These Are Scenes from the "Kangxi-Qianlong Golden Age"

Qianlong, the second-most sagely emperor of the Qing Dynasty. During his reign, he made six southern tours, each a grand display of the splendor of the golden age. Every tour involved a procession of thousands. At every stop, local officials had to construct temporary palaces and present rare treasures to curry favor, while preparing sumptuous banquets for the entourage of thousands. Dilapidated homes along the roads were ordered demolished for being unsightly, displacing vast numbers of common people. After Qianlong's first southern tour, someone circulated a critical essay under the forged name of the Minister of Works Sun Jiagan. Emperor Qianlong launched a massive inquisition to track down the author, implicating and imprisoning over a thousand people. It is said that the magistrate of Huzhou, a certain Zhao, upon learning that Qianlong intended to visit Huzhou, struck upon a brilliant idea: he sank boats in the river to block the waterway, finally stopping Qianlong's touring party. Later, when Zhao left his post, the people of Huzhou escorted him for dozens of li.

When Qianlong's first southern tour passed through Shandong, Shandong and Henan were suffering a devastating flood. An official named Peng Jiaping described the disaster conditions to him. Qianlong instead flew into a rage, rebuking Peng for exaggerating. Later, during his journey, Qianlong finally witnessed the misery of displaced refugees with his own eyes. It is said "His Majesty was moved." However, after touring around and returning to Beijing, he summoned Peng Jiaping and asked whether he had any "banned books" at home. Peng replied that although he had a few Ming Dynasty unofficial histories, he had never examined them. Qianlong berated him for being dishonest. He was immediately imprisoned and his home ransacked. Then it was announced that Peng's family genealogy had been found in the raid, and that it failed to observe taboo characters for the emperor's name -- "wildly disrespectful and treasonous." This Peng Jiaping was thus inexplicably executed.

Emperor Qianlong himself declared: "Of all matters on my southern tours, none is greater than the river works." Yet during his six southern tours spanning over thirty years, the Yellow River breached its banks eight times in Henan alone, with refugees scattered everywhere. He traveled about sightseeing, bringing calamity to half of China, yet he had at least some self-awareness and never once visited Henan.

These are scenes from the "Kangxi-Qianlong Golden Age."

Emperor Kangxi of the Qing Dynasty was a genius of an emperor. The official Qing records, the "Veritable Records," document him as invincibly brave -- going on a hunt, he could kill two tigers in a single day. Over the course of a multi-day hunt, he could kill eight tigers. His grandson Qianlong said of him: "The Sacred Ancestor's divine valor was unparalleled. His strength could draw the strongest bows, and he could use twenty long arrows. Few among his subjects could match this." "Fierce as a tiger, strong as a bear, nimble as a rabbit -- he often killed them with a single shot."

On the other hand, he was also a refined and cultured great scholar, erudite in both ancient and modern knowledge, worthy of being a master of his generation. That person who engaged in extensive hunting activities no longer existed -- instead, "In his leisure from attending to state affairs, regardless of cold or heat, his only pursuits were reading and calligraphy."

And of course there was his noble character. His son Yongzheng said of him: "His clothing and personal effects were invariably plain and simple," and "My admiration for his sacred virtue is truly without end."

A veritable paragon of civil and martial virtue, sagely to the extreme. Did such a perfect person really exist? Unfortunately, the Qing Dynasty had a tradition of forging, tampering with, and concealing historical facts. In the early Kangxi reign, Zhuang Tinglong compiled "A History of the Ming," and his entire clan was massacred. After some years, a man named Dai Mingshi forgot this lesson and compiled a book called "Nanshan Collection," which collected some historical materials from the late Ming and early Qing. Emperor Kangxi was furious and had Dai Mingshi beheaded. The "Nanshan Collection" cited some materials left by the deceased Fang Xiaobiao, and all of Fang's surviving family members were also exiled to Heilongjiang. Emperor Qianlong's compilation of the "Complete Library of the Four Treasuries" required all books nationwide to be submitted for inspection. Not only were documents unfavorable to the Qing banned and destroyed, but even previous writings concerning the Liao, Jin, and Yuan dynasties were tampered with. Over three thousand titles and more than 150,000 volumes of books were confiscated and banned.

So thorough was the literary inquisition that a single copy of "Ten Days in Yangzhou" and a single copy of "A Brief Account of the Jiading Massacre" vanished from Chinese soil for over two hundred years, only to be rediscovered in Japan two centuries later.

The Ming Dynasty also had official "Veritable Records," which recorded the following event: Emperor Shizong of Ming, the Jiajing Emperor, was cruel and heartless. His palace women could not endure it any longer and tried to strangle him in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, they only managed to render him unconscious -- he survived. These poor palace women naturally could not live after that. There was also an occasion when Jiajing was chatting with the empress. A concubine came in to serve tea. Jiajing immediately pulled the concubine over and fondled her right in front of the empress. The empress naturally became jealous. Jiajing flew into such a rage that the empress was literally frightened into a miscarriage that killed her. These palace scandals were all recorded one by one by Ming Dynasty historians, exposing the imperial family's dirty laundry for centuries to come.

Compare the two. Ming Dynasty emperors were certainly no saints, but the spirit of historical documentation between the Ming and Qing differs by nothing less than heaven and earth! Under these two very different approaches to recording history, the depravity of Ming emperors is inevitable, while Qing emperors -- how could they possibly not be brilliant, divinely martial, and far surpassing all predecessors?

The Qing Dynasty -- a dynasty so brutal, dark, and autocratic as to reach the pinnacle among all Chinese dynasties. A dynasty that reached the absolute extreme in both physical slaughter and spiritual destruction. Whether the emperors were good or bad is beside the point. In such a dynasty, all people with backbone had been killed. The traditional Chinese ideals of officials speaking truth to power and historians recording faithfully were thoroughly destroyed. All that remained was the slavish sycophancy that, together with the queue hairstyle, was kept alive. Under the heavy dark curtain, aside from the severity of the literary inquisition being clearly documented -- to serve as a deterrent -- who knows how much boundless blood and tears were mercilessly buried! The greatest achievement and pride of this dynasty was its unprecedented talent for fabricating and tampering with history, so effective that a century later, people still willingly believe that this unbelievably dark and evil era was an unsurpassable "golden age" and that its rulers were all "good emperors." If the Qing emperors could know this, they would sincerely marvel at how truly great and sagely they had been.

[This post was edited by the author on 2003-6-8 22:22:35 (edited)]