Grandfather and Grandson: Kangxi, Qianlong, and the Making of the High Qing

Act I: The Grandfather (Review Question 3)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, "The Qing at Its Height" and "Kangxi," pp. 273–276. Reading-guide sentence (p. 274): "By annexing Mongolia, the Kangxi emperor made sure the Qing Dynasty would not have the northern border problems the Ming had faced."

Four scripts and a boy emperor

The deck opens with a symbol (slide B): Qing documents and inscriptions were written in Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan, and in the eighteenth century often in Uyghur (Chagatai Turkic) as well. That habit sums up the dynasty's method, and it is the thread of Review Question 5.

The story begins in 1661, when the Shunzhi emperor died of smallpox at twenty-two (slide C). His successor, the boy Xuanye (born 1654), was chosen in part because he had already survived the disease and so could be expected to live. He reigned as the Kangxi emperor; slide D explains why "Kangxi" is a reign name, not a personal name. Ebrey dates the three great reigns "from 1662 to 1795" (p. 273), counting from the first year of the Kangxi era. The deck gives 1661, the year of his accession.

The boy ruled through four Manchu regents, of whom Oboi became dominant. The regency of 1661–1669 reversed much of Shunzhi's reliance on Chinese advisers, enforced harsh tax collection in Jiangnan, and purged rivals. Ebrey writes: "At age fourteen, he announced that he would begin ruling on his own and had his regent imprisoned" (p. 274). Two events are joined here. Kangxi formally assumed personal rule in 1667, at thirteen by Western count (fourteen sui). Oboi was arrested two years later, in June 1669, when Kangxi was fifteen. The story that he used a troop of young wrestlers to seize the regent comes from later tradition. Slide E now gives both dates, and its headline says "As a Teenager."¹

Winning the scholars

Slide F's concept is legitimacy: a ruler had to persuade people he had the right to rule. For a Manchu emperor in the 1670s that meant persuading Chinese scholars. Kangxi kept the Ming examinations and most Ming institutions (slide G). He studied the classics with Chinese tutors, wrote Chinese well, and in 1670 issued the Sacred Edict, sixteen moral maxims to be lectured in every village. In 1679 he held a special examination, the boxue hongci ("broad learning and grand phrasing"), to recruit eminent scholars, many of them men who had refused to serve, and set them to compile the official history of the Ming. Writing the Ming's history was a way of declaring it finished and of claiming its legacy. Some famous loyalists, including Gu Yanwu and Huang Zongxi, still declined, but Huang let his son and a student work on the project.

Kangxi also made six tours of the south between 1684 and 1707 (slide H), visiting Jiangnan, the region that had resisted longest. He inspected river works, honored local worthies, and visited the tomb of the Ming founder at Nanjing. The tours were public theater of Confucian rule, and they also let him see his officials at work. His bondservant Cao Yin, the Nanjing textile commissioner and grandfather of the novelist Cao Xueqin, hosted him four times. That family will reappear in Lecture 4.²

The Three Feudatories and Taiwan

The greatest challenge of the reign came from the conquest's own Chinese generals (slide I). Wu Sangui in Yunnan and Guizhou, Shang Kexi in Guangdong and Geng Jingzhong in Fujian held huge, semi-independent satrapies as rewards for their service. When the court moved in 1673 to dissolve them, Wu rebelled and proclaimed his own Zhou dynasty, and the other two joined. For a time the rebels held most of the south. But Wu, who had opened the gate to the Manchus and executed the last Ming pretender, could hardly pose as a Ming restorer, and few Chinese scholars rallied to him. He died in 1678, and by 1681 the revolt was over.

Ebrey says that "at the conclusion of these campaigns" Taiwan was made part of Fujian (p. 274); slide I now gives the dates. Taiwan was a separate campaign. The admiral Shi Lang, a former Zheng commander, defeated the Zheng fleet at Penghu in 1683; Zheng Keshuang surrendered; and in 1684, after a court debate about whether the island was worth keeping, Taiwan became a prefecture of Fujian province.

Mongolia, Russia and Tibet

Ebrey's argument is that the Qing had cannons and muskets, the Mongols "bows and arrows only," so the Qing "could dominate the steppe cheaply, effectively ending two thousand years of northern border defense problems" (p. 274). This is a large claim that needs two corrections. The Zunghar (Dzungar) Mongols under Galdan were not armed only with bows. They had muskets and some artillery, bought or made with Central Asian and Russian help, and at Ulan Butung in 1690 Galdan's men fought from behind a line of kneeling camels. The Qing advantage was in heavier guns, in numbers and, above all, in logistics: the ability to supply large armies far out on the steppe. And the northern problem did not end under Kangxi. The Zunghar state survived his campaigns and was destroyed only in the 1750s, by Qianlong. Slide J now teaches guns, grain and diplomacy, and keeps the textbook's claims for the instructor notes.³

The sequence is worth knowing. In 1689 Qing and Russian envoys signed the Treaty of Nerchinsk, with two Jesuits interpreting in Latin; it fixed the border along the Amur watershed and kept Russia from aiding Galdan. In 1691, at Dolon Nor, the Khalkha (eastern) Mongols submitted to Kangxi, having fled from Galdan. In 1696 Kangxi led a great army into Mongolia, one column of which defeated Galdan at Jao Modo; Galdan died the next year. Ebrey's figure of eighty thousand men refers to this campaign.

Tibet followed. In 1717 a Zunghar army seized Lhasa. Ebrey says that the Qing army sent after them "occupied Lhasa in 1718" (p. 274). In fact the Qing force of 1718 was destroyed near the Salween River. A second, larger expedition took Lhasa in 1720 and installed the Seventh Dalai Lama under Qing protection, and a resident commissioner (amban) and garrison followed in the 1720s. Slide J's notes now give 1720.⁴

The Jesuits at court

Slides L and M preview the Pierian Spring story. Kangxi was intellectually curious, and he kept Jesuit priests at court as astronomers, mathematicians, cartographers, painters and interpreters. He studied geometry with them himself. The Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest ran the Bureau of Astronomy and designed cannon for the war against the feudatories; the slide J cannon of 1689 is one of his designs. Slide M's headline now says Kangxi "Turned Against the Missionaries," because the real history is a slow tightening, described in the Pierian Spring below.

Act II: The Grandson (Review Question 5)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, "Qianlong," pp. 276–277. Reading-guide sentence (p. 276): "He ordered full searches for books with disparaging references to the Manchus or previous alien conquerors."

Xinjiang

Qianlong (Hongli, 1711–1799) took the throne in 1736 and reigned for sixty years. He called his wars the "Ten Great Campaigns," and the greatest of them, in the 1750s, destroyed the Zunghar state and added the Ili valley and the Tarim basin, together called Xinjiang ("new territory"), to the empire (slide N). The conquest of the Zunghars was savage. Qianlong ordered their extermination, and war, smallpox and flight destroyed most of the Zunghar people. The Turkic Muslims of the oasis cities, whom the deck calls Uighurs, a name not used for them until the twentieth century, were then conquered in 1758–1759. Xinjiang was ruled through military governors and local Muslim notables; its Muslims kept their own religious leaders and were not required to wear the queue.⁵

An emperor of many faces

Slide O's image, a thangka showing Qianlong as the bodhisattva Manjushri, is the best single picture of his method. To Tibetans and Mongols he was a patron of Tibetan Buddhism and, in Buddhist terms, a cakravartin, a "wheel-turning king" whose conquests advance the dharma (slide P). To Mongols he was also a khan, heir to Chinggis. To Chinese scholars he was a sage emperor, poet, calligrapher and connoisseur (slide Q). He sponsored dictionaries and translations so that each language of the empire could be set beside the others. Historians call this "simultaneous" rule, in which no one face was the "real" emperor.⁶

Two details on slide O need care. The textbook lists the languages Qianlong learned as including "Tibetan and Tangut" (p. 276). In Qing usage "Tangut" (Manchu Tanggūt) usually meant Tibetan, so the pair probably names one language twice, and the slide now lists three languages. And the claim, sometimes repeated, that Qianlong raised a Dalai Lama in Beijing should be dropped. The Tibetan lama who grew up at the Qing court, studied alongside the young prince and became his teacher was the Changkya Khutukhtu, Rolpe Dorje (1717–1786). The deck's notes caution against the Dalai Lama claim and name Rolpe Dorje.

The sage and the son

For Chinese audiences, Ebrey says, Qianlong worked at state papers until early afternoon and then turned to reading, painting and calligraphy (p. 276; slide Q). He took credit for more than forty-two thousand poems, inscribed his seals and comments on the paintings of his collection, and was "ostentatiously devoted to his mother." His six southern tours cost, by Ebrey's estimate, ten times as much as his grandfather's. Their host at Yangzhou, the salt merchant Jiang Chun, closes the deck (slide KK).

Sorcerers and books

The other face of the reign was suspicion. Slide R tells the queue-clipping scare of 1768, made famous by Philip Kuhn. Rumors spread through the Yangzi delta that sorcerers were stealing souls by clipping the ends of men's queues. Qianlong, hearing in the rumor a hint of anti-Manchu sedition, drove his officials to extract confessions by torture until the case collapsed for lack of any real plot. Kuhn's point is that the emperor used the scare to discipline his own bureaucracy as much as to hunt sorcerers.⁷

Slide S defines a literary inquisition. The danger did not start with Qianlong. In 1711, under Kangxi, Dai Mingshi was arrested for using Southern Ming reign titles in a collection of essays (he was executed in 1713), and Fang Bao, who had written its preface, spent two years in prison; his "Random Notes from Prison" is the chapter's Documents feature (pp. 278–279). Under Yongzheng the Zeng Jing case of 1728–1730 led the emperor to publish a long refutation of anti-Manchu arguments.⁸ Qianlong's campaign was larger. In the course of compiling the Complete Books of the Four Treasuries (Siku quanshu), a vast imperial library assembled in the 1770s and 1780s, he ordered searches for books that slighted the Manchus or earlier conquerors (slide T). Passages were cut or rewritten; whole books were destroyed. Ebrey's figure, "no copies survive of more than two thousand titles" (p. 276), is a fair summary. R. Kent Guy shows that the project was also a genuine scholarly enterprise, staffed by the leading evidential scholars of the age, and that the inquisition and the scholarship were two sides of one effort to define the canon.⁹

The banners, Heshen and the end of the reign

Slides V and W recap the banner story told in Lecture 1's Pierian Spring: idle bannermen, debts, land sales and the expulsion of many Chinese bannermen. The debt and land-sale passage is on Ebrey pp. 277–278, and slide W's source line now cites those pages, matching Lecture 1 slide FF.

In old age Qianlong trusted a young Manchu guardsman, Heshen (1750–1799), who rose to dominate the court for more than twenty years and built a vast fortune from bribes and military appropriations (slide X). He was blamed for the slow suppression of the White Lotus rebellion of Lecture 4. Qianlong announced in 1795 that he would abdicate, so as not to reign longer than his grandfather, and handed the throne to his son, the Jiaqing emperor, at the new year of 1796. He kept real power until he died in February 1799, at eighty-seven by Western count; Ebrey's "eighty-nine" (p. 277) is a Chinese count; slide X now gives eighty-seven and the 1795–1796 sequence. Within weeks Jiaqing had Heshen arrested and allowed to commit suicide.

Slide Y looks ahead to the Macartney embassy of 1793. Its image is a redrawing of William Alexander's famous picture of the audience. Alexander, the embassy's draftsman, did not go to Rehe and drew the scene from others' accounts; Lecture 3 slide H says so, and slide Y's caption now agrees.

Pierian Spring: Missionaries and the Middle Reign (Review Questions 13 and 12)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 275–276. Reading-guide sentences (p. 276): "However, when the pope sided with the Dominican and Franciscan orders in China who opposed allowing converts to maintain ancestral altars (known as the 'rites controversy'), he objected strongly to the pope's issuing directives about how Chinese should behave" (Q13); and "A hard-working ruler, he tightened central control over the government" (Q12).

Maps and stars

The Jesuits' most lasting work for Kangxi was the survey of the empire carried out between 1708 and 1718 and printed as the Huangyu quanlan tu (slide AA). Jesuit and Qing surveyors, using astronomical observations and triangulation, produced the most accurate map of China yet made; European atlases relied on it for a century. Ebrey's description of the Jesuits as astronomers and cartographers who translated European works is accurate (p. 276).¹⁰

The rites controversy

Since Matteo Ricci, the Jesuits had argued that the rites Chinese performed for ancestors and for Confucius were civil and social, not religious, and that converts could keep them (slide BB). Dominican and Franciscan missionaries, who worked among ordinary villagers rather than at court, disagreed. They also objected to Jesuit use of the Chinese words Tian and Shangdi for God. The quarrel became a war of reports in Rome (slide CC). In 1692 Kangxi had issued an edict tolerating Christianity. In 1704 the pope ruled against the rites, and the papal legate Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon came to Beijing in 1705 to enforce the decision. Kangxi was outraged that a foreigner should tell his subjects how to honor their parents (slide DD). In 1706 he required every missionary to obtain an imperial certificate (piao), granted only to those who promised to follow Ricci's practice; the others were expelled. The bull Ex illa die (1715) confirmed the ban on the rites, and when a second legate came in 1720–1721, Kangxi wrote on the papal document that Westerners should no longer be allowed to preach in China.

That is the basis for Ebrey's statement that Kangxi "outlawed Christian missionaries" (p. 276). It compresses the story. Kangxi restricted missionaries to those with permits and ended the toleration of 1692 in practice, but the formal empire-wide proscription of Christianity came in 1724, under Yongzheng, who expelled missionaries from the provinces to Macao and kept only the Jesuit technicians in Beijing. In 1742 Pope Benedict XIV ended the debate with a final prohibition of the rites, which Rome did not lift until 1939.¹¹

Yongzheng

Yinzhen, the Yongzheng emperor (1678–1735), took the throne at the end of 1722, after a bitter succession struggle among Kangxi's sons (slide FF). He was forty-four by Western count; Ebrey's "forty-five" (p. 276) is the Chinese count; the slide FF headline now says forty-four. Rumors that he had altered his father's will followed him all his life. He ruled for twelve years with remarkable energy, reading and annotating thousands of officials' secret palace memorials in vermilion ink.

Two reforms matter most. Slide GG describes the small council he set up in the palace in 1729, at first to manage the war against the Zunghars. It became the Grand Council (Junjichu), a handful of trusted ministers who drafted edicts and handled confidential business, bypassing the slower Grand Secretariat. Beatrice Bartlett shows that the council grew gradually, and that its real consolidation came under Qianlong.¹² Slide HH describes the fiscal reform. Local officials had long collected irregular surcharges, such as the "meltdown fee" (huohao) for casting tax silver into ingots, to pay for local government and themselves. From 1724 Yongzheng made the surcharge a fixed, official levy that was sent to the provincial treasury and returned as "nourishing honesty" allowances (yanglian) and funds for local expenses. Madeleine Zelin argues this was the most ambitious fiscal reform of the dynasty, and that it was gradually undermined after his death.¹³ Qianlong inherited a full treasury (slide II), and the surpluses paid for his wars and tours.

A salt merchant and the emperor

The deck ends with Ebrey's biography of Jiang Chun (1725–1793), a head merchant of the Yangzhou salt monopoly (slide KK; Ebrey, p. 275). The salt merchants were the richest men in China. Jiang spent his wealth on gardens, poets, two opera troupes, and the six visits of Qianlong to Yangzhou, of which he hosted four. His story shows how the imperial court, the salt monopoly and the culture of the delta cities were tied together. It also complicates any simple picture of Qing cultural repression: the same emperor who burned books watched Jiang's plays.¹⁴

Corrections and Cautions

Corrections and Sources Behind the Slide Notes

The deck's speaker notes are written for students. The instructor-level detail behind them, where a slide departs from Ebrey and the scholarship it relies on, is collected here, slide by slide.

• Slide B (four-scripts). Moved from the notes: the temple's name (Yonghe Gong, the "Lama Temple") comes from the image record, not from Ebrey.
• Slide C (smallpox-heir). Textbook inconsistency: Ebrey dates Kangxi's accession to 1661 here (p. 274) but writes "from 1662 to 1795" on p. 286. The deck uses 1661.
• Slide D (names-reign). Moved from the notes: the personal names and temple names come from outside the textbook (standard reference works such as Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period).
• Slide E (kangxi-fourteen). Correction: Ebrey says that "at age fourteen" Kangxi announced his rule and had his regent imprisoned (p. 274). Fourteen is the Chinese count, and it joins two steps: he began personal rule in 1667, at thirteen, and arrested Oboi in 1669, at fifteen. Oboi's name and the identification of the portrait come from outside the textbook. Source: Robert B. Oxnam, Ruling from Horseback (1975).
• Slide H (southern-tours). Moved from the notes: the number of scrolls (twelve) and their date come from the Metropolitan Museum of Art record, not from Ebrey.
• Slide I (wu-revolts). Moved from the notes: Ebrey puts Taiwan's annexation "at the conclusion of these campaigns" without dates (p. 274); the notes add 1683 and 1684 (John R. Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1993). The name "Revolt of the Three Feudatories" and the 1645 novel illustration come from outside the textbook.
• Slide J (steppe-closed). Correction: Ebrey says the Mongols had "only bows and arrows," speaks of "two thousand years" of northern border problems, and dates the taking of Lhasa to 1718 (p. 274). Galdan's Zunghars used muskets; the Qing force of 1718 was destroyed, and Lhasa fell in 1720. Sources: Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West (2005); Luciano Petech, China and Tibet in the Early XVIIIth Century (1972). The Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) and the history of the guns come from outside the textbook.
• Slide L (jesuits-court). Moved from the notes: Verbiest's direction of the Bureau of Astronomy (1669–1688) and the observatory instruments come from outside the textbook.
• Slide M (rites-ban). Correction: Ebrey, and Review Question 13, say Kangxi "outlawed" the missionaries (p. 276). He restricted them from 1706 and stopped their preaching in 1721; the formal ban on Christianity came under Yongzheng in 1724. The notes give that sequence. Source: D. E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West (2013).
• Slide N (xinjiang). Moved from the notes: the design of the battle scenes by court artists and their engraving in Paris come from outside the textbook.
• Slide O (many-languages). Moved from the notes: Ebrey says Qianlong had "the child Dalai Lamas raised and educated in Beijing" (p. 276). Specialists would not say this of the Dalai Lamas; the court did raise high incarnate lamas in Beijing, such as Changkya Rolpe Dorje (1717–1786), so the claim is left off the slide (Patricia Berger, Empire of Emptiness, 2003). Ebrey's language list also adds Tangut; in Qing usage "Tangut" usually meant Tibetan, so the slide lists three languages.
• Slide R (queue-clipping). Moved from the notes: the date of the panic (1768) comes from Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (1990).
• Slide X (heshen). Correction: Ebrey dates the abdication to 1795 and gives Qianlong's age at death as eighty-nine (p. 277). He announced it in 1795 and handed over the throne in February 1796; eighty-nine is the Chinese count (he was eighty-seven). Heshen's forced suicide (1799) comes from outside the textbook.
• Slide Y (next). Moved from the notes: the gold letter box detail comes from accounts of the embassy, not from Ebrey.
• Slide AA (ps-jesuits-maps). Moved from the notes: the Jesuit survey of 1708–1717 and the atlas of 1721 come from outside the textbook.
• Slide BB (ps-rites-dispute). Moved from the notes: Ricci's method and Xu Guangqi come from outside the textbook.
• Slide CC (ps-pope-ruled). Moved from the notes: the edict of toleration (1692) and the papal bull of 1715 come from outside the textbook.
• Slide DD (ps-kangxi-angry). Correction: Ebrey says Kangxi "outlawed Christian missionaries" (p. 276); see the entry for the rites-ban slide (Mungello, 2013). Kangxi's handwritten comment on the papal decree comes from outside the textbook.
• Slide FF (ps-yongzheng). Correction: Ebrey's "forty-five" (p. 276) is the Chinese count; Yongzheng was born in December 1678 and took the throne in December 1722, at forty-four. His vermilion replies and the 1732 preface come from outside the textbook.
• Slide GG (ps-central-control). Moved from the notes: the Grand Council and the secret palace memorial come from outside the textbook. The point that the council grew powerful only under Qianlong follows Beatrice S. Bartlett, Monarchs and Ministers (1991).
• Slide HH (ps-tax-fix). Moved from the notes: the meltdown fee (huohao) reform of 1724 comes from outside the textbook; see Madeleine Zelin, The Magistrate's Tael (1984).
• Slide II (ps-surpluses). Moved from the notes: the link between the surpluses and Qianlong's campaigns, tours and projects is an inference from Ebrey, not her statement. The identification of the older man as Yongzheng, and the painting's date, are debated by art historians.
• Slide KK (ps-jiang-chun). Moved from the notes as an instructor prompt; now a student question: the textbook's Questions for Analysis ask why Jiang Chun's biographers wrote more about how he spent money than how he earned it.

Notes

1. Robert B. Oxnam, Ruling from Horseback: Manchu Politics in the Oboi Regency, 1661–1669 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); Lawrence D. Kessler, K'ang-hsi and the Consolidation of Ch'ing Rule, 1661–1684 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). ↩

2. Jonathan D. Spence, Ts'ao Yin and the K'ang-hsi Emperor: Bondservant and Master (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), on the southern tours and the emperor's private information network in Jiangnan. ↩

3. Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), is the essential account of the Zunghar wars, Qing logistics and the end of the steppe empires. ↩

4. Luciano Petech, China and Tibet in the Early XVIIIth Century: History of the Establishment of Chinese Protectorate in Tibet, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1972). ↩

5. Perdue, China Marches West, on the Zunghar campaigns; James A. Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), on how Xinjiang was governed and financed. ↩

6. Mark C. Elliott, Emperor Qianlong: Son of Heaven, Man of the World (New York: Longman, 2009), is a short, readable biography. On the Buddhist imagery, see Patricia Berger, Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003); on court institutions, Evelyn S. Rawski, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). ↩

7. Kuhn, Soulstealers. ↩

8. Jonathan D. Spence, Treason by the Book (New York: Viking, 2001), tells the Zeng Jing case. ↩

9. R. Kent Guy, The Emperor's Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late Ch'ien-lung Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987). ↩

10. Mario Cams, Companions in Geography: East-West Collaboration in the Mapping of Qing China (c. 1685–1735) (Leiden: Brill, 2017); Catherine Jami, The Emperor's New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority during the Kangxi Reign (1662–1722) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). ↩

11. D. E. Mungello, ed., The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1994); for a general history of the mission, D. E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800, 4th ed. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013). ↩

12. Beatrice S. Bartlett, Monarchs and Ministers: The Grand Council in Mid-Ch'ing China, 1723–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). ↩

13. Madeleine Zelin, The Magistrate's Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth-Century Ch'ing China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). On the reign as a whole, see Pei Huang, Autocracy at Work: A Study of the Yung-cheng Period, 1723–1735 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974). ↩

14. Ping-ti Ho, "The Salt Merchants of Yang-chou: A Study of Commercial Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century China," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 17 (1954): 130–168; Meyer-Fong, Building Culture in Early Qing Yangzhou. ↩

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

Jonathan D. Spence, Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K'ang-hsi (1974). Kangxi in his own words, assembled from his writings; the best way into the man.

Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West (2005). The Zunghar wars and the making of the Qing frontier; essential for Q3 and Xinjiang.

Mark C. Elliott, Emperor Qianlong: Son of Heaven, Man of the World (2009). A short biography written for students, strong on the many faces of the emperor.

Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers (1990). The queue-clipping scare of 1768 and what it reveals about monarchy and bureaucracy.

R. Kent Guy, The Emperor's Four Treasuries (1987). The library project and the literary inquisition as one enterprise.

Madeleine Zelin, The Magistrate's Tael (1984). Yongzheng's fiscal reform and its fate.

D. E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800. A concise survey of the Jesuit mission and the rites controversy.

William T. Rowe, China's Last Empire: The Great Qing (2009). The best one-volume history of the dynasty, useful for all four lectures.