Growing and Organizing Lotus in Qing Imperial Spaces

The chapter explores the growing of lotus in water spaces under the control of the Imperial Household Department in and around Beijing. This seemingly minor organizational task with meagre financial returns was nevertheless regulated to the detail and established dependencies of tenants and officials, of working tools and paper trails, as well as between the flows of money and an unpredictable nature. Together they built a functional sub-part of the court’s ideological project of presenting itself as economically efficient. The chapter argues that the undertaking was an ideologically efficacious spectacle visible in the bureaucratic process and in the lakes and moats around the Forbidden City which were beautifully covered with lotus plants.

Kupiao and the Accounting System of the Imperial Household Workshops

Focusing on kupiao, a rudimentary document of accounting, this chapter explores the accounting system of the Imperial Workshops in Qing China. Spurred by a series of institutional reforms, a complex budgeting and auditing system developed at the Imperial Workshops during the eighteenth century. As the records of day-to-day transactions between various Works and other departments, kupiao instantiated the operation of production and finance as a correlated system. Tracing the paper trails of kupiao, therefore, we locate the manufacturing processes of the Workshops at the intersection of artisanal collaboration and the administrative cycles of budgeting and audits in which various bureaus participated. By comparing the accounting systems of the Imperial Workshops and the Qing state, moreover, we argue that the former modelled after the zouxiao system of the state. Both systems shared as their principles rigorous accountability and the pursuit of checks and balances.

Working the Qing Palace Machine

This chapter asks about the personnel working at and for the Qing court. It explores their numbers, working conditions, labour relations, and social positions with a temporal focus on the mid and late Qing. Labour relations, in accordance with the definitions of the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, include the non-working, reciprocal, tributary, and commodified types. All of these types were represented at the Qing courts in various constellations. The paper outlines work incentives and sanctions based on Palace Regulations and Precedents (Qinding gongzhong xianxing zeli) and personal accounts of a palace maid and a eunuch in the early twentieth century and gives insights into the interaction of humans with the institutional mechanisms of the palace machine.

The Story of An Image

Focusing on the uniqueness of tapestries and embroideries based on paintings, this vignette retrieves the production process of one set of ‘embroidered paintings’ based on the same painting. These objects are outstanding pieces of artwork, often marking important historical events. The essay investigates the sequence of commissioning the painting in different media and the diverse patterns of production procedures, management, and finance in the process.

Decluttering

Drawing on the example of the Imperial Household Department, this essay offers a reflection on the cultural practices of Qing governance. It argues that a reading of the Qing state’s mobilization of material resources through an economic lens reveals only part of the story. The classification of objects and the underlying material epistemologies did not merely represent a concern with calculating monetary value; they also served as an ordering mechanism through which the ruling elite visualized the subjects of the empire. The examples provided in the essay illustrate some of the ways in which the Qing state produced structural resources (such as systems of classification) to manage its imperial and colonial expansion.