Wensheng Wang
Ph.D. Candidate
History Department, UC Irvine
Grant Report for the CAS
02/23/2007
Partly funded by CAS, I conducted full-time archival research for my
dissertation project in China from August 2005 to July 2006. My research examines
two momentous social crises—White Lotus rebellion (1796-1805) and South China
piracy (1796-1810)—and takes them as an effective prism through which to view the
patterns of conflict and change during the Jiaqing reign (1796-1820) as well as the
dynamic of Qing historical development more generally. This historical study focuses
on the imperial, bureaucratic, and intellectual responses to the dramatic conjunction of
upheavals, thus intensive work with a wide variety of primary resources, including
both central government archives and local materials, is a crucial part of the project.
Therefore I immersed myself in various archives and libraries in three cities and
conducted my research in three phases.
During the first stage, I traveled to Shanghai in August 2005 and stayed there for
a month. The principal places I visited were the Shanghai Municipal Library and the
Library of Fudan University. The focus of my research was to look for the written
records left by local elites and intellectuals. The two crises opened new opportunities
for Confucian scholars from different intellectual schools to express themselves,
providing them with rich symbolic resources to articulate their social, cultural, and
political visions. Such materials as local gazetteers, diaries, letters, and biographies
are more difficult to find in comparison with the central government archives. But to
my great joy, I was able to gather a considerable body of documents which give me a
bottom-up view of the two crises.
In mid-September, I left Shanghai to Beijing where I spent the next nine months.
My focus of attention in the second stage shifted to the central government archives. I
worked primarily in the First Historical Archives of China in the Forbidden City, the
world’s largest repository of Qing primary sources. This part of research turned out to
be especially productive, yielding about 4,000 documents of various sorts, many of
which have rarely, if ever, been used by scholars. The bulk of these materials were the
Emperor’s Imperially Rescripted Palace Memorials, Court Diary of Imperial Actions
and Speeches，and Draft Memorials by the Grand Council. By describing the
intractable problems emperors and officials grappled with and a variety of answers
they provided or implemented, these archives open an illuminating window onto their
relationships and the day-to-day operation of the governments at various levels during
the time of social crises. Based on those resources, I argue that the two crises
propelled the Qing regime to reorganize itself and produced a path-shaping
conjuncture in the process of state making in nineteenth-century China.
In addition, I also worked in the National Library of China and university
libraries in the Beijing area. On the one hand, I continued to collect official archives
in these institutions by reading and photocopying printed documentary collection and
relevant secondary literature which are unavailable in US. On the other hand, I paid
great attention to the non-official materials such as the scholars’ anthologies, letters,
and pedigrees which shed new light on the intellectual change during the Jiaqing reign
and how it related to the contemporary sociopolitical crises. The massive disturbance
and the accompanying state development provided favorable milieu and impetus for
the intensified cross-fertilization and crystallization of a spectrum of opinions about
how best to “save the world.” It is very interesting to investigate how these scholars
and the intellectual currents they represented interacted with each other which shaped
the cultural geography from the nineteenth century. Hence I argue that late Qing
culture and political theory cannot be treated as an ideological fossil or merely a
defensive response to the challenge of Western ideas.
The last month of my research in China was spent in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei
province. I mainly worked in the Provincial Archives, investigating local archives
such as the gazetteers of the crisis-torn counties, individual biographies, and family
genealogies of the immediate participants. It is worth noting that I have been fortunate
to actively participate in the intellectual and student life of my affiliated
campus—Wuhan University. I interacted with many Chinese scholars and gave a
research talk to the graduate students.
To sum up, I had a very productive research trip partly funded by CAS. The
research I conducted in China laid a solid archival foundation for my dissertation
project and allows an a nuanced, expansive，and dynamic Qing history to be written.
More broadly, the skills I acquired in this trip made me a better researcher and
scholar.