Asia
and terrorists" whose interference in governmental
affairs was a cause of corruption in the imperial
government. Tsai presents, for instance, the Ming
eunuchs as a group who "had remarkably assumed an
unprecedented role in the stewardship of the Ming
economy" (p. 187). He examines eunuchs' roles in six
major areas of economic activities: managing the
imperial plantations (which belonged to the state land
category); collecting all sorts of taxes; supervising the
salt monopoly; managing the production of various
kinds of textiles and silk; purchasing palace supplies
and other special goods and managing the manufacture of porcelain and pearl cultivation; and promoting
mining and metallurgical renovations. Tsai is fully
aware of the controversial nature of these activities.
Although the eunuch managers and entrepreneurs
brought their energies and ingenuities to many endeavors, they also at times abused their authority by
taking over land by force, extorting money and other
valuables, and imposing undue hard labor on the poor
and helpless. These things explain why the eunuchs
were notorious for crimes and scandals according to
contemporary writers.
Tsai takes a "scholar-officials versus eunuchs" approach. "The two groups collided, interacted, and
conflicted throughout the Ming period and for nearly
250 years vied with one another for control of the
imperial apparatus" (p. 8). But should the scholarofficials be viewed as "idealistic and timid" men who
"gleefully served" the very imperial institution that
caused the ills of the society, while the eunuchs are
treated as "needed hewers of wood and drawers of
water" who just did what they were ordered to do, as
Tsai suggests? This is questionable, because one of the
reasons that the Ming emperors chose the informality
and irregularity of eunuch employment over that of
regular civilian bureaucracy was to avoid the endless
obstructions and moral exhortation of the scholarofficials. Admonition and remonstrance were a significant part of the Confucian heritage. Many Ming
scholar-officials challenged emperors to their faces in
the best Confucian manner; in fact, the Ming dynasty
had a disproportionately large number of China's most
famous remonstrators.
Whether or not one agrees with all of Tsai's conclusions, his book is undoubtedly an impressive and
challenging contribution to the field of Ming history. It
is important not only for the wealth of data it presents
but also for the insights it offers. It provides a sound
foundation for future research on the government and
politics of late imperial China.
SHELLEY HSUEH-LUN CHANG
University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor
JAMES L. HEVIA. Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest
Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press. 1995. Pp. xv, 292. Cloth
$49.95, paper $15.95.
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867
James L. Hevia has written a very important book on
a critical moment in the history of the Sino-British
encounter. Drawing on the theoretical insights of
Edward Said and other postcolonial theorists, Hevia
represents the Macartney embassy of 1793 as "one
between two ... expansive colonial empires," "each
with universalistic pretensions and complex metaphysical systems to buttress such claims" (p. 25). His study
begins with an analysis of the different views of
sovereignty and the respective processes through
which power was constructed within the Qing and the
British empires. On the Chinese side, he distinguishes
the Qing empire from its predecessors, arguing that by
the late eighteenth century, the Qing empire was
"multinational, multiethnic, and multilinguistic." The
Qing emperor positioned himself above a multitude of
lords such as those of the Tibetans and Mongols,
seeking to include them in his own rulership. Involvement took the form of participation in a "Guest
Ritual" process that "organized a center relative to the
peripheral kingdoms of other lords" (pp. 30-32).
When Macartney came, he was treated as one of the
lords.
By focusing on Guest Ritual, Hevia departs from
current interpretations of the embassy, which he criticizes for their modernist, functional, and culturalist
treatments of ritual. He challenges studies that treat
the mission as an encounter between two essentialized
cultural entities-China and the West. Interest in
ritual has been considered a cultural trait of the
Chinese in particular and of traditional societies in
general. Scholars of the mission who rely on the
Euro-American system of international relations as
the frame of analysis therefore fail to understand that
ritual was no Jess important to the British and the
European governments. By the late eighteenth century, in European political theory and diplomatic
practice, the ambassador represented the honor and
dignity of the sovereign. "It was through ceremony that
mutual recognition of sovereignty was asserted and
state-to-state equality achieved" (p. 76).
Underscoring the signifying ritual for both the Chinese and the British, Hevia demonstrates the flaw of
conventional studies that attribute the failure of the
Macartney embassy and subsequent attempts to China's "isolation" policy, its Sinocentric worldview, and
its obsession with ritual. The failure was rather a result
of "competing and ultimately incompatible views of
the meanings of sovereignty and the ways in which
relations of power were constructed. Each attempted
to impose its own views on the other; neither was (at
the time) successful" (p. 28). Hevia recontextualizes
the tribute system as part of the Guest Ritual and
explains how the koutou (kowtow) was objectified as a
symbol of Chinese national character in subsequent
European representations of China. This line of analysis provides new insights for reassessing the Opium
War and the role of British and American missionaries
in the production and dissemination of Orientalist
discourse on China.
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1997
868
Reviews of Books
Hevia analyzes the Guest Ritual as a "centering"
process, which "allows the differentiation and inclusion of the powers of others into the emperor's
rulership as desirable superior/inferior relations" (p.
123). It is "one means by which vast and complex
hierarchical relations are constituted through the activities of multiple agents, agents who are neither
unitary individuals nor individuals who engage in
voluntaristic action" (p. 216). But it was also the
process through which the Qianlong emperor gathered
information about Macartney's embassy and adjusted
his treatment accordingly. Indeed, Hevia demonstrates
clearly that this process depended primarily on the
degree of attention and "intervention" of the Qianlong
emperor, and one wonders how much less "centering"
the Guest Ritual might have been had the emperor
been less interested. Left to the officials, both at the
provincial level and in Beijing, the process would have
fallen into either the rigidity or the laxity that the
Qianlong emperor had complained about. Which produced the centering effect: the Qing emperor or the
Guest Ritual?
Hevia's study is an exciting and important contribution to Chinese and cross-cultural studies. It is broadly
conceptualized, taking issue with various views of the
history of Sino-British diplomacy. Historians interested in the bureaucratic operations and the complex
system of communication between the central government and local offcials will enjoy the meticulous
reconstruction of the activities of both the Macartney
embassy and the Qing court's vigilant management of
the Guest Ritual. The book is well researched, using
both English and Chinese archival materials. It should
be read by anyone interested in Chinese history,
postcolonial studies, or the history of diplomacy and
cultural encounters.
KAI-WING CHOW
University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign
PAUL R. KATZ. Demon Hordes and Burning Boats: The
Cult of Marshall Wen in Late Imperial Chekiang.
(SUNY Series in Chinese Local Studies.) Albany:
State University of New York Press. 1995. Pp. xviii,
261. $19.95.
This is a capable and clearly-written study of a fascinating topic, the history of a plague-exorcising cult that
has held broad appeal for much of China's southeastern coastal population for nearly a millenium. Paul R.
Katz offers rich detail about the disease history of the
region that spawned the cult, the hagiographic traditions of its central deity (the seemingly composite
figure, Marshall Wen), the ecology of the cult's spread
(most often by means of commercial diasporas), and
the practice of its central prophylactic and apotropaic
rituals, including the spectacular boatburning rites
noted in the book's title.
The book combines the techniques of religious
studies and social history, explicating the cult's textual,
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
iconographic, and ritual traditions with the utmost
care while making an equally serious effort to situate
these within the context of the Zhejiang region's
marked demographic and economic change during the
late imperial era. It is diligently researched in a wide
range of difficult written sources and demonstrates
with unusual force the value of fieldwork (in Taiwan)
to enrich the study of a cult such as this, which enjoys
a living history.
One of the most interesting revelations of the book
is the way Confucian scholar-officials, Buddhist and
Daoist clerics, plebeian religious specialists, mercantile elites, and organized marginal groups such as
actors and beggars systematically orchestrated their
efforts in staging mass exorcistic rites in Wenzhou and
Hangzhou when those cities confronted serious epidemics. In an article in Late Imperial China (1995),
Mingming Wang describes a similar exorcism in Quanzhou in 1895, when the debacle of the Sino-Japanese
War threatened the city with visitation by hordes of
war casualties' "hungry ghosts." Such effective rolespecific coordination on the part of otherwise antithetical orthodoxies and social constituencies to serve a
common community purpose says much about the
extraordinary syncretism and flexibility posssible
within late imperial Chinese culture.
Katz's efforts to extrapolate from his central subject
into wider areas of discussion achieve mixed results.
Most successful is the critique he offers of the theoretical perspective of "Daoist studies" specialists, notably Kristofer Schipper and Kenneth Dean (whose
work he treats with due respect). Following an argument suggested in Susan Naquin's and Cho-feng Yu's
Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China (1992), Katz contends that it is a mistake to view ecclesiastical Daoism
as a "higher form" of worship than the cluttered and
messy popular religious practices of the Chinese people and, following biases inherent in many written
sources, to see Daoism as a pristine theological tradition influencing popular practices but relatively immune from reciprocal influence by them. Marshall
Wen's cult offers, as Katz shows, powerful counterevidence to this assumption.
Broadening his focus to issues of popular and elite
culture more generally, Katz puts forward notions of
"cogeneration" and "reverberation" to suggest that
processes of appropriation work in both directions.
There is little reason to doubt the veracity of this,
though in the context of a generation of work on the
history of popular culture in the West the insight
seems perhaps less original than the author imagines.
In what appears almost obligatory fashion, Katz
concludes his book with a meditation on the somewhat
tired subject of civil society in China. He argues that
previous works by Mary Rankin, David Strand, and
myself, among others, pay insufficient attention to the
role of religious institutions and practices in making up
the "public sphere," or, in Philip Huang's more cautious phrase, the "third realm" between state and
society. This much is easy to concede. Katz's further
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1997