‘Ancestral Voices Prophesying War’

2020 ◽  
pp. 29-62
Author(s):  
Chris Murray
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
Opium War ◽  
Imperial Expansion

Edward Gibbon and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were uneasy about the prospect of a British Empire, fearing overreach and collapse. Historical precedents such as the Roman Empire and Kublai Khan’s China made imperial expansion appear unwise. To Coleridge these predecessors served as warnings to Britain, but to Macartney they offered evidence that the Qing Dynasty was doomed. The Macartney Embassy attempted to recreate aspects of Marco Polo’s reception at Kublai Khan’s court: Macartney, like Gibbon and Coleridge, felt that histories could be replicated. In light of Britain’s fruitless embassies to China in 1793 and 1816, Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ draws on Gibbon’s account of the Khans for prophetic effect. Like Macartney’s journal, Coleridge’s poem articulates a perception that war between Britain and China was likely some decades before the First Opium War occurred.

Collecting the Pei Cen Stele in Qing China

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-278
Author(s):  
Weitian Yan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Han Dynasty ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Cultural Relic

Abstract This article investigates three vignettes in the collecting of the Pei Cen Stele during the eighteenth century. A Han-dynasty monument in Barköl, Xinjiang, the Pei Cen Stele tells of an unrecorded military achievement against the Xiongnu in 137. I begin by discussing how court officials used this artefact to support the Qing imperial expansion into central Asia. The second episode identifies four major types of copies of the Pei Cen Stele—facsimiles, replicas, tracing copies, and forgeries—and examines their varied functions to the epigraphic community at the time. The final section analyses the transitional style of this inscription through calligraphers’ innovative transcriptions. Appropriations of the Pei Cen Stele in these political, social, and artistic contexts, I argue, pinpoint the idea of collecting as a form of invention in the Qing dynasty. Collectors invented the Pei Cen Stele as a symbol of prosperity, a cultural relic, and a calligraphy exemplar.

The Qing Dynasty and Its Neighbors

2008 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-304
Author(s):  
Victor Lieberman
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Cultural Integration ◽  
Forward Movement ◽  
Inner Asia ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
Symbolic Resources ◽  
Imperial Expansion

Peter C. Perdue'sChina Marches Westargues that the Qing dynasty's ability to break through historical territorial barriers on China's northwestern frontier reflected greater Manchu familiarity with steppe culture than their Chinese predecessors had exhibited, reinforced by superior commercial, technical, and symbolic resources and the benefits of a Russian alliance. Qing imperial expansion illustrated patterns of territorial consolidation apparent as well in Russia's forward movement in Inner Asia and, ironically, in the heroic, if ultimately futile, projects of the western Mongols who fell victim to the Qing. After summarizing Perdue's thesis, this essay extends his comparisons geographically and chronologically to argue that between 1600 and 1800 states ranging from western Europe through Japan to Southeast Asia exhibited similar patterns of political and cultural integration and that synchronized integrative cycles across Eurasia extended from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries. Yet in its growing vulnerability to Inner Asian domination, China proper—along with other sectors of the “exposed zone” of Eurasia—exemplified a species of state formation that was reasonably distinct from trajectories in sectors of Eurasia that were protected against Inner Asian conquest.

Grammatical Descriptions in Manchu Grammar Books from the Qing Dynasty

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-55
Author(s):  
Takashi Takekoshi
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
Chinese Scholars ◽  
High Degree ◽  
The 19Th Century

In this paper, we analyse features of the grammatical descriptions in Manchu grammar books from the Qing Dynasty. Manchu grammar books exemplify how Chinese scholars gave Chinese names to grammatical concepts in Manchu such as case, conjugation, and derivation which exist in agglutinating languages but not in isolating languages. A thorough examination reveals that Chinese scholarly understanding of Manchu grammar at the time had attained a high degree of sophistication. We conclude that the reason they did not apply modern grammatical concepts until the end of the 19th century was not a lack of ability but because the object of their grammatical descriptions was Chinese, a typical isolating language.

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