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From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................................viiReign Period Abbreviations......................................................................................................................ixIntroduction....................................................................................................................................11. A Wealth of Indias: India in Qing Geographic Practice, 1644–1755.......................................................................252. The Conquest of Xinjiang and the Emergence of "Hindustan," 1756–1790...................................................................693. Mapping India: Geographic Agnosticism in a Cartographic Context..............................................................................1014. Discovering the "Pileng": British India Seen from Tibet, 1790–1800.....................................................................1275. British India and Qing Strategic Thought in the Early Nineteenth Century.....................................................................1636. The Discovery of British India on the Chinese Coast, 1800–1838.........................................................................1997. The Opium War and the British Empire, 1839–1842........................................................................................2378. The Emergence of a Foreign Policy: Wei Yuan and the Reinterpretation of India in Qing Strategic Thought, 1842–1860.....................271Conclusion: Between Frontier Policy and Foreign Policy..........................................................................................305Character List..................................................................................................................................315Notes...........................................................................................................................................329Bibliography....................................................................................................................................367Index...........................................................................................................................................389

Chapter One

The Practice of Foreign Geography in Early Qing China

How did Qing officials and scholars understand the physical and political disposition of the outside world? Geography is among the most empirical of sciences, and it is natural to turn at once to the abundant descriptions of foreign lands available to them, including military intelligence, travelers' reports, religious and historical writings, and maps. Yet this material contained a range of conflicting accounts and interpretations. Studying the world in this context meant not passively consuming a transparent body of evidence, but struggling to put the available data in order. Before turning to the empirical basis informing Qing worldviews, and the constructions placed on it by individual scholars, it is therefore necessary to begin with the practice of geographic scholarship itself: the modes of reasoning and debate in which variegated worldviews coexisted and evolved, and the attitudes engendered by these methods.

Scholars of foreign geography in the Qing period were aware that their knowledge was limited, uncertain, and provisional. This was due not to a lack of information, for centuries of interaction with the outside world had brought to China a great volume of data about foreign geography, but rather to the manifest incommensurability of those data. The corpus had accumulated over time via informants with different linguistic, regional, intellectual, and religious backgrounds, whose reports could not easily be amalgamated into one coherent account. Generations of scholars recognized and responded to this challenge by reading broadly, on the basis of which they ventured theories about how seemingly contradictory reports might be harmonized. Such theorizing relied on methods of exegesis and argument inculcated by formal schooling, above all the aggregation and juxtaposition of citations. Textual research and debate profoundly shaped the study of geography by concentrating attention on philological questions of nomenclature. With precise spatial data sparse or lacking altogether, maps—which could only present one image of the world—were far less useful than written geographic studies for reasoning through a thicket of contradictory sources. Before the late Qing, foreign geography was studied almost entirely through word rather than image.

Conscious of the impediments to certain knowledge about the outside world, and possessing a textual methodology tolerant of conflicting opinions and deferred judgment, Chinese scholars generally approached foreign geography with an attitude that can be termed geographic agnosticism. Some claims might be preferred and others doubted, but none could be absolutely endorsed or eliminated. No single conception of the world displaced all others, and judgments on the value of geographic evidence remained provisional.

ELEMENTS OF INCOMMENSURABILITY: DESCRIPTIONS OF THE WORLD BEFORE THE EARLY QING

By the early Qing, Chinese geographers had too much information about the outside world. Informants of various backgrounds, whose testimonies ranged from comprehensive accounts of the universe to fragmentary jottings on a single journey, had over time deposited many strata in the geographic record. Cosmologies available to scholars in 1644 posited seas and continents differing in number, size, and shape. The same regions were often described in different ways using inconsistent names. As scholars of geography read diligently in all these accounts and tried to construct theories that synthesized them, there emerged a range of hybrid outlooks at least as numerous as the original sources themselves. Even a simplified typology of pre-Qing sources and synthetic arguments lies beyond the scope of this study, but it is useful briefly to review this process in order to demonstrate why the body of geographic evidence remained incommensurable despite dogged and skillful attempts to reconcile it.

One of the earliest and most influential descriptions of the world in the Chinese intellectual tradition is found in the "Yu gong" chapter of the Shangshu. After describing the nine regions (zhoua) of China, it concluded vaguely: "On the east reaching to the sea; on the west extending to the moving sands; to the utmost limits of the north and south:—[Yu's] fame and influence filled up all within the four seas." In the Warring States and early Han periods, more elaborate models of the world emerged. The Shanhai jing conceived of a central rectangle surrounded on each side by sea, beyond which lay a "great wilderness" (dahuang). Alternatively, Zou Yan (ca. 250 BC) proposed that the world was composed of nine continents (zhoua), and that China as described in the canonical Shangshu was simply one ninth of a single continent. Each of these...