Introduction: Until the 1830’s, they seemed almost invulnerable to European attack. By 1840 that old immunity was dead in the case of China and dying in Japan . Instead, both states came under growing pressure from the Europeans. Britain, Russia and the United States took the lead. They demanded free access to the ports of East Asia, freedom to trade with Chinese and Japanese merchants, and an end to the diplomatic protocols under which Westerners had the status of barbarians, culturally and politically inferior to the Middle Kingdom and Japan. They accompanied these demands by the demonstration and use of military force, and by territorial demands - coastal and modest (though far from trivial) by the maritime British, much larger by continental Russia. Not surprisingly, this traumatic alteration in their international position had far-reaching political, cultural and economic consequences in China and Japan. By 1880, both had undergone a series of internal changes that were revealingly described by their makers as 'restorations': the T'ung-chih ('Union for Order') restoration in China, the Meiji ('Enlightened rule') restoration in Japan. Both were the result of the convergence of internal stresses and external threat. But, as we shall see, their trajectories were very different, and so was the scale of the transformation they promised.They had to run two races at once: a race to self-strengthen before Europe arrived in force; and a race to 'reform' before internal dissent wrecked all hope of success. Of the great Eurasian states beyond Europe, China (above all) and Japan had always been the richest, strongest and least accessible to European influence. Until the r830s, they seemed almost invulnerable to European attack. By 1840 that old immunity was dead in the case of China and dying in Japan. Instead, both states came under growing pressure from the Europeans. Britain, Russia and the United States took the lead. They demanded free access to the ports of East Asia, freedom to trade with Chinese and Japanese merchants, and an end to the diplomatic protocols under which Westerners had the status of barbarians, culturally and politically inferior to the Middle Kingdom and Japan. They accompanied these demands by the demonstration and use of military force, and by territorial demands - coastal and modest (though far from trivial) by the maritime British, much larger by continental Russia . Not surprisingly, this traumatic alteration in their international position had far-reaching political, cultural and economic consequences in China and Japan . By 1880, both had undergone a series of internal changes that were revealingly described by their makers as 'restorations': the T'ung-chih ('Union for Order') restoration in China , the Meiji ('Enlightened rule') restoration in Japan. Both were the result of the convergence of internal stresses and external threat. But, as we shall see, their trajectories were very different, and so was the sle of the transformation they promised. China was the first to feel the weight of European displeasure. The occasion was the breakdown of the old 'Canton system' for China 's trade with Europe .
In 1684 the British East India Company secured permission to trade through Canton . Until the 1710s, company ships were each directed by a supercargo-an agent who oversaw arrangements for a given port. The supercargoes, in turn, could trade only with the "Co-Hong," Chinese merchants authorized by the Chinese government to serve as liaisons. The hongmerchants rented out warehouse spaces (factories) in segregated neighborhoods at the edges of Canton but unlike the earlier period when Jesuit Priests were able to visit, now, prohibited Westerners from interacting with the general population.
In 1757 the Qianlong emperor restricted Western traders to a district in Canton through the trading season ending in the spring. Traders returned to Macao until early fall. Forbidden to learn Chinese from locals, they had to use the Hong merchants' "linguists," who generated a commercial lingua franca-pidgin (business) English. Western traders, who interacted primarily with Hong merchants, servants, sailors, and shopkeepers, rarely met the literati who had so impressed the Jesuits.
Under this system, Canton was the only port through which the trade - confined to a closely regulated guild of Chinese merchants (the 'Hong') - was lawful. Europeans (who were allowed to maintain warehouses - 'factories' - on the quay) were forbidden to live permanently in the city, departing for Macao at the close of the trading season. The end of the East India Company monopoly of British trade in r833, and the rapid increase in the number of 'free' British merchants selling opium - almost the only commodity that the Chinese would accept for their tea, apart from silver - brought on a crisis. When the Chinese authorities, alarmed by the flood of opium imports and the outflow of silver (the basis of China's currency) to pay for them, as well as by the widespread flouting of the rule that all foreign commerce must pass through Canton, tried to re impose control, driving away the British official sent to supervise the trade and confiscating contraband opium, the uproar in London led to military action. In February r84r the Royal Navy arrived off Canton, the Chinese war fleet was destroyed, and an invading force landed in the city. When the Chinese prevaricated, a second force entered the Yangtze delta, occupied Shanghai , smashed a Manchu army, and closed the river and the Grand Canal (the main artery of China 's internal trade). By August 1842 the British had arrived at Nanking , the southern capital of the empire, and prepared to attack it. The emperor capitulated, and the first of the 'unequal treaties' was signed.
Under the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, five 'treaty ports' were opened to Western trade, Hong Kong island was ceded to the British, the Europeans were allowed to station consuls in the open ports, and the old Canton system was replaced by the freedom to trade and the promise that no more than 5 per cent duty would be charged on foreign imports. It was a staggering reversal of the old terms on which China had dealt with the West. But its significance (at this stage) should not be overstated. Irksome as the treaty was to the Chinese authorities, it had certain merits. The foreigners were kept well away from Peking , could not travel freely, and, under the system of consular jurisdiction, would be carefully segregated administratively from the Chinese population.74 To a great inland, agrarian empire, the snapping of barbarians on the distant coast was a nuisance to be neutralized by skilful diplomacy.But the treaty was not the end of the matter. It was followed by continual friction between Chinese and Europeans. By r 8 54 the British were pressing hard for its revision, to open more ports and allow Europeans to move freely into the interior and widen the scope of their trade. In 1856, the 'Arrow' incident, when the Chinese seized a ship allegedly flying the British flag, became the excuse for a second round of military coercion. When the Chinese stalled the implementation of a new treaty agreed in 1858, an Anglo-French expedition arrived at Tientsin and marched on Peking , burning the emperor's palace in the ‘forbidden City.’
Now back to the Qigong literate and elite residents of Nanjing.
As can be imagined from the above, events in the early nineteenth century galvanized Nanjing's elites, convincing them that the strength of the polity depended on their active involvement in administration of both city and empire. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, these events were mostly distant: the White Lotus Rebellion in Sichuan and Henan and the Eight Trigram uprising in the North China Plain. Nevertheless, beginning in 1814 the experiences of literati in Nanjing confirmed their sense ofthe need to reinvigorate govemment. That year, severe floods struck the city, prompting the city's elite residents to organize relief efforts. The silting ofthe Grand Canal in 1824 seemed to confirm that Nanjing's ecological problems were related to problems of govemance, as did the frequency of subsequent flooding (1830-33, 1840, and 1848-49). The Opium War of 1839-1842 spurred the formation ofmilitias to combat the British, and the terms ofthe 1842 treaty was signed in Nanjing granting new privileges to the British strengthened the impression that imperial government was not up to addressing the challenges facing the city.
These events gave urgency to the desire ofNanjing's elite residents to reform government. Throughout the fIrst half of the century, the emotional pitch of their expressions of concern intensifIed. When literati diagnosed the root causes of flooding, foreign incursion, and rebellion, they (like Yun Maoqi) discerned the tendency of selfIsh interests to undermine social cohesion, the inability of elites to address the problem collectively, and the resulting imbalance of qi. These perceptions of political problems in turn shaped their sense of the importance of ritual for effecting change.
When Nanjing elites wrote about the problems afflicting the empire in the first half ofthe nineteenth century, they frequently referred to its "deterioration" (bi). They underscored the tendency ofthe selfIsh (si) to cheat (qi), deceive (zha), engage in corrupt (fan) acts, or otherwise undermine attempts to solve administrative problems. One version ofthis phenomenon was the use of government funds for personal gain. Another was the perceived inability of Qing provincial government officials to address new challenges like the opium trade. Tbis concern went beyond the bureaucracy; Nanjing's elites were equally worried about themselves. They feared that the process of gaining status and position corrupted those who took part. These nineteenth-century concerns about the ethical makeup of literati were in part responses to earlier characterizations of the class by eighteenth-century Qing emperors. (For details see Philip Kuhn and Susan Mann Jones, "Dynastie Decline and the Roots ofRebellion," pp. 107-162 in John K. Fairbank, ed., The Cambridge History ofChina, Vol. 10, The Late Ch 'ing, 1800-1911, Cambridge University Press, 1978).
One of the central problems of Qing governance involved the proper activities and responsibilities of elite men trained in the Classics. As Philip Kuhn has observed, the "cIassical curriculum.. .had taught [the elite] that educated men and a political vocation. ldeally they would realize this goal through government service, but strict examination quotas afforded this opportunity to only a very select few. Furthermore, because literati viewed themselves as inheritors and transmitters ofthe classical tradition, they feit obligated to criticize those government activities they believed violated received c1assical norms and to praise those initiatives seen to be in accord with ancient models.
By sharing their ideas about government policy from a moral standpoint, literati could claim prerogatives of official positions that were not otherwise available to them. Through essays, poetry, and letters criticizing imperial decisions, literati could also express (tacitly or directly) to educated elites throughout the empire an ideal of government: that considered scholarly opinion could be a check on the power of Qing monarehs. Both the eagemess of elites and officials to read such publications and the willingness ofQing emperors to tolerate open remonstrance changed over time.
Early Qing emperors were deeply suspicious of acts to affect policy that appeared to be part of coordinated campaigns outside of the emperor's control. As James Polachek has argued, politically motivated literati groupings conjured images of "perpetual factional warfare among riyal bureaucratic cliques, thus making effective imperial rule impossible." (Polachek, Inner Opium War, 1992, p. 19.) The Qing thus moved to limit formalliterati associations and to narrow the circle of people who deliberated on political appointments, thus reducing the likelihood of the formation of factional groups.
The imperial perception of the dangers of morally inspired literati remonstrance was intimately tied to interpretations of the fall of the Ming. The Qianlong emperor attributed the decline ofthe Ming dynasty to self-interested maneuvering on the part ofbands of literati who allowed their political goals to obstruct the larger interests ofthe dynasty. "Before long," wrote the Qianlong emperor, they ceased asking whether their actions supported the state, and even came to regard beatings at court as expanding their reputations for being straightforward and honest. This kind of thing is fiendish and monstrous, and should not happen in the dynasty. We must prevent it from spreading.In short, even though the examination curriculum trained literati to treat political questions as moral issues, any attempt to claim a moral high ground in criticisms of the imperial bureaucracy could be (but was not always) treated as a danger to the dynasty, even tantamount to sedition.
Between 1800 and 1850, population growth, economic dislocation, and popular rebellion destabilized the dynasty, forcing a realignment ofthe relationship between Qing emperors and literati. Emperors grew more willing to acknowledge, even solicit, wide input on policy issues, and literati feIt that the growing social upheaval necessitated a more activist approach to both local and imperial politics. The accession of the Jiaqing emperor to the throne in 1799 proved to be a turning point. Jiaqing forced his father' s chief minister, Heshen, to commit suicide following revelations of a string of administrative abuses. Heshen, a Manchu, had amassed an enormous personal fortune, and many Han Chinese officials and literati blamed the length and severity of the White Lotus Rebellion (1796-1804) on Heshen's corrupt minions. The episode galvanized low-ranking and expectant officials into believing that collective action was necessary for good government in general and for their own career advancement. At the same time, the Jiaqing emperor issued a general call for suggestions on how to correct the problems that remained as the legacy ofHeshen.(David S. Nivison, "Heshen and His Accusers: Ideology and Political Behavior in the Eighteenth Century," pp. 209-244 in Confucianism in Action, ed. by David S. Nivison and Arthur F. Wright, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), pp. 240-244.)
Although he largely ignored the advice received, Jiaqing' s move signaled a change in the willingness of Qing emperors to accept forms of political participation outside of regular bureaucratic channels.One way for literati and officials to combat corruption was to band together in righteous opposition in order to expose it to the court. James Polachek has suggested that the Xuannan Poetry Club (Xuannan shi she) founded in 1814, was one such group. It did bring together numerous disaffected scholars at regular intervals in the southern part of Beijing. The main target of the ire of these scholars (who included Wei Yuan and Mei Zengliang) was the large government conservancy that managed grain transport along the Grand Canal to supply banner garrisons. Hoping to gain more power in government and to promote a more efficient system of sea transport that would eliminate the need for a grain conservancy, they worked to win positions in local administration in the lower Yangzi region. This scheme fell apart in 1827 as the Daoguang emperor became suspicious ofthe group's goals. This faHure convinced leading literati to pursue opposition to government policy from both inside and outside of the bureaucracy. (Polachek, Inner Opium War, 1992, pp. 55-59; 63.) Tobe effective, such opposition had to be' "pure" (qing m) and not self-interested. Elites thus concerned themselves with identifying possible sources of moral deterioration.
Although literati attempted to counter accusations of selfishness by Qing emperors, in fact many shared the Qianlong emperor' s view that parochial interests could undermine the good of the state. Understanding that most bureauerats were themselves products ofthe examination system (and thus drawn from the pool of educated elites) literati feit they could not solve the issue of corruption in government without examining their own class. Although scholarship and virtue were the defming attributes elites ascribed to themselves, it was clear that money could be very helpful in gaining both. Literati worried about the corrupting power of money, and the use of wealth for maintaining social position was acknowledged, but also condemned.
Status was a topic offrequent discussion in Nanjing. Like their counterparts throughout the empire, Nanjing's elites usually referred to themselves as "degreeholders" (shen) and "literati" (shi). Those accomplished in c1assical exegesis were recognized as "scholars" (ru), and those serving as officials in the Qing bureaucracy were "great men" (daifu). These terms highlighted academic accomplishment and moral cultivation, but masked the economic underpinnings of status.
In his essay "On Literati" (shuo shi), published in 1833, the Nanjing belletrist Guan Tong argued that the empire's elite c1ass had suffered from moral dec1ine. The desire for money was a key factor in this degeneration, for it contributed to corrupt management of collective resources. Guan claimed there were three levels (deng) of literati. The top level consisted of those who composed poetry and prose, followed in the middle by those who obtained office through success on civil-service examinations. The bottom group was those who accumulated and managed wealth. The two upper tiers of scholars, Guan argued, contributed to the greater social good. The lowest third consisted of merchants and clerks, people who "in their affairs cheat and deceive" and who "relyon their privilege to control officials". "The decline in the practices ofthe literati," Guan concluded, "has never been as great as it is today." Guan' s complaint summed up what he and his counterparts saw as a central conundrum of governance. Status in theory relied on scholastic achievement, but in practice the books, time, and teachers necessary for literary renown or examination success were only available to those with wealth. In Nanjing, the merchants who "relied on their privilege to control officials" were the parents of (or were themselves) the city' s famous poets and scholars. Although Guan described the talented, the powerful, and the wealthy as three groups of people, in fact his categories were ideal types. Many of Nanjing's most prominent residents combined wealth, belletristic acumen, and political involvement to cement their social status. When wealth was lacking, literati used talent and position to earn it. Guan' s essay reflects the consequent predicament - what if the need for cash undermined the virtues that education was supposed to cultivate? The problem, then, was and internal one - not merely "how do we fix government" but "because we are government, how do we fix ourselves?" (For details of the above see Guan Tong , "Shuo shi shang" [Discussion of the literati, part one], Yinji xuan wenji[prose writings of Guan Tong, second collection), 1833. Reprint (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1995).
Guan's contemporaries generally agreed with his account ofthe ubiquity of deterioration. Nanjing elites complained about the mishandling offamine relief, the manipulation of grain prices, and the mismanagement of grain transport. In disaster relief, there were few checks on the power of officials, literati managers, and yamen runners to abscond with funds. Nanjing literati blamed officials for failing to inspect affected areas or oversee relief operations, viewing famine as the result of poor preparation as well as bad weather.Mismanagement had various manifestations. When the strong pushed to the front of the line at food distribution centers, leaving the old and weak to go hungry, when gentry managers in charge of aHocating grain manipulated the size of the measures, skimming the difference for themselves, when yamen runners ground sawdust into the rice gruel in order to conceal the amount pilfered, the people suffered. Such improbity was thought to result from selfishness (si ). In response, Nanjing's literati did propose measures to combat corruption, replenish empty granaries, and relieve high prices. Local officials could issue ration coupons and increase supervision of granaries.They could forbid high-interest loans to starving peasants, and they could construct embankments to reduce the threat offlooding. But the success of these measures ultimately rested on the honesty ofthe people undertaking them.The underlying issue was character. Relief from famine and natural disasters ultimately lay in the cultivation of sincerity, cheng, a term we have already eneountered in reference to offerings. In this ease the word meant earnest application of one' s abilities, attention to detail, and working for the good of a larger eommunity. The question for government, therefore, was how to ensure sineerity in the handling of loeal affairs. Ritual bore on this question precisely beeause it too was thought to cultivate sineerity in participants.
While some residents of Nanjing were aetive in politics in the capital and throughout the empire, others foeused their efforts on the administration ofthe city. An implieit problem was: how does imperial politics affeet Nanjing? How ean activism in Nanjing affect the empire? Because ritual allowed actions to resonate in multiple spheres, it seemed to be one answer. In general, literati aetivism included running charitable organizations, brokering solutions to administrative problems, and donating money to urban institutions. As an illustration, consider the case of Wu Guanyu, 1760-1839). Wu was a man of philanthropie bent and organizational acumen, known for contributing to charitable causes and for encouraging others to follow suit. When the prefectura1 school burned down in 1819, he helped raise money for rebuilding. When a drought in 1814 1ed to famine, Wu offered 500 ounces of silver (jin) to endow a fund for victims, and when tloods ravaged the city in 1823, the compounded interest from the original sum (more than 20,000 copper cash) was still available for relief. When his mother died, he donated 1,000 ounces ofsilver from the sale ofher jewelry to the city's horne for widows. (Biography ofWu by his sons, and epitaph by Cheng Enze in. [Collected Poems of Wu Guangyu], 1844. University of British Columbia Library.)
Conclusion of part 1 to 3: At this point one can say that like the Spirit Music Temple and the shrines to Fang Xiaoru, the prefectural school bore the imperiallegacy of the early Ming. Each was particularly associated with the early Ming, when the Spirit Music Temple was used in the most august rituals, when Fang Xiaoru was a powerful minister, and when the Imperial Academy had not yet degenerated into a mill where degrees were available for purchase. (See Alexander Woodside "The Divorce Between the Political Center and Educational Creativity in Late Imperial China," pp. 458-492 in Benjamin Elman and Alexander Woodside, ed. Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600-1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994).
All three places allowed educated residents access to that time through smells, sites, or sounds. The Spirit Temple had surrounding water and flora. Fang Xiaoru offered blood and tears. The school offered music that some identified as identical to the airs once-played in the Imperial Academy. And each site was a place of ritual.Literati in early nineteenth-century Nanjing saw qi as the fundamental stuff of the cosmos. Viewed as a discursive device, "qi" was indeed a building block, crucial for connecting the physical movement ofbodies in ritual to affairs of state and 10 the cosmos itself. Literati produced "qi" by writing: letters about the Opium War, poems a1;out city sites, stele inscriptions about temples, biographies of one another, ac counts ofNanjing's history , and treatises about the state of the world. In this writing, residents claimed that qi in general was in a denuded state, but that deeply moral acts could lead to its regeneration.
This connecting of virtuous action and cosmic renewal was the discursive work of literati writing about qi. From that association, others followed. Literati could treat such various activities as raising money for boatmen, fighting the British, criticizing the emperor, or making offerings at a shrine as acts that could reshape the polity. Constructing meaning in the city was a project familiar to Nanjing's elite residents because the city had once been capital of the empire, and because many came from families who had been involved in maintaining the city's Ming past through the literary production of qi. Literati in Nanjing understood how a place could be several things at once - a palace could also be a military encampment, for example. Their maps, their ritual spaces, and their utopian visions reflected this sense of simultaneity. They constituted themselves as elites, Nanjing as their city, and the empire as centered around,and dependent on, literati activity. Literati depicted their centrality in the empire as natural and virtuous, and sought to translate their ritual efficacy into other forms of influence. They hoped for more aggressive defense against foreigners by literati-led militia. They wished to combat corruption in government and in their own class, and to make evident the problems of agitated qi: flooding, epidemics, and an unruly populace.(See also Alexander Woodside "The Divorce Between the Political Center and Educational Creativity in Late Imperial China," pp. 458-492 in Benjamin Elman and Alexander Woodside, ed. Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600-1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 1994).
In fact literati in Nanjing incubated avision that would, with the outbreak ofthe Taiping Rebellion, spur a search for political alternatives that allowed wider participation in administration in order to mobilize resources to fight the war. Elite ritual practice in Nanjing anticipated those changes by enacting their view ofhow the state should be. The primary justification for their claims was evidence found - and produced - in the city itself. Literati had made Nanjing a city ofvirtues, proofthat elite activity could and should be an integral part of imperial governance.