and swamps, and above all, the lethal endemic diseases. Not only did one after another commander-in-chief of the Qing dynasty fail to conquer Myanmar, but the Qing troops also suffered extremely heavy casualties. After a gruelling four-year campaign, a truce was reached by the field commanders of the two sides at the end of 1769 with the Qing invading expedition failing to conquer Myanmar and withdrawing in disarray. To rehabilitate itself, the Qing dynasty kept a heavy military lineup in the border areas of Yunnan for about one decade in an attempt to wage another war while imposing a ban on inter-border trade for two decades.

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