("The Search for Modern China")

[fiefoe]

Taiping to me is when Chinese history turns truly dark, but Jonathan D. Spence gave me a nice refresher on the period between Ming and Qing in the first eight chapters.

• make it clear how much China's history illuminates its present. China's Communist government can claim, with validity, revolutionary credentials. But it is also a giant bureaucracy whose leaders insist on their right, in the name of a higher truth, to define people's aspirations in virtually all spheres of life. So it was in the late Ming and early Qing states of the seventeenth century.
• * The loosely woven fabric of late Ming China's state and economy began to unravel at many points. Falling tax revenues led to failures to pay the army promptly. Troop desertions encouraged border penetration by hostile tribes. A flow of silver from the West brought unexpected stresses in the Chinese economy. Poor state granary supervision and harsh weather conditions led to undernourishment and a susceptibility to pestilence among rural populations. Random gangs of the disaffected coalesced into armies whose only ideology was survival.
• Those who brought order out of this chaos were neither peasant rebels nor estranged scholar-officials, but Jiirchen tribesmen from across China's northern frontiers who called themselves Manchus. Their victory was based on their success in forming a system of military and administrative units and the nucleus of a bureaucracy long before they were ready to conquer China. With these institutions in place, and with large numbers of surrendered or captured Chinese serving these tribesmen
• The patterns of Manchu advance from north to south and from east to west followed the logic of the terrain and the need to incorporate areas of critical political and economic importance firmly into the structures of the new state. (Both the timing and direction of the Manchu advance were startlingly echoed by the Communists when they united China in 1949.
• There were also some synagogues, where descendants of early Jewish travelers still congregated, and dispersed small groups with hazy memories of the teachings of Nestorian Christianity, which had reached China a millennium earlier. The lesser grandeur of China's city architecture and religious centers represented not any absence of civic pride or disesteem of religion, but rather a political fact: the Chinese state was more effectively centralized than those elsewhere in the world; its religions were more effect tively controlled; and the growth of powerful, independent cities was prevented by a watchful government that would not tolerate rival centers of authority.
• Perhaps in all this outpouring, it is the works of the short-story writers and the popular novelists that make the most important commentary about the vitality of Ming society, for they point to a new readership in the towns, to new levels of literacy, and to a new focus on the details of daily life. In a society that was largely male-dominated, they also indicate a growing audience of literate women.
• The mountains are at their loveliest / and court cases dwindle,
  "The birds I saw off at dawn, / at dusk I watch return,"
  petals from the vase cover my seal box, / the curtains hang undisturbed.
  This sense of peace and order, in turn, prompts a more direct response to nature, when official duties can be put aside altogether, the literary overlays forgotten, and nature and the simple pleasures enjoyed on their own terms:
  山色好，讼庭稀。朝看飞鸟暮飞回，印床花落帘垂地。(牡丹亭 第五出)
• Indeed the distinction between town and country was blurred in China, for suburban areas of intensive farming lay just outside and sometimes even within the city walls, and artisans might work on farms in peak periods, or farmers work temporarily in towns during times of dearth.
• The social structure was further complicated by the bewildering variety of land-sale agreements and rental contracts used in China... The definition of a land sale, furthermore, was profoundly ambiguous. Most land sales were conducted on the general understanding that the seller might at some later date reclaim the land from the buyer at the original purchase price, or that the seller retained "subsurface" rights to the soil while the purchaser could till the land for a specified period.
• * Tang Xianzu gently mocks the rustic yokels of China, putting into deliberately inelegant verse the rough-and-ready labor of their days:
  Slippery mud, / sloppery thud, / short rake, long plough, clutch 'em as they slide.
  After rainy night sow rice and hemp, / when sky clears fetch out the muck,
  then a stink like long-pickled fish / floats on the breeze.
  泥滑喇脚支沙，短耙长犁滑律的拿。夜雨撒菰麻，天晴出粪渣，香风腌蚱。
• Emperor Wanli: For years on end he held no court audiences to discuss key political events, gave up his studies of the historical and philosophical texts that lay at the heart of Confucian learning, refused to read state papers, and even stopped filling the vacancies that occurred in the upper levels of officialdom. <> The result was that considerable power accrued to the court eunuchs
• * As scholars will, they sought a theoretical cause for the trouble: many of them concluded that the corruption sprang from a breakdown of the general ethical standards, from flaws in the educational system, and from the growth of an unbridled individualism. The villain, to many of these critics, was the earlier Ming philosopher Wang Yangming, who had argued in his writings that the keys to ethical understanding lay in our own moral nature and, hence, that any person had the power, through innate knowledge, to understand the meaning of existence... Wang's doctrine led to eccentric behavior, the rejection of normative forms of education, and the call for a new egalitarianism.
• To combat these trends, certain late sixteenth-century scholars who held a rigorously moral view of the significance of Confucian thought began to gather in philosophical societies. By 1611, the most famous of these societies—founded in 1604 and known as the "Donglin Society" for the building where it was based in the Jiangsu city of Wuxi—had become a major force in politics.
• the Chinese managed to hold the Mongol raiders in check only by paying them regular subsidies. On the southeast coast, Chinese cities were ravaged by pirate groups, sometimes numbering in the hundreds and including a great many Japanese as well as Chinese fugitives, and even black slaves who had escaped from the Portuguese outpost at Macao.
• troops were sent in force to help the hard-pressed Koreans. The war might have continued, at terrible cost to all three countries, had not domestic turmoil in Japan, coupled with effective disruption of Japanese supply lines by the Korean navy, led to the recall of Japanese troops from Korea in 1598. As it was, the strains of the war fed a growing crisis in Manchuria, where groups of Jiirchen tribesmen were beginning to coalesce in armed bands under the leadership of a talented chieftain named Nurhaci,
• By the 1600s, following the emperor's ban of direct trade by Chinese merchants with belligerent Japan, the Portuguese had moved into the resulting commercial vacuum as middlemen. They made fortunes by buying up Chinese silk, in local markets and shipping it to Japan, where they traded it for silver from Japanese mines. With this silver, which was valued more highly in China than in Japan, the Portuguese returned and bought larger stocks of Chinese silk. <> The steady flow of silver brought by the Portuguese into China was itself just one element in the larger pattern of silver shipments that brought major economic effects to all parts of the world in the sixteenth century.
• At the same time, however, the massive influx of silver to China brought a range of problems that included inflation, speculation in business, and an erratic economic growth in certain cities that disrupted traditional economic patterns. <> Thus, before Wanli's reign ended with his death in 1620, China was beginning a complicated economic slide. The thriving world of the Ming merchants, which had led to the efficient distribution of luxury goods on a countrywide basis and had spawned an effective proto-banking system based on notes of exchange, suffered from the military troubles of the times.
• China's trade—while never effectively taxed by the state, which concentrated mainly on the agricultural sector—was extremely vulnerable to extortion and confiscation by corrupt eunuch commissioners in the provinces,
• * International trade patterns changed as raiders from the Protestant Dutch and British nations sought to expand their own trading empires by wrecking those of the Catholic Spaniards and Portuguese. This led to a massive drop in silver imports into China, which encouraged hoarding and forced the ratio of copper to silver into a decline... The effect on peasants was disastrous, since they had to pay their taxes in silver, even though they conducted local trade and sold their own harvests for copper.
• * For his part, in a bitter quarrel that showed how swiftly violence flared and how easily the rebel alliance could fragment, Li Zicheng demanded of his fellow rebels that he be given the captured eunuch musicians whose job had been to play ritual music at the tombs. The rebel leader who held the musicians, Zhang Xianzhong, reluctantly complied, but smashed all their instruments first. Li then killed the unfortunate musicians.
• Foremost among the Ming generals was Yuan Chonghuan, whose career may be seen as exemplifying some of these late Ming tensions... Yuan was able to hold the Liao River against Nurhaci. In 1628 he was named field marshal of all northeastern forces, but for reasons of jealousy he executed one of his most talented subordinates the following year... Yuan was falsely accused of colluding with them and was tried on a trumped-up charge of treason.

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• Instead of Jiirchen, Hong Taiji's people were now to be called Manchus. Manchu was a new term; though its exact meaning is not known, it was probably taken from a Buddhist term for "great good fortune," and implied a new measure of universality for the Qing state.
• The chance for further Manchu expansion looked frail indeed, but in the spring of 1644 Li Zicheng led his rebel army out of the Peking he had just seized and advanced across the plains east of the city to attack General Wu Sangui, whom Li saw as the last major defender of the Ming cause. General Wu turned from the Shanhaiguan pass and marched westward to confront Li. Seizing the incredible opportunity, the regent Dorgon rallied the troops of the boy Manchu emperor and led the armies of the Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese banners swiftly down the coast, crossing the border into China unopposed.
• 张自忠：He inflicted terrible punishments on those he believed were trying to betray him in Sichuan, beheading or maiming thousands of local scholars and their families, and even decimating whole regiments of his own armies. He finally abandoned the city of Chengdu in late 1646, burning much of it to the ground, and conducted a scorched-earth campaign of appalling thoroughness as he marched eastward.
• It was General Wu Sangui, once the Ming guardian of the Shanhaiguan passes, who in 1661 spearheaded a final attack by the Qing armies into Burma. The Burmese handed over the sad remnants of the Ming court to Wu,
• though eunuchs remained as supervisers in the imperial women's quarters, other court duties and special financial tasks were assigned to Chinese bondservants who had been captured and enslaved in Liaodong in the 1620s and 1630s. The eunuchs were also deprived of the quasi-military status they had had as palace guards under the Ming; instead, an elite corps of bannermen, many of them descendants of warriors who had helped found the original Jiirchen state under Nurhaci,
• * In most areas of governmental and intellectual organization, the Manchus were content to follow Chinese precedents. The six ministries, which were in charge respectively of civil affairs, finance, rituals, war, justice, and public works, were retained intact, although the leadership of each ministry was placed in the hands of two presidents, one a Manchu and one a Chinese bannerman or a civilian Chinese. A similar multiethnic dyarchy of four men (two Manchus and two Chinese) held the title of vice-president in each ministry.
• For the last year of his life, Shunzhi grew passionately enamoured of one of his junior consorts and completely neglected the reigning empress. At the same time he returned considerable power to the palace eunuchs and revived several eunuch bureaus that had been disbanded at the time of the Qing conquest... In another unusual development, Shunzhi became close friends with a Catholic Jesuit missionary, Father Johann Adam Schall von Bell... Schall von Bell's favored status may also have been another way for Emperor Shunzhi to express his independence, or even to rediscover the father that he had lost so young... Shunzhi died suddenly in 1661, probably from smallpox, not long after his beloved consort. (24? 岁)
• * But the idea of class warfare presumes a level of economic cohesion and self-consciousness concerning one's role in society that seems to have been lacking in China at the time. For each occasion on which one can find social tension, one can point to others in which the lines were crossed. Li Zicheng had several successful scholars from wealthy backgrounds on the staff of his Shun regime.. As we have seen, class lines in seventeenth-century China are difficult to unravel. They blurred and crossed in ways that are confusing to those of us whose historical sense of "class" may come largely from the study of the transition from feudalism to capitalism by means of an urban bourgeoisie who gradually won power—through force and representative institutions—from a reluctant nobility. <> In Ming and Qing China, there was almost no aristocracy as such. The descendants of the ruling families of even the greatest dynasties did not retain their titles and prestige once their dynasties had fallen... the Manchus' ingenious policy held that, within a system of nine aristocratic ranks, a given family dropped one rung on the ladder with each noble incumbent's death:
• Upper-class status came from an amalgam of four factors: wealth, lineage, education, and bureaucratic position.
• * the Manchus conspicuously failed in their attempt to have an efficient, up-to-date survey made of the landholdings of the wealthy Chinese, a survey that alone might have enabled the Manchus to institute an equitable land-tax system. The task was a vast one, and the paradox was that it depended on local Chinese, knowledgeable about local conditions, to carry it out.
• The Dutch stayed largely aloof from the fighting by the Ming loyalists in the 1640s and 1650s, but the development of the coastal war and its interconnections with Ming loyalism eventually made Dutch isolation impossible. The fighting escalated when the leader of the powerful and wealthy Zheng family, a pirate and trader who plied the waters between Fujian, Taiwan, and southern Japan, was finally made an official by the desperate Ming. Although he went over to the Qing court in 1646, his impetuous son, Zheng Chenggong, refused to do so. Instead he made his troops and ships available to the fleeing Ming, and continued to support them in name and deed even after they had been driven inland. <> This remarkable naval warrior, known to history as Koxinga,* had been born in 1624 to a Japanese mother, and his upbringing suitably reflected the polyglot world of international trade and cultural relations.
• Most famous of the three scholars was Gu Yanwu... his foster mother, who starved herself to death rather than submit to the new conquerors... Gu sought to develop a body of writings that would counter what he—like his contemporary Wang Fuzhi—saw as the moral hollowness of the dominant schools of Confucianism, with their emphases on metaphysical dualisms and intuition. Gu traveled over much of north China on horseback, examining farming practices, mining technology, and the banking systems of local merchants.
• In a series of essays drawn from his observations, he tried to lay the basis for a new kind of rigorous and pragmatic scholarship... paid special attention to philology, which he saw as a fundamental tool for evaluating the exact meaning of China's earlier scholarly legacy. He especially praised the scholars of the Han dynasty.. Gu was revered by many scholars who saw him as a model of scholarly precision and integrity;
• early Qing painters used their art to show their agitation and lack of faith in the regime. Through boldly innovative and eccentric brushwork, and the use of empty space in their compositions, they portrayed a world that was bleak or out of balance. Lone and twisted pine trees, desolate, angular mountain ranges, images of tangled foliage laid on paper in thick, wet strokes, isolated birds or fish—such were the subjects these artists often chose. Some of the most brilliant of these painters, like Shitao or Bada Shanren, were related to members of the fallen Ming ruling house 
• Kong Shangren's The Peach Blossom Fan: The heroine resists the advances of a wicked Ming minister, attacking him with her fan, which gets spattered with blood. A painter transforms the blood drops into part of a design of peach blossoms, giving the play its title and providing a brilliant metaphor for the mixture of violence and beauty that Kong saw as lying at the heart of late Ming moral and intellectual life.
• Though this was a major departure from traditional Chinese practices, it is worth noting that from the foundation of the Qing dynasty dealings with the Russians had been conducted not through the Ministry of Rituals, which handled the so-called tributary relations with such countries as Holland, Spain, and Portugal, but through a special bureau, the Lifan Yuan. This bureau had been an invention of Hong Taiji and dealt originally with problems of diplomacy and commerce with the Mongols.
• But in foreign policy, each solution leads to a fresh problem. The power politics of the region were not resolved by Galdan's death, and Kangxi found himself drawn into complex struggles with other Zunghar leaders when the Dalai Lama was murdered and an improperly chosen successor named in his place. This gave Kangxi the opportunity to invade Tibet in the name of righteous retribution (just as the Manchus had entered China in 1644);... and a new Dalai Lama, loyal to the Qing, was installed. Thus began the Chinese military intervention in the politics of Tibet.
• Kangxi period: This mutual hard line wrecked the power base of the missions in China and effectively prevented the spread of Western teaching and science. Had either side been more flexible, then later in the eighteenth century, when the Catholic church accepted the findings of Galileo and the missionaries started to introduce up-to-date Western astronomy to the Chinese, the new knowledge and techniques might have led to significant changes in Chinese attitudes about thought and nature.
• Since Kangxi—like Shunzhi before him—had given up on attempting a national survey of landholdings, China's land-tax system was now doubly frozen: land in the provinces remained registered according to the last reasonably full survey made in 1581 during Emperor Wanli's reign, and the numbers of per capita units subject to tax assessment were henceforth based on the 1712 figures. This was seriously to impede any attempt by Kangxi's successors to rationalize China's finances.
• Here the obligations of filiality to Emperor Kangxi were too strong, and Yongzheng did not attempt to change his father's 1712 ruling. Moreover the central premise of Chinese political theory, which the Manchus had also made their own, was that a low tax base was essential to the well-being of the country and the true proof of an emperor's benevolence.
• Kangxi had been content to give a brief summary of sixteen moral points to help his subjects lead obedient and peaceful lives. But Yongzheng elaborated on each of his father's maxims at great length, preparing lectures that were to be delivered by local scholars twice a month right down to the village level... It was a serious and thorough attempt at nationwide indoctrination, which, Yongzheng believed, would improve people's thoughts and behavior, and intensify their loyalty to the state. Such patterns of moral indoctrination would become a recurrent theme in later Chinese history, both after the great rebellions of the mid-nineteenth century and under the successive governments of the Chinese Nationalists and the Chinese Communists.
• Suzhou: Among the area's large labor force were men, legendary for their great physical strength, who used huge rollers, weighing a thousand pounds or more, to press and finish the cloth. These "calenderers," as they were called, worked furiously hard for poor wages.
• Kangxi: In other words, only now would the ministries in Peking and the grand secretaries be allowed to share in the full details that the emperor and a few favored officiais had been brooding about for seven years.
• Yongzheng was alerted to the extent of the problem early in his reign and determined to ban opium smoking, but since there was no clear precedent in the Chinese legal code, a number of different clauses had to be invoked by analogy. Thus opium dealers were to be sentenced, like those selling contraband goods, to wear the heavy wooden collar called the "cangue" for one month and then to be banished to a military frontier garrison.
• emancipate the "mean people" of China: social outcasts and were forbidden to serve in any government capacity or take the state exams: the "singing people" of Shaanxi and Shanxi, who sang and played music at weddings and funerals; the so-called "fallen people" of Zhejiang; the hereditary servants of Anhui and the hereditary beggars of Jiangsu; the boatmen, oyster gatherers, and pearl fishers from certain local tribes who worked in the dangerous seas off the southeast coast; the humble "hut dwellers" who gathered hemp and indigo on the Zhejiang-Fujian border;
• Here, as at other times in his reign, Yongzheng had a chance to learn that human nature could be obdurate, and that public pronouncements of moralistic concern did not necessarily change ingrown patterns of behavior; but we cannot tell if he took the lesson to heart. His belief in his own powers of persuasion remained intact, and he continued to exhort his officials and his subjects until the day he died. His practical moralism is a sign of how deeply the conventional Confucian virtues had been internalized by the Manchu rulers of the Qing state.
• by analyzing late imperial China in terms of units of economic integration rather than through the traditional provincial and prefectural subdivisions, we gain a different perspective on the society based on a body of data that was not available to the rulers and bureaucrats of the time. Scholars employing this approach have identified nine "macroregions" (as they term them), each embracing parts of several provinces.
• First, the northern macroregion—centered around Peking and western Shandong, and extending into Henan and northern Jiangsu: ... Cotton was becoming a valuable cash crop of this macroregion as both spinning and weaving techniques grew more efficient, often carried out in home-based cellar workshops that provided a "climatized" environment of controlled dampness to prevent the fragile strands from breaking.
• The task of the state, therefore, was to bond the macroregions together by ideological and administrative means—backed if necessary by military force. This task would be eased if trade links between separate macroregions also developed, as began to happen in the later eighteenth century.
• What does seem clear is that these demographic catastrophes made possible the economic revival and population rise of the eighteenth century, for in many areas there was good land going begging for tenants and cultivators. During Kangxi's rule, there was a resettlement of the devastated areas of north China and of the war-ravaged parts of once-prosperous Sichuan. In Yongzheng's reign, settlers began to push down into southwest China. Under his son Qianlong, Chinese began to defy government prohibitions and move into southern Manchuria in large numbers, and also to populate the uplands of the Yangzi and Han river drainage areas.
• * Following traditional practice, the families moving onto upland areas along the Yangzi and Han rivers, or into the forests of southern Manchuria, cleared these areas for agriculture without understanding the ecological effects of their actions. Although yields on virgin lands were high, intensive agriculture was rapidly followed by soil erosion and deforestation... Much of the country's population growth in the eighteenth century was speeded up by a massive ecological change: the introduction of new crops into China from the New World.
• * Compiling the Four Treasuries also served some of the functions of a literary inquisition, since private libraries were searched and those people owning works considered to be slighting to the Manchus were strictly punished. Such books, along with volumes of geography or travel containing information considered harmful to China's defenses, were destroyed. So thorough was this campaign that over 2,000 works that we know were scheduled for destruction by Qianlong's cultural advisers have never been rediscovered.
• * One can trace, running through many of Qianlong's pronouncements and actions, an undercurrent—faint yet disturbing. It is that of a man who has been praised too much and has thought too little, of someone who has played to the gallery in public life, mistaken grandeur for substance, sought confirmation and support for even routine actions, and is not really equipped to make difficult or unpopular decisions.
• 如日中天：When the sun stands at midday, it begins to set; when the moon is full it begins to wane. The fullness and emptiness of heaven and earth wane and wax in the course of time. How much truer is this of men, or of spirits and gods!
• the reason for the collapse of the Ming dynasty, and many of them found a satisfactory explanation in the extreme individualism and belief in innate moral knowledge that had been so popular in the late Ming. Senior scholar-officials under the early Qing emperors Shunzhi and Kangxi—as well as those emperors themselves—sought to counter what they considered decadent Ming trends by reasserting the central values of Song-dynasty (960-1279) Confucianism.... Zhu Xi (d. 1200) had given prominence to the view that there were indeed underlying principles that explained heaven's actions and guided human conduct. Understanding such principles, Zhu Xi and his later followers believed, would help men to live rationally and in tune with heaven, and would justify the attempts of moral men to find meaning in a public career. Thus there was a state-oriented tilt to Song Confucianism
• later Qing thinkers reject those Song norms and search for certainty elsewhere. By the time of Qianlong, many scholars had begun to find a new security not so much in particular texts as in a methodology. This methodology, which they called Kaozheng... They devoted their energies to studies in linguistics, mathematics, astronomy, and geography, confident that these would lead to greater certainty about what the true words and intentions of China's ancient sages had been... One of the tyxozheng heroes was Gu Yanwu, the Ming loyalist
• * It was extraordinarily difficult, for one thing, and hence enabled Kaozheng scholars to reformulate a vision of a scholarly elite that had become endangered by the swelling number of unemployed degree candidates in the eighteenth century. (The plight of that elite, and the corruptibility and pomposity of many self-satisfied scholars, were poignantly and amusingly caught in a novel entitled Unofficial History of the Scholars [Rulin waishi])... The elite world of kaozheng scholarship was largely closed to the poorer, self-educated scholars and to women.
• * "how to do it" painting manuals like the Mustard Seed Garden of 1701. From such a book, one could quickly learn to render a passable branch of plum blossom, a thatched cottage, or a distant mountain range, allowing any member of the educated public to produce a reasonable painting. In response, the literati painters now began to cultivate a greater sense of eccentricity, deliberately violating the norms of composition and color to show an "amateurism" that was in fact highly planned. Such eccentricity had been a feature of Ming loyalist painting in the seventeenth century, when it was used to convey a political position; by the eighteenth century, it showed a more class-conscious face.
• in the late eighteenth century many Qing government institutions began to falter: the emergency granaries were often empty, sections of the Grand Canal silted up, regular banner troops behaved with incompetence or brutality, efforts to stop ecologically dangerous land-reclamation projects were abandoned, the bureaucracy was faction-ridden, and corruption ran deep. It is also possible that Qing reluctance to create new county governments in areas of new settlement or dense population put impossible stresses on officials in the bureaucracy. Moreover, the intense pressure for jobs meant that those who had finally obtained office sought a swift return for all their waiting and anxiety, pressing local peasants in their jurisdictions for speedy tax payments and for supplementary charges. The White Lotus insurgents of the 1790s, for instance, stated categorically that "the officials have forced the people to rebel."
• Qianlong, having allowed the secret palace memorial system of his father Yongzheng to become impersonal and routine, now had no reliable, confidential sources from which to learn of his officials' malfeasance. <> There is no doubt that this pattern of corruption grew worse after 1775, when a young Manchu guards officer named Heshen became entrenched as the elderly emperor's court favorite,.. A homosexual liaison was implied in popular stories, such as one suggesting Heshen was the reincarnation of one of Emperor Yongzheng's concubines, with whom Qianlong had been infatuated as a youth.
• Heshen's dominance was even stronger after 1796. In that year, Qianlong "abdicated," an action devised as a "filial" one to show that he did not consider himself worthy to reign longer than the sixty-one years of his famous grandfather, Kangxi. But Qianlong did not allow his son to exercise power, and during this twilight period, even though Qianlong's name was not used in dynastic titles, it was his will that was manifested through Heshen's continuing official power.
• In the Ryukyu Islands, there was a curious case of divided loyalties. The islanders were in fact controlled by the southern Japanese lords of Satsuma, but on ritual occasions continued to profess themselves loyal tributary subjects of the Qing. Contemporary eighteenth-century accounts show Japanese ships retreating discreetly out of sight when Chinese diplomatic missions visited the islands, only to return promptly as soon as the Chinese left.
• But after the Success, sailing back to Canton, was lost at sea with all hands except for Flint (he had traveled south independently), the emperor changed his mind. Flint was arrested and imprisoned for three years for breaking Qing regulations against sailing to northern ports, for improperly presenting petitions, and for having learned Chinese.
• Macartney: "The Empire of China," he wrote in his journal, "is an old, crazy, first rate man-of-war, which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers has contrived to keep afloat for these one hundred and fifty years past, and to overawe their neighbors merely by her bulk and appearance." But with lesser men at the helm, Macartney added, China would slowly drift until "dashed to pieces on the shore."
• The county magistrates acted essentially as detectives, judges, and jury. They accumulated the evidence, then evaluated it, and finally passed sentence. Punishments for particular crimes were prescribed in the legal code, which magistrates had to follow. Although these officials often relied on a member of their clerical staff who was allegedly "expert" in the law, there was no independent profession of law and no lawyers... Fathers who killed sons should be beaten only if they had acted "unreasonably," argued the ministry.
• * In a famous series of lectures delivered by the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the early 1820s, the various critical analyses explored by Boulanger, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Smith were synthesized in such a way that "Oriental Civilizations"—China pre-eminent among them—came to be seen as an early and now by-passed stage of history. The view of "Asiatic Society" synthesized by Hegel was to have a profound influence on the young Karl Marx and other later nineteenth-century thinkers. History, to Hegel, was the development of what he called the ideas and practices of freedom throughout the world. Freedom was the expression of the self-realization of the "World Spirit," and that spirit was reaching its fullest manifestations in the Christian states of Europe and North America.
• 贺长龄：He Changling was himself not just an exponent of statecraft thinking, but also an administrator of experience and insight. It is ironic that at just the same time that Hegel was discussing China's rejection of the sea, He Changling was trying to develop an elaborate plan to circumvent the decaying Grand Canal system by transporting government grain supplies from central and southern China to the north by sea. In 1826, on his advice, 4.5 million bushels of rice were shipped successfully in this way, on a fleet of over 1,500 junks. But He's plan was soon canceled, mainly in response to the vested interests of those who worked on the Grand Canal system. Had it been allowed to continue, the plan might have led to considerable growth of China's commercial ocean shipping.
• the government still refused to increase examination quotas or enlarge the size of the bureaucracy. If these scholars had no private incomes, no interest in reform, no satiric power, and no great artistic talent, their lives took on a certain melancholy. One such man, Shen Fu, in a brief and poignant memoir written around 1807 when he was in his forties, gives a haunting picture of what it was like to be an educated Chinese without prospects at this time... His memoirs, appropriately entitled Six Records from a Floating Life, show him wandering around China in search of patrons, completely subordinate to his dictatorial father or the whims of various short-term employers. Not that Shen's life was entirely somber... Shen's portrayal of their life together shows that it was indeed possible to have a close and affectionate marriage despite the rigorous views of the superiority of husband to wife—and the legal and philosophical justifications for that superiority—that had become part of the Confucian tradition... I was fond of friendship, proud of keeping my word, and by nature frank and straightforward." 3 But the society he was living in did not seem to reward those quiet, conventional virtues anymore.
• * Even before the opium had been washed out to sea, one Chinese official had dared to point out that Lin had not really solved the opium problem, just one of its immediate manifestations. And a British opium trader, reflecting on his experiences during the blockade, noted dryly to a friend that the blockade "is even fortunate as adding to the account for which we have to claim redress."
• Opium war: In Wusong, they discovered five new Chinese paddle-wheel boats armed with newly cast brass guns. In Shanghai, they seized sixteen new, beautifully made eighteen-pound ship's guns, perfect in detail down to the sights cast on the barrels and the pierced vents for flintlocks. All were mounted on sturdy wooden trucks with iron axles. 14 At least some people in China had clearly found the barbarian challenge to be a stimulus as well as an outrage.
• So within six years of Lin Zexu's appointment as imperial commissioner, the Qing, instead of defending their integrity against all comers, had lost control of vital elements of China's commercial, social, and foreign policies. A host of other nations followed where Britain, the United States, and France had shown the way. The British did not have to worry about these other negotiations, because any new concessions offered up by the Chinese came also to them. In an ingenious article—number 8—to their own supplementary treaty of 1843, they had stipulated a "most-favored nation" clause
• 三合会：Women were often recruited into Triad ranks, as they were into the White Lotus, giving them a prestige and function in society otherwise largely denied to them. According to some accounts, women who joined Triad lodges in advance of their husbands might claim precedence within the household over their own spouses.
• 贾母：I ask you now, never mind very grand families like the ones they pretend to be writing about, even in average well-to-do families like ours when do you ever hear of such carryings-on? It's a wonder their jaws don't drop off, telling such dreadful lies!'