In the Qing dynasty, ritual shaped political community. And as we have seen so far, decisions of eighteenth-century emperors on ritual matters had accelerated participation by literati in state offerings, and by the first half of the nineteenth century, elites produced works of local history that added new registers of meaning to these ritual practices. State ritual thus came to depict differing visions of the polity.Then, between 1850 and 1864 the Taiping movement mounted a massive assault on the Qing, and its adherents used ritual to articulate political alternatives. For defenders of the dynasty, the rebellion reinforced the conviction that proper ritual practices were essential to the restoration of civilization. In Nanjing, capital of the rebellion and center ofpost-war reconstruction, victorious armies and returning urban elites built shrines to console the souls of the dead, temples to re-establish government offerings, and schools to teach proper ritual practices. Qing state ritual carried new weight in the post-Taiping period, serving variously as guide for the building and rebuilding oftemples in Nanjing, as occasion for reasserting Nanjing's place in the Qing empire, and as mode ofinterpreting the city's past.These engagements with ritual both reflected new understandings of the polity and constituted new ways of regenerating state power. Emperors receded in importance as the actions of subjects became seen as the root of the strength of the dynasty. As regionally based sources ofrevenue, military power, and administrative expertise supplemented (and perhaps undermined) centraI govemment procedures, ritual activity became the primary means of expressing affmities between regionalism and state building. Nineteenth-century formulations of political community differed significantly from those ofthe eighteenth and twentieth centuries. In the eighteenth century, one's relationship to the emperor had tended to defme one's place in the polity. In the twentieth century, contestations over central government authority would be expressed most forcefully in terms of the nation. In their efforts to elucidate late imperial foundations of the modern nation state, scholars have tended to use teleological concepts that have obscured the dynamism of nineteenth-century politics. As a result, nineteenth-century processes of conceptualizing the polity, formulating political problems, and contesting opposing views are still not fully understood. This case study of Nanjing has demonstrated that closer attention to ritual practices can reveal nationalism to be but one of many possible outcomes of nineteenth-century tumult.For example in his c1assic 1957 work, The King's Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorowicz investigated a medieval European image of the monarch as having a mortal and immortal body. The mortal body was the person of the king, but the immortal body represented the body politic, the state itself. Representations of this incorruptible body drew on a powerful existing model of immortality, that of Christ. Because religious ideas informed these portrayals, Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King 's Two Bodies: Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957(Reprint with a new preface by William Chester Jordon, 1996) subtitled his work A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Portrayals of the state demarcated communities. What Kantorowicz called the "mystic fiction" ofthe king's two bodies was but one example ofhow religious imagery might make a constructed form of community appear natural and cohesive. Employing the figure of Christ also expressed the claim that the polity had priority over other, non-divine markers of community such as family and village.Beginning from different theoretical assumptions, Angela Zito has drawn similar conclusions about eighteenth-century Qing emperors: Power was not predicated upon a state-versus-civil-society model wherein a sovereign subject (king/state) oppresses a passive object (people/society). Power was instead generated through aseries of macrocosmic/microcosmic resemblances, through the authority to exemplify for the totality an ideal cosmo-social order. The king claimed the authority to instantiate the yerfect part and thus to enable the existence of the perfect whole.The perfection of the monarch was never unquestioned, but in the nineteenth century the claim ‚to enable the existence of the perfect whole became less and less compelling as population growth, shifts in the world economy, and foreign imperialism undermined the authority of the emperor.The challenges to imperial rule invoked "ideal cosmo-social orders," but the way the imagined community related to the cosmos differed from the relationship enacted in eighteenth-century court ritual. For Nanjing elites and Taiping adherents, no individual "instantiated the perfect part." Monarchs remained significant figures, but access to gods (or God) was broader and more direct. Pre-war Nanjing literati sidestepped the claims of Qing emperors by invoking Ming models and by staging their own offerings to Confucius. Early Taiping leaders personated the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and Taiping Sabbath regulations required that each member of the community express thanks to God. Post-war shrines suggested that the continued survival of the dynasty rested in the willingness ofsubjects to defend it rather than the virtue ofthe emperor who ruled it; more than the living emperor, the dead soldiers embodied the polity.
The political views of Qing emperors were thus one aspect of a much larger field of debate. Because Kantorowicz's "political theology" seems too limited to encompass the diversity of practices involved, we instea use the term "utopian visions" to describe alternative conceptions of politics in nineteenth-century China. As the model of a strong emperor with a civilizing mission to "teach and transform" (jiao hua) his subjects became increasingly distant from reality, different movements sought to legitimize new ideals of government. Despite the often violent conflict between adherents, they often shared similar rhetoric and aspirations. Yun Maoqi's idea ofharmonious qi, the Taiping vision of a "Great Peace," and the post-war hope for renewed moral vigor each was described as the return to a past when people better understood the workings of the cosmos and could thus create a society that would foster virtue (defined variously as a state of mind, a relationship with God, or a willingness to support the Qing against its enemies).
These ideas were "utopian" because nineteenth-century movements described the state in relationship to some larger world. Given certain cosmic truths, governments had corresponding obligations. Nanjing's elite residents held that qi was in astate of degradation, but that the moral activism of educated men could revive (or at least address the problems in) the cosmos. The Taiping portrayed the world as created by God yet dominated by demons, and it followed that representatives of God should lead believers to exterrninate the demons. A representation of the cosmos thus implied a view of the nature ofthe polity, dictated certain practical (shi) actions, and condemned competing visions and movements as vacuous (kong). It is this depiction of the relationship between cosmos, polity, and political activism that leads me to describe nineteenth-century movements as advocates of "utopian" rather than "cosmological" or "religious" visions. Each movement sought to make Nanjing the center of ideal order, to situate the city in the center of a much broader geography, to create a place where cosmic harmony (which otherwise had no place; it was thus "utopian" in the literal sense) could be realized. Ritual was intrinsic to these efforts. Catherine Bell has shown that studies of ritual often reify an opposition between "thought" and "action" in which the former is given conceptual primacy. The term "utopian visions" may appear to correspond to the thought side ofthis dichotomy, and "state offerings" to the action side. In fact, these nineteenth century utopias all included ritual as one productive form of discourse. The elements of an offering seemed to provide tangible evidence of the idealized cosmos, -and the participants in the ritual declared themselves to have a shared frame of reference to the polity as a whole. These common concerns in nineteenth-century conflicts over ritual were not issues of mere form; they could shape the Qing state or define alternative modes of governance. Many of these conflicts centered on the city ofNanjing, whose imperial past facilitated efforts to depict it as an alternative seat of empire. Nanjing's potency continued after 1911 into the Republican Period when Nationalists sought to establish a new form of government. The common administrative geography of Taiping and Nationalist movements suggests continuity over time, but with regard to li, the ideas of Taiping rebels, Nanjing elites, and Qing officials were more similar to each other than they were to those of the twentieth-century founders of the Republic of China.
Treating ritual as one way of producing state power makes both supporters and enemies ofthe dynasty active participants in similar collective enterprises. In this view, the state was not the monopoly of the emperor and his ministers. Because numerous discrete acts enabled the exercise of authority, any given situation had the potential for multiple possible outcomes. Both static and teleological views of the state obscure this fact. Several factors have contributed to the impression that the nineteenth century was but a lead up to the main events ofthe twentieth century. Prasenjit Duara has shown the ways that enlightenment concepts of progress and linear history have shaped narratives of the formation ofthe nation state.(Duara, Rescuing History From the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1995).
Nationalist and Communist historiography inherited this view. Because both regarded the Taiping Rebellion as a failed revolution, the post-war period was necessarily a time of stagnation until revolutionary forces- could regroup. These teleological views remain subtly embedded in the language of our histories of the nineteenth century. The word "public," for example, suggests a nascent Republic. It posits a group of people whose interests transcend their particular ties to family, native place, faction, or c1ass. Calling something "public" gives an artificial answer to the question "what does political community look like?" Attention to the ways historical actors articulated answers to this question reveals an array of alternatives rather than simply a budding nation.The phrase "fall of the Qing" carries similar difficulties. It treats the dynasty as a crumbling edifice, unable to adjust to the march of progress, and also scopes the way historians have asked questions about the period. Instead of looking for shifts in the forces that had regenerated Qing authority, scholars have tended to look at events that weakened the dynasty. The narrative of the nineteenth century becomes one of failure to respond without taking into account the ways the exercise of Qing power evolved over the course of the century and led in different directions.
Claimes by most Historians on the subject, have presented the view, that the dynasty's various domestic wars were conflicts between state and society rather than between different states. This interpretation uncritically accepts the claims of Qing ruling elites while relegating rival assertions of political authority to the realm of society, a construct (as Michael Tsin has shown) invented in the twentieth century, when politicians sought to assert a unitary state and body politic to counter the fragmentary nature of the new nation.(Tsin, Nation, Governance, and Modernity in China: Canton 1900-1927 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Taking this into a new phase of investigation, by reconstructing the importance of ritual in asserting and enacting the claims to state power, we will detail for the first time, a politics that was distinctive to nineteenth-century China. Different groups attempted to constitute the state, but in fact there was no single state, only competing claims to authority.
Violent as they were thus, a lurking question in nineteenth-century political movements was: "what is the right kind ofritual?" Moving from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, this question became less important for political thinkers. The shifting discourse of ritual is thus one way of demarcating the nineteenth century from the twentieth.
In this context we have discoverred several examples of Qing power, as expressed and enacted in state ritual, being reformulated without being undermined. Prior to the Taiping rebellion, Nanjing elites sought to define themselves as a group at the center ofthe Qing empire, a local critique ofimperial power that nevertheless maintained the dynasty. Nanjing literati agreed with the Yongzheng emperor that offerings cultivated virtue, but they claimed that such virtues in fact limited the autocratic authority of emperors and obligated political participation by the empire's educated elites. This view had existed at least since the Ming dynasty, but at the beginning ofthe nineteenth century population growth, economic shifts, and European colonial expansion were forcing emperors to begin to realign the dynasty's relationship to local elites. The result was a feedback loop. As elites gained more opportunities in ritual and government, they asserted more claims. The Qing registry of offerings reflected this tension as literati proposed, and emperors approved more and more gods and exemplars for inclusion.
The Taiping Rebellion however was a tipping point of this trend. Repeated defeats of Qing Green Standard and banner forces, combined with the lack of meaningful Qing local administration over large swaths ofthe empire (including Nanjing) ultimately convinced literati such as Wang Shiduo that a different kind ofpolitics was both necessary and possible. These reflections led him to join the regional armies that were fighting the Taiping. For these armies, enshrinement was part of a complex of ways that they accounted for and commemorated the dead. Such rituals, they believed, not only consoled the troubled souls of the fallen, but also produced virtues that would prevent further unrest.
Most scholars have viewed the victory of Zeng Guofan's Hunan Army as a triumph of regionalism. And while it is certainly true that Zeng and others relied on native place connections and regional networks to fund, supply, and carry out reconstruction, the performance of offerings (alongside the revival of the examination system, the opening of schools and academies, and the publication of books) helped Zeng to articulate his goals in terms that included the entire empire. Zeng's offerings to Confucius were not marked as Hunanese; they were described as culture itself. The money, materiel, and time he dedicated to researching and reviving the cult in Nanjing, even in aperiod of widespread devastation, is indicative of the importance he placed in both the idea of li and in its specific enactrnent in offerings. Through most of the nineteenth century, ritual was not the only way of expressing alternatives, but it was particularly important in giving people throughout the empire aceess to the symbol of empire. By making these symbols meaningful in ehanging loeal eontexts, Nanjing elites supported the Qing. It is not the ease that the state was an actor eompeting with other aetors to shape the meaning of a partieular image or aet within a ritual. Rather, the images that Nanjing residents produced, and the offerings in which they participated, were part of what constituted the state.
Throughout the period we will describe further, ritual was said to both refleet and demonstrate deeper truths about the cosmos. At the end of the nineteenth eentury, however, other forms ofknowledge, such as science, economics, and diplomacy gained prominenee. Reformers deseribed "ritual" (li) as inadequate or downright false. This shift of debate from how to perform ritual to how to evaluate the category "ritual" had implications for the Qing state. Throughout the nineteenth century statecraft compilations inc1uded the category of "ritual administration" li zheng. Between 1899 and 1914, "ritual administration" appeared in only one of collections of statecraft writings. "Foreign intercourse" (wai jiaa) emerged as a way of describing relations with other countries, and "schools"continued to describe education initiatives. Government officials continued to perform offerings, but to those proposing reform, these offerings did not seem essential to good govemment.
This shift may have resulted from a combination ofthe Taiping War and foreign missionary activity. As we have seen, during the war each side had sought to debunk its opponents' version of ritual as empty and impractical while promoting its own as in accord with the cosmos. Participants in this struggle had framed the issue as one of understanding the right kind of ritual and knowing how to perform it. Missionaries echoed the critique that Chinese ritual was unchanging, empty, and useless, but claimed that their own ritual practices differed from li. One could also say, that discourse shifted from a "knowing how" (how to perform the right kind of ritual) to a "knowing that" (knowing that li were ossified, meaningless, repetitive traditions). Subsequent effons to naturalize power no longer relied on ritual.
Nevertheless, ritual (li) has remained a prerogative of government. Rebecca Nedostup has shown the ways it was deployed against the idea of superstition in the Republican period. It remained the word for protocols of foreign relations and ceremonies of commemoration. Officials no longer claimed that ritual could bring about cosmic equilibrium, especially as the sciences were offering new models of portraying the role of people in the universe, but the rituals of the nation-state continued to shape urban life in Nanjing. The most notable ofthese were ceremonies honoring martyrs: sites around the city commemorate those who died in the 1911 revolution, the War Against Japan, and of course the 1937 Rape ofNanjing. As Republican capital, Nanjing was home to Chiang Kai-shek's secret police, and the grounds where Communists were once executed are now a museum where "ceremonies" (yi shi) are held.
Leaders of the People' s Republic of China today face questions about government that echo earlier formulations ofpolitical problems. The ubiquity of corruption, the emergence ofregional centers ofpower, and the changing articulation ofthe guiding ideology ofthe state suggest the potential for new articulations ofstate power. Party leaders are justifiably nervous about the emergence of regional centers of power and the capacities of religious groups to depict moral, political, and cosmic alternatives to the existing order. There are diverse ideas about what (if any) part ofthe past might serve as a model for further changes.
Treating the nineteenth century as an age of utopian visions can help illuminate paths not taken, but perhaps still available. The twenty-first century Chinese Communist government has increasingly come to resemble the twentieth-century Nationalist one. This resemblance should remind us of the continuing reformulations of the Chinese polity. As Chinese officials grapple with problems oflegitimacy, state power, and political participation, there is still potential for utopian alternatives to the existing order to emerge.