Introduction
In the early autumn of 1686, a little-known official from Shandong named Guo Xiu (1638–1715) arrived at the Qing court from Jiangsu, where he had served as district magistrate, to compete for a post as censor in the capital. After he was appointed to the post in the spring of 1687, his initial task in the capital was to inspect granaries. But as summer turned to fall, the emperor encouraged his censors to speak out about the faults of the court. Shortly after the New Year, Guo presented the emperor with two impeachments that called into question the probity and efficacy of two of the most important officials of the day, governor-general of the Grand Canal Jin Fu (1633–1692) and chief grand secretary Mingju (1635–1708).1 These accusations shed a bright but harsh light on the Kangxi court, revealing the web of connections and collusions that undergirded the politics of the era. One year later, Guo Xiu submitted a third impeachment, of Gao Shiqi (1645–1703), Wang Hongxu (1645–1723), and Chen Yuanlong (d. 1736), three officials who served in the emperor’s private Southern Study (Nanshufang) as intellectual mentors and scholarly advisers to the monarch. This book is about Guo’s impeachments.
It is also about the politics of the Kangxi court in the 1680s. Guo Xiu’s impeachments interrogated relations between the monarch and three elements that made up the seventeenth-century Qing elite: Jurchens, Hanjun martial bannermen, and Chinese literati, at a moment of tremendous importance to all three. Qing rule through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rested on a grand bargain between Chinese and Manchus in which each group was assigned a sphere in administration and ideology. This bargain was struck in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, when the conquerors and conquered put aside their wartime roles and came to fill niches in the peacetime government, beginning the period that has come to be known as high Qing.2
The Moment: The 1680s as a Time of Change
History has been kind to the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1723), perhaps too kind. Few historians would dispute the emperor’s judgment, made late in his reign, that his three most important accomplishments were the defeat of Wu Sangui and the ejection of the three feudatory princes from their satrapies in the south, the repair of river infrastructure in the southeast, and restoration of grain shipments along the Grand Canal. These accomplishments cannot be gainsaid. There may be room, however, to ask with what combination of Manchu and Chinese advice, insight and missteps, luck and strategy, they were achieved.
Such a fine-grained reading of the Kangxi era requires that the sixty-year reign be broken down into manageable units. The reign of the Kangxi emperor has often been treated as a single era in Chinese history, with good reason. The energetic, judicious, and curious emperor dominated the age and seemed the personal author of its triumphs. Most older studies in English and Chinese are of the entire reign and are based in the continuity of imperial leadership.3 More recent scholarship, however, has divided the reign into shorter eras: an early period of perhaps ten years when the work of conquest was completed; a middle era when a new Chinese style administration was built; a third era dominated by warfare in Central Asia; and a fourth period dominated by the intense succession struggle and an aging monarch.4 This book is concerned with the second of these eras, a period that began with the defeat of the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories and the suppression of the Zheng Chenggong (1624–1682) regime on Taiwan in 1683 and ended with the decision to go to war in Mongolia with Galdan in 1693. This was a decade of transitions, from an age of conquest and fiscal stringency to one of peace and relative prosperity.
At the beginning of the Kangxi reign, the last remnants of the conquest regime were three powerful military figures who had been granted quasi-feudal authority over China’s southeast and southwest by a conquest regime desperately pressed for resources and troops. Wu Sangui (1612–1678), Geng Jingzhong (d. 1682), and Shang Zhixin (d. 1680), known as the three feudatories (sanfan), occupied lands the early Qing could not afford to administer and defended the nascent Manchu order against rebels and Ming holdouts for thirty years. But with the death of the Shunzhi emperor (r. 1644–61) and the passing of commanders who had led the Manchu armies into China, the question of the feudatories’ future role inevitably emerged. As if to pose this question, in 1671 Wu Sangui offered to resign. The move was not simply a retirement; it was meant as a test of the young Kangxi emperor, then seventeen years old, who had just taken the throne. To the surprise of many and the consternation of some, the young monarch accepted the resignation and precipitated an eight-year war between the Qing and its former retainers that severely challenged the new state.5 After the Qing prevailed, the court almost immediately agreed to support a naval attack on the regime of Zheng Chenggong on Taiwan. Politics across the Taiwan Strait in the early Qing had been left uncertain. The Manchus had no experience of naval warfare, and a suspicious court ordered the ports along the China coast evacuated and coastal dwellers moved inland, with disastrous consequences for the vigorous early modern coastal trade. The successful conclusion of the attack on Zheng Chenggong was the last time Manchu military force was used against the Chinese for nearly one hundred years. The young Kangxi emperor, secure on his throne, was the first Qing ruler to be able to contemplate a peaceful future for the dynasty.
One of the clearest signs that the long eighteenth century had arrived in China was the changed economic picture. Nature had not smiled on the early Qing years. Cooler than usual weather, devastating in an agrarian empire, marked the middle seventeenth century in China as it had in many other parts of the world.6 Lower than normal agrarian yields made tax collection difficult; indeed, the Ming’s inability to collect taxes and fund its armies had made it vulnerable to the Qing conquerors. Epidemics, a by-product of famine conditions, undermined health and stability. Granting that historians must be cautious with the label “crisis,” William Atwell is nonetheless inclined to use the term to refer to the twenty years between 1640 and 1660 in China.7 Though no longer in full-fledged crisis mode in the early Kangxi years, China’s welfare can hardly have been much improved during the bitter extension of Manchu military occupation that dominated the dynasty between 1660 and the early 1680s. In particular, the prohibition of maritime trade, which the Qing imposed until its long coastline was under control, disrupted traditional patterns of trade and undermined livelihoods and prosperity in the coastal region.
By the last quarter of the seventeenth century in China, however, the weather began to warm and crops approached their normal yields. Money, which had been so tight in the early Qing that the dynasty could barely make ends meet, began to flow more easily. Trade restarted along the southeast coast, and it became possible to collect most of the land taxes. As Robert Marks has demonstrated, a warming climate and the end of the trade prohibition brought prosperity to the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong, rendering the far south one of the fastest-growing regions in the empire.8 The Qing experienced a double peace dividend; not only were war expenses reduced, but peacetime tax receipts increased. The Kangxi emperor, who prided himself on his frugality, was able to remit taxes more often. There were four tax remissions in the first twenty years of the reign and twenty-four in its last forty years.9 Chinese dynasties imposed both a land and a poll tax; in 1711, the emperor decreed the poll tax quotas of the provinces to be permanently frozen: no Qing successor could increase the amount levied regardless of the growth of population or productivity.
As prosperity returned, a new emperor came of age. For the first thirty-five years of the Qing dynasty, no emperor was more than twenty-five years of age; except for a few years in the late Shunzhi reign, regents and relatives managed government. This was not a necessarily a bad thing, as there were competent and powerful regents, and the Manchus had a historical preference for conciliar rule. Conservatism was built into regencies, however: they existed to conserve sovereignties intact for the legitimate ruler. A legitimate ruler, particularly a young, vigorous, and intellectually curious one who had already presided over a victorious war, had more freedom to innovate and explore. A new politics of influence arose: whereas the regents were influenced mainly by men of their own faction, a single ruler could be influenced by the wider range of officials with whom he came in contact. In the 1680s Qing courtiers had to accustom themselves to a Chinese-style all-powerful Manchu monarch, who had the ability and desire to rule as well as reign. For the next decade, the emperor would be involved in all new initiatives.
Three Tasks
As the young emperor contemplated the needs of his realm in the early 1670s, three issues stood out as urgent. The first was defining the role of Manchu bannermen in a civilian Qing state. A second was rebuilding the physical infrastructure that guided the Yellow River to the sea and supported the Grand Canal. A third task was developing a set of institutions that expressed the commitment of Manchu rulers to govern through established Confucian means and norms while retaining control of power in Manchu hands. Each of these tasks involved a process of construction, metaphorical or literal, but each also involved setting limits—on the power and prerogatives of Manchu officials, the demands of river administrators, and the influence of Chinese Confucian advisers. Each depended on the relationship of the monarch with a different group of servants.
MANCHU BANNERMEN AND THE QING STATE
Jurchens were the dominant group in the Qing Manchu order. Originally a hunter-gatherer and trading folk who lived to the northeast of the Ming Chinese, they began in the later sixteenth century to organize themselves for war against their southern neighbors. Finding the name “Jurchen” to be derogatory, in 1636 they decreed that the name of their political order would henceforth be “Manchu.”10 In the twentieth century this term has become an ethnonym, but in its original usage it described a political order that eventually came to incorporate Chinese and Mongols, as well as the Jurchens who led it.11 In 1644, Manchu armies conquered Beijing, and over the next two generations, they extended their conquests to include all the territory controlled by the Ming.
The New Qing History, an American scholarly movement that began in the 1990s, has emphasized reading Manchu-language texts and attending carefully to the cultural and institutional forms the Manchus created. Mark Elliott and his students have done the most to define Manchu culture; in Elliott’s view, the “Manchu way” consisted of a series of customs and habits that the Manchus brought with them to China, most typically “archery, horse-riding, use of the Manchu language and frugality.”12 These characteristics survived, in Elliott’s view, because they were imbricated in the institution of the eight banner armies, so-called because they were named after the color and pattern of the flags under which they marched. All Manchus, known as bannermen (qiren), were enrolled in these armies with their families for life.13 The Manchu banner system was a military order in which proximity to the monarch, social status, and entitlement for office rested on one’s rank, which often reflected ancestors’ achievements. Originally, all banner armies were of the same status, but before the conquest the Qing ruler assumed personal command of three armies: the Plain Yellow, Bordered Yellow, and Plain White Banners, which become known as the “upper three banners.”14 Those affiliated with these banners had the highest status among bannermen.
Integrating the Manchu military conquest elite into civilian administration proved to be a challenge for the young dynasty. Dorgon (1612–1650), regent for the first Qing emperor to rule in China, relied on the military to establish order and conducted civil administration through those Chinese whom he could persuade to collaborate.15 Dorgon’s reliance on collaborators was, however, too much for his military colleagues, who prosecuted a number of his Chinese appointees after his death and sought to keep power in their own hands. The Manchu and Chinese orders remained separate, particularly under the regents who governed after Shunzhi’s death. Imposing a harsh and austere regime, the four former military leaders appointed as regents for the young Kangxi preserved and reinforced the distinctions between conquering Manchus and conquered Chinese. The early years of Qing rule provided no stable answer to the question of how Manchus and Chinese would be integrated into a civilian peacetime administration.
Time, and new incentives, effected a solution to this problem. The Manchus born after the conquest developed stronger Chinese language skills than their forebears, showed a greater interest in matters of Chinese administration, and found new routes to civilian influence. Before the conquest, the dynasty had decreed that each of the major institutions of Qing central government—the six ministries and the Censorate—would be administered jointly by a Chinese and a Manchu. For those who could become a Manchu minister, a Manchu censor, or a Manchu grand secretary, the possibility existed of building a bicultural career, drawing on strengths from both traditions, outside of the traditional barracks and parade ground. Mingju was neither the first nor the last to enjoy such a career, but he did effectively employ both Chinese and Manchu skills to rise from bodyguard to minister and grand secretary. Literate in Chinese and Manchu, he was comfortable with both Chinese and Manchu subordinates and served the state in both civilian and military capacities. He became a confidant and close adviser of the Kangxi emperor, twenty-one years his junior. He was very smooth and became very wealthy.
Mingju and his faction had proved valuable to the emperor during the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories; how valuable was open to question. On some readings, Mingju was instrumental in the imperial decision to go to war against the Three Feudatories. This may exaggerate his role, projecting his influence onto a decision that was likely made within the imperial family. Certainly, Mingju proved a capable administrator as minister of war, managing logistics and supply for a monarch suddenly catapulted into making strategy. Developing power in wartime, Mingju and his colleagues came to dominate the peace as they fanned out through the central and territorial administration. They offered a plausible model of how Manchus might be integrated into a peacetime administration.
THE RIVER
The Yellow River was always China’s sorrow, but the nature of its threat constantly changed. Ruth Mostern’s prize-winning account, The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History, has traced events along the Yellow River through the three thousand years of Chinese life in the region. Fundamentally, she argues, catastrophic events along the banks were determined by the amount of silt that entered the river as it passed through a region of northwest China known as the Ordos. The late imperial period saw increasing deforestation and desertification in the Ordos, resulting in the river bearing increasing loads of silt.16 For much of Chinese history the river turned north after it encountered the Shandong massif, reaching the sea at a point north of the peninsula, as it does today. However, for 531 years, from 1324 to 1855, it flowed to the sea through the lowlands of northern Jiangsu to a mouth south of the Shandong Peninsula.17 By the beginning of the Qing, it had flowed through this southern mouth for 320 years. The longer the river flowed through the southern mouth, the more silt it deposited along its bed through the lowlands, and the more difficult it became to control. River officials in the late Ming and early Qing confronted a problem along the river that, although not unprecedented, was perhaps unique in scope. This had implications for the Grand Canal, the crucial waterway that joined the rich agrarian south to Beijing: when the Yellow River flooded, mud flowed into the canal, and the portion of the canal that utilized the Yellow River became impassable. In 1471, the Ming Dynasty designated one member of the Ministry of Works as manager of river affairs (zonghe shilang), creating a specialized position to manage the lower Yellow River and Grand Canal.18
River work became a distinct niche in the late imperial bureaucracy, supported by a defined canon of specialized knowledge. Early Chinese produced a number of essays on river management, but beginning in the Yuan Dynasty (1264–1366), there were an increasing number of accounts by successful river managers of their experience with specific rivers.19 The most famous of this genre was An Overview of River Work (Hefang yilan) by Pan Jixun (1521–1595), who served four terms in charge of the Yellow River hydraulic works and set the standard against which all subsequent river directors would be measured.20 Much of the work of river maintenance consisted of shoring up the levees (di) that contained the river, as well as the network of lakes and catchment basins through which it flowed. Winds and rains that came with late summer storms broke the levees, producing flooding and destroying maturing crops. Breaks were filled with gabions—sausage-shaped baskets of stone (zhulong)—and fascines (sao) of sorghum stalks bound together with bamboo. Joseph Needham quotes an early twentieth-century observer who watched as a hole in a levee thirty-six feet at the bottom and fifty-four feet at the top was filled: “Gabions and fascines were used, handled by 20,000 men hauling on cables 100 feet long. The process of filling a hole in the levees was referred to as ‘closing the dragon gate’ (he long men).”21
To address the problems of the river in the Qing, the court turned to a member of a group whose loyalty and technical knowledge had served the Qing well during the conquest. Established in 1631, the Chinese Martial Banner Army (Hanjun) was an organization for Chinese who had served the Manchus before the conquest, a mechanism for rewarding collaborators with status in the developing Manchu order. David C. Porter has argued that the institution was founded on an exchange. The Qing “guaranteed that the state would provide all banner people with a means of support, disproportionate access to government posts carrying prestige and salaries, and the right to have penalties assessed for criminal offenses committed within the banner system.” In return, the expectation was that “adult men would serve the state directly, usually as soldiers in military units, but sometimes in civilian administration, and not seek outside employment.”22
Previous work on the Hanjun has focused on ethnic issues, the questions of what it meant that Manchus employed Chinese in their multiethnic ruling order. Much can be accomplished with such inquiry, but equally interesting is the question of what in fact the Hanjun did for their masters. Chinese scholarship has suggested that in the earliest days, the service recognized by Hanjun status was quite specific: Manchu armies were at a disadvantage in battle when Ming opponents deployed Portuguese canons against them, and the Hanjun were formed shortly after some Chinese soldiers taught the Manchus how to use, and resist, canons.23 As the Manchu order became established, Chinese martial bannermen continued to provide their masters with access to Chinese language and technologies of rule, the forms and procedures of administration. As Manchus acquired Chinese language and cultural competence, Hanjun bannermen were less needed as translators but continued to provide knowledge and expertise to their superiors. They were literate and loyal, carried little ideological or cultural baggage, and were willing to take on tasks of military occupation that would have been difficult or distasteful for Chinese scholars with examination credentials. For instance, they oversaw the Chinese reoccupation of southern China after the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories in the mid-1680s and undertook special missions requiring discretion and military-style administration.24 In the latter part of the seventeenth century, Hanjun bannermen were particularly prominent in the territorial administration. Hanjun bannermen provided half the provincial governors in China from 1646 until the later 1670s and a quarter of all governors until 1690.25
With bannerman Jin Fu’s appointment, the Qing got access to Chinese technology for river control. Jin Fu was not himself an expert in rivers, but his private secretary (muyou), Chen Huang (d. 1689), was a master of the statecraft tradition and was able to guide Jin in understanding the realities of river control. Together, Jin and Chen developed an extensive and ambitious plan for the rivers of the southeast that they imagined would form a once-and-for-all solution to the dynasty’s river concerns. It was frightfully expensive, a disadvantage that was especially acute at a time when the dynasty was bearing the expense of the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories. Nonetheless, the court proved willing to support their requests, and by 1683, the southern infrastructure was adequately repaired, and grain boats from the south regularly reached the capital.
THE SAGES
The postwar years also saw an enduring commitment by Qing dynasts, and a personal commitment by the Kangxi emperor, to demonstrate fealty to Confucian precepts. Patronage of Chinese scholars and scholarship became a hallmark of the new dynasty. All Chinese dynasties had a relationship with intellectual endeavor; they maintained libraries, published editions of the classics for examination takers, and cast their intellectual debates in terms drawn from the classics.26 The Qing were especially active in this area. Because they were foreigners committed to ruling China on Chinese terms, it was essential that the Manchus demonstrate their mastery of the tradition. From the first examination for scholars of wide knowledge and great abilities (boxue hongci) in 1673 until at least the project to compile the Complete Library of the Four Treasures (Siku quanshu) in the 1770s, the Qing engaged in lavish patronage of scholarly activities.
More was involved here than reprinting the Confucian classics or patronizing Confucian scholars, although these were outward signs of the new dispensation. Huang Chin-shing has argued that the Kangxi emperor actually modeled his behavior and writing on the figures of Confucian sagehood, evoking a persona unique among Chinese emperors: “The emperor combined the tradition of governance (chih-t’ung) and the tradition of the Way (tao-t’ung) in himself. This was his most important cultural-political policy. The success of this policy could be seen in the Confucian scholars’ own perceptions: in their eyes, the emperor was the real embodiment of the tradition of governance and the tradition of the Way, which had been separated since the Golden Age.”27 Harry Miller has argued in a similar vein that the “coronation of the Kangxi emperor as sage king” effectively ended the disputes over the appropriate political model for the state that had dominated the late Ming and early Qing.28
Maintaining such a stance required vigilance on the emperor’s part and the ready advice of Confucian specialists. To guarantee that such advice was always at hand, the Kangxi emperor established in 1677 his Southern Study, a space in the palace where he could meet and consult with selected Chinese scholars about matters of Chinese tradition. Scholars recommended from the court were appointed to serve in the study; housing was provided for them in the Forbidden City so that they could remain on call for the emperor, able to respond when the need for advice arose.
Each of these solutions to the great issues of the early Kangxi reign was in some measure unorthodox. There were no precedents for Manchus without civil service degrees exercising sway over central personnel and policies, Hanjun bannermen appointed to secure technological expertise, or scholars without a political appointment provided unrestricted access to the monarch. The solutions that evolved seemed workable, but each depended on the character and capacities of the individuals appointed. Guo Xiu was the first to subject these new solutions to review.
Guo Xiu’s Intervention
In the early spring of 1688, Guo Xiu intentionally involved himself in the politics of the Kangxi court, bringing to his work courage, conviction, and the assumptions of his Confucian education. On February 1, Guo submitted his first impeachment, of Jin Fu. It was a brief document, more suggestive than conclusive, perhaps meant to test the waters, that triggered a series of more specific accusations from other officials. Three days after his first impeachment, Guo submitted a much longer and more specific impeachment of Mingju. As one of Guo’s charges against Mingju was that he was in league with Jin Fu to skim revenues appropriated for the river project, it was possible that the charges against Jin Fu were meant to lead to Mingju. Both impeachments were well received, and Guo was promoted, eventually to the post of Chinese censor-in-chief. Two years later, Guo submitted an indignant impeachment against the scholars of the Southern Study, precipitating their immediate dismissal.
Throughout his impeachments, Guo’s political stance was clear and consistent. No anti-Manchu resister, he accepted the fact of Manchu rule and the legitimacy of Qing attempts to control the river, employ Manchus in high office, and recruit Chinese scholars to serve as advisers to the monarch. What he questioned was the ability and honesty of Jin Fu, Mingju, and the scholars of the Southern Study who found themselves in new and unregulated positions. Given that Manchus were to rule, he seemed to insist, they and their servants had to abide by the norms of the Confucian tradition, which he saw as of universal and not just Chinese significance.
This book assesses Guo Xiu’s charges and assembles the narrative of his intervention. Guo’s impeachments were not simply tales of corrupt acts performed, investigated, condemned, and punished. His impeachments did not focus on individual acts; rather they condemned long-standing patterns of behavior among principal actors of Kangxi government. This was what made his impeachments useful to the historian: Guo examined not moments but habits, not individual acts but the intertwined political activities that together constituted Qing government. Some of his charges were likely more valid, and more valuable to the emperor, than others, but all were revealing of mid-seventeenth-century Qing politics.
Part 1, “Kangxi Politics,” weighs Guo’s charges. Because of their breadth, understanding and assessing Guo’s accusations requires fairly full review of the trajectories of their targets’ careers, examined in chapters 1, 2, and 3. Guo Xiu made three charges against Jin Fu. First, he asserted that Jin was ineffective, requiring more and more support and achieving little. Second, Jin was accused of supporting the corrupt machinations of his secretary, Chen Huang. Third, Guo charged that Jin was engaged in a scheme to steal land and resources from the rightful landowners of northern Jiangsu. Chapter 1 considers how Jin Fu came to be river director and the nature of his reliance on his private secretary, Chen Huang. Chapter 2 establishes the basis for Guo Xiu’s claim that Jin Fu stole land from landholders in northern Jiangsu and shows why he was perceived as ineffective.
Guo Xiu’s charge against Mingju was that in numerous ways and in many specific incidents the minister had usurped imperial authority to pursue private interests. Whereas the Manchu tradition was one of collegial rule with multiple senior figures collaborating in decision-making, in Chinese tradition the emperor was sacred, and political decisions were his alone to make. Mingju was serving in a Chinese role and could not presume on the right of the monarch to make decisions about personnel, the directions of the river project, or administrative discipline. Chapter 3 shows how Mingju came to be in a position to undertake the usurpation of imperial authority that Guo condemned and why the minister’s position at the court has often been neglected in historical accounts.
Part 2, “Guo Xiu’s Intervention,” concentrates on Guo Xiu’s actions in making his charges and the response to them among his colleagues and the emperor. Chapter 4 looks at Guo Xiu’s life, how he became a censor, and the experiences and attitudes he brought to the role. Chapter 5 describes the moment of accusation, the immediate causes of Guo’s actions, the language he used, and the reactions of his colleagues. Chapter 6 interrogates the emperor’s reactions and the complex multiethnic environment that produced them. In chapter 7, the charges Guo brought against the scholars of the Southern Study are elaborated; they were accused of mixing scholarship and politics. Chapter 8 sets the episode in a larger context by considering the post-impeachment fates of Guo and those he condemned. A final chapter offers reflections on the universal issue of corruption and its prosecution.
A remarkable array of sources makes it possible to describe corruption and its recompense in the middle Kangxi era. For the most part, mid-seventeenth-century authors and politicians, at least those closest to the court, did not transmit to posterity negative views of the new dynasty. Recipients of the dynasty’s patronage have left a positive account of the Kangxi emperor and his era. There were few dissidents in the 1680s and 1690s, and those who existed were not allowed to speak to posterity. In the 1720s, Wang Jingqi (1672–1726) offered a description of the Kangxi court that overlapped with some of Guo Xiu’s charges, in a work titled Jottings of a Western Journey (Xizheng suibi).29 The work was not a travelogue, as its title suggested, but an account of what Wang and his father, an official at the Qing court, observed in 1680s and 1690s Beijing. When the Yongzheng emperor (r. 1722–36) was presented with the work, he ordered it suppressed as disrespectful of his father’s government. Fortunately, the work survived and is today available.30
The same fate might have been in store for Guo Xiu’s impeachments, but for several reasons, Guo’s accusations survived. In the Yongzheng reign, sixteen years after Guo Xiu died, a friend convinced Guo Xiu’s son, Guo Tingyi (n.d.) to edit his father’s state papers, including the three impeachments, and prepare a chronology of his father’s life.31 Published by a man who held no degree or political position, Guo Tingyi’s book was able to fly under the radar of Qing censorship. The impeachments were remembered in the 1770s when the Qianlong emperor ordered that the texts of the impeachments of Mingju and Wang Hongxu be included verbatim in their official biographies. The formal reason given by the emperor for this order was to make clear that Mingju and Wang Hongxu were in fact guilty of transgressions, of which subsequent readers needed to be aware. A second reason the emperor offered was to show that the factional maneuvering of the Kangxi years was relatively benign and easily contained by the Kangxi emperor, unlike the factionalism of the late Ming, which had brought down the dynasty.
Impeachments and imperial responses formed the warp and woof of imperial politics in China, but often this is all that remains, as the details of discussion and reply were hidden. This was not, of course, a problem unique to China. In Royal Courts in Dynastic States and Empires, Jeroen Duindam describes the challenge of establishing agency in royal courts: “How can one ascertain the degree to which rulers themselves were active agents, and how can we assess the balance between them and their courtiers and servants? Answers change not only from ruler to ruler, but within the life cycle of a single individual, particularly in long reigns. The variations in circumstances and personalities cannot be adequately addressed in generalized statements in either direction.”32 This universal problem of understanding the inner workings of imperial courts was surely no less acute in the case of the Chinese court, which made no pretense of being public and whose product, a list of edicts arranged in chronological order, was both unwieldy and not in a technical sense a primary source.
For limited periods, however—and among them were the few years of the early Kangxi reign with which this study is concerned—the court diaries provide remarkable insights. Court diaries are a very old genre in China, dating from the earliest days of government, when “the Recorder of the Left wrote down the actions and the Recorder of the Right wrote down the utterances” of the monarch.33 The purpose of this recording was in the first instance moral: to record clearly how mistakes were made so that they would not be repeated, and how good deeds were accomplished. They were meant as primary sources for the Veritable Records (Shilu), the chronological reprinting of the official edicts issued during a reign, which was prepared after an emperor died. After preparation of the Veritable Records, the diaries were meant to be destroyed. Diaries were intended as records of court activities; even the emperors whose lives they chronicled were not meant to see them. It is likely that this stricture was relaxed in later dynasties, but the diaries, when they existed, were regarded as the most reliable primary sources. Extant portions of the early Kangxi diary were first published in 1984, hence not available to historians who wrote about the Kangxi emperor before that date.34
In an ideal world, court diaries would have been an ideal source, but the real world intervened. The Kangxi diary began in the autumn of the tenth year of his reign, on October 3, 1671. This was shortly after the emperor had taken power from his regents and begun to reign in his own name; diary keeping was one of a number of specifically Chinese political practices adopted by the young emperor. The first eight years of the diary, however, were concerned exclusively with the young emperor’s education and ritual activities. These were likely the primary concern of those who kept the diaries; they may also have accounted for most of the young emperor’s time. In the autumn of 1679, the emperor observed, “In addition to the routine matters that the diarists of action and repose record, there are matters presented in memorials and petitions that must be decided. These are all important matters of state, and our accomplishments and failures can be observed [in them]. Henceforth, let the petitions and memorials that are reviewed by the court be recorded by the diarist on duty. As for court conferences on secret matters, and cases in which I summon officials to the throne for personal oral orders, the officials on duty need not record these.”35
From the viewpoint of tradition, this was a somewhat odd imperial intervention in diary keeping, a prescription of what sort of materials should be in the diary. It likely reflected the fact that by 1679, the monarch was making decisions important for the future of the state, and the decisions turned out to be successful. Following these orders, the diary entries became steadily more detailed as the years went by.
The diaries preserve bits of conversation between the emperor and his counselors that can be revealing. After a visit by Jin Fu to court, for instance, the emperor quietly asks that a report be prepared on the feasibility of shipping grain by sea, thus avoiding the waterways Jin was charged with sustaining. Somewhat later, when Jin Fu proposes an expensive project, the emperor notes that the dynasty’s treasury is fuller than during the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories. Later during a court conference, the diaries preserve what can only be called an imperial tantrum directed at Chinese officials, a revealing episode in Sino-Manchu relations. None of these comments are included or even referenced in the official record of imperial edicts in the Kangxi Veritable Records. The diaries are not perfect sources. They are not verbatim records, nor do they preserve any of the conversations officials had with each other as they decided what to say to the emperor. But they do afford a deeper look into Kangxi policy-making than other extant materials. Although the diaries are not extant for the entire Kangxi reign, they are available for the years of Jin Fu’s service as canal director and the months in which Guo Xiu made his accusations. Together with Guo’s impeachments, they produce a tale worth telling.
In the twenty-first century, additional sources have become available. A new funerary inscription for Mingju has been unearthed and an old family story about Guo Xiu’s origins made public. Two new movies and a Beijing opera have been produced depicting this period; these are not as valuable as other sources, as they are not historically accurate, but they point to the contemporary relevance of the events under consideration here for assessing the nature and significance of China’s last dynasty.36