City of Virtues

Nanjing in an Age of Utopian Visions

Chuck Wooldridge

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780295994697
• eBook ISBN: 9780295805986
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

Throughout Nanjing's history, writers have claimed that its spectacular landscape of mountains and rivers imbued the city with "royal qi, " making it a place of great political significance. City of Virtues examines the ways a series of visionaries, drawing on past glories of the city, projected their ideologies onto Nanjing as they constructed buildings, performed rituals, and reworked the literary heritage of the city. More than an urban history of Nanjing from the late 18th century until 1911 — encompassing the Opium War, the Taiping occupation of the city, the rebuilding of the city by Zeng Guofan, and attempts to establish it as the capital of the Republic of China — this study shows how utopian visions of the cosmos shaped Nanjing's path through the turbulent 19th century.

CHAPTER 1

The Qianlong Emperor’s Tours of the Imperial City, 1751–84

IN Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud compared the city of Rome to the human mind. In truth, Freud contended, a given part of the city could have a ruin or a modern construction, but not both: “The same space cannot have two different contents.” Were the city more like the mind, however:

On the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon of today as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on the same site, the original edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed the same piece of ground would be supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built. And the observer would only have to change the direction of his glance or his position in order to call up one view or another.¹

There were historical urban equivalents for what Freud considered to be a fantastic thought experiment. The city of Nanjing, for example, had both a physical and a poetic cityscape. The physical city required the destroying or refashioning of buildings, streets, and squares to create new urban forms. The poetic city, on the other hand, expanded by accretion over time as different writers described particular locations. Note the ease in which the eighteenth-century poet Chen Shulan (1766–1820) could in four lines unveil the layers of time lodged in the same space. She wrote about a song, “Jade Tree,” popular in the court of Chen (557–589), the last of the six dynasties based in Nanjing. When the Chen fell, Nanjing was destroyed. Chen Shulan described herself as looking at the present-day city of Nanjing and simultaneously recalling the flourishing of the Chen court as well as its destruction. Her lines also evoked the many poets who since the sixth century had described the same scene and also expressed nostalgia. Her words captured centuries of subsequent recollection:

MATCHING THE RHYMES OF ‘BEING MOVED BY THE OLD IN NANJING’

The Song ‘Jade Tree’ died away, and I could not bear to listen.

The gold dust of the Six Dynasties has half dispersed.

And now there is only, at the edge of the sky, the moon

That once shone toward the Chen palace and illuminated the rear courtyard.²

Chen Shulan arranged as much as she composed. The lines were excerpts from Tang Dynasty (618–906) works. Quoting them evoked nostalgia for the Chen court and also for the ensuing period of nostalgia. The “gold dust” (jinfen) in the poem referred to an age of prosperity; though “half dispersed” (ban diaoling), the dust was also half present. The moonlight was suspended in time, so that the same light that once shone on the Liang court, and later illumined eighth-century Tang poets, now inspired Chen Shulan, who used the light to locate the rear courtyard in her own city of Nanjing. In writing such as this, the conjuring of different moments of time, and thus of different meanings of a given site required even less than a change in the direction of one’s glance. The slightest flicker of the mind could in principle “call up one view or another,” or even several vistas at once.

The Qianlong emperor was one of many—but one with unusually strong shaping force—who could construct such temporally chambered mansions. In the course of his six tours of southern China (in 1751, 1757, 1762, 1765, 1780, and 1784), he inserted himself into the cityscape, a display of power that would shape the ways in which city residents of the future would perceive imperial rule. Following the last of these tours, the emperor would continue to be on the one hand a model (because he demonstrated that one could arrange the many elements of the city to extraordinary political effect), and on the other hand a foil (because residents would come to see the personal, autocratic power on view as disruptive to social harmony). Making sense of the tours, of the forms of space they created, and the reasons they stopped, is crucial to making sense of the subsequent age of utopian visions.

On April 19, 1751, the Qianlong emperor entered Nanjing for the first time, bringing with him a retinue of over 3,000 people and 6,690 horses.³ On this and on each of his later tours to Nanjing he rode to his so-called “travelling palace” (the phrase connotes an oversized tent, but in fact refers to a luxurious building complex in the center of Nanjing). He then reviewed troops at the city’s training grounds, presented offerings at the tomb of the first Ming emperor, accompanied his mother to various sites (until her death in 1771), and bestowed awards for poetry at the Zhongshan Academy, an institution normally devoted to training scholars to compete in civil service examinations. On the morning of April 23, the emperor departed.⁴

If a city were simply a collection of tangible objects in fixed locations, then that would be that. It is true that the emperor left some physical traces of his visit: panels on the entrances to certain buildings inscribed in imperial calligraphy, steles, throne platforms where the emperor could sit and take in the sites, and the travelling palace. Still, if Nanjing were merely the sum of its parts, then the tours of the emperor, despite the enormous expense and size of his enterprise, would have meant little beyond adornments on an already ornate cityscape.

Instead, the emperor transformed the city. The rituals he performed, the verses he wrote, and the encomia he inspired became fixtures of the poetic cityscape, which would come to inscribe his many roles. Nanjing was already known as a city of wealth, of emperors, of temples, of ritual, of scholars. Qianlong used these facets of the city to depict himself as patron of Buddhism, moral exemplar, paragon of military virtues, conqueror, connoisseur, poet, and scholar. The emperor would refigure Nanjing’s vistas even as the physical city remained, as a person fording a stream might create unseen turbulence without changing the direction of the flow. Although Nanjing’s “flow” was unusually intense, the Qianlong emperor’s footfalls were unusually heavy, so the elements of the city would continue to swirl about the energy of his former presence long after he had stepped out of the water.

Strategic and Poetic Crossroads

When Zhu Yuanzhang, the first Ming emperor, made Nanjing his capital, he had water diverted from the Qinhuai River to feed canals circling the palace district in the western part of the city. Upon seizing control from the Ming, Qing emperors ordered soldiers to occupy the palace district, and it became the garrison for banner troops, a hereditary military caste.⁵ The many offices of civil administration lay in the center of the city, north of the Qinhuai and west of the palace quarters. To the north, city dwellers fished in Xuanwu Lake, and in the city’s northwest corner the city wall shot up to meet a bend in the Yangzi River like a ball into a socket.

The Yangzi River turned here from its northward flow through Anhui province and restlessly veered toward Shanghai, causing intense currents as it intersected the Grand Canal at Zhenjiang. Because this entire section of the Yangzi, including Nanjing, had long produced extraordinary quantities of rice, the region’s farmers were subject to a special levy, and boatmen ferried the grain up the Grand Canal to supply the arid region around Beijing.

The Yangzi’s bend gave Nanjing strategic significance. The city was a gateway to southern China, and as a result it became the capital for an array of monarchs and aspirants and also a center for religious movements, many of which had enjoyed court patronage As Stephen Owen has pointed out, the city’s long association with changing dynastic fortunes created a literary tradition that formed “a mood and a poetic image of the city, an overlay of sites, images, and phrases that shaped the way the city was seen.”⁶ Nostalgia for earlier prosperity, laments at the destruction of capitals, and a melancholic sense of impermanence pervaded this literature. Nanjing prospered in the retelling of its defeats.

To appropriate this tradition was a political act. The work of Chen Shulan, which appeared in a compilation of women’s poetry edited by the famed polymath Yuan Mei (1716–97), asserted her place in the long tradition of writing about Nanjing. Although hundreds of male poets wrote of similar themes, Chen was one of a very few women to explore the living presence of Nanjing’s past. The originality of Chen’s work lay not as much in its content, but in the very fact of her writing it, and, in the process, making herself one of the sculptors of Nanjing’s multidimensional cityscape.

So what happened when an emperor engaged such a space as Nanjing? He found an ideal means to display his multiple roles. For an emperor, who was meant to embody many things at once, it was useful to come to a place whose landscape could offer many meanings at once.

CITY OF EMPERORS

A tour was an imperial progress to points outside of the Qing capital of Beijing, one which invariably included tents, military retinues, horses, hunting, and highly visible acts of imperial benevolence. The Qianlong emperor undertook these massive logistical deployments to augment his power. Tours demonstrated the enormous resources the emperor held at his command, but they also reenacted the seventeenth-century Qing conquest, when the ancestors of Kangxi and Qianlong had from their base in Manchuria stormed past the Great Wall, defeated the remnants of the Ming, and established the Qing Dynasty. Because the Qianlong emperor insisted on the distinctiveness of his Manchu heritage, and because tours afforded the emperor the opportunity to manifest the martial (and, for Qianlong, quintessentially Manchu) skills of riding, archery, and hunting, historian Michael Chang has described the tours as “exercises in ethno-dynastic aggrandizement.”⁷ The Qianlong emperor also depicted himself as upholding classical virtues of benevolence, concern for the people, and filial piety. By enacting these roles at different points throughout his empire, the Qianlong emperor could hope to induce others to “reproduce a certain socio-political order” with himself at the apex.⁸ By manipulating Nanjing’s physical and poetic space, the emperor could attempt to secure this order even after he departed the city.

In this project, the Qianlong emperor drew on elaborate precedents. His grandfather, the Kangxi emperor, had himself conducted six tours through the city between 1684 and 1707. At that time, although supporters of the Ming dynasty had mostly been quelled, the possibility of dissent, even rebellion, continued to alarm the court.⁹ The Kangxi emperor had composed an essay about what rulers could learn from Nanjing’s natural features, cultural flourishing, and political upheaval. His essay followed the style of laments for past dynasties and described the Ming’s loss of the Mandate of Heaven, thus asserting the Kangxi emperor’s learning and legitimacy. The essay began with an account of the history of the city’s vicissitudes prior to the Ming, and then turns to the tangible evidence of dynastic upheaval, the Ming palace:

In the winter of 1684, in the eleventh month, coming south on a tour of inspection, I halted in Jiangning. On my way to ascend Mount Zhong in order to offer sacrificial wine at the mausoleum of Ming Taizu, I passed by the former palace, where thorns and bushes everywhere met the eye. Where palace gates once stood so imposingly, there were instead ruined walls.¹⁰

There were lessons here, insights into the arts of rulership that the Kangxi emperor’s grandson (i.e., the Qianlong emperor) surely apprehended. The trick was to understand how the Ming had failed despite Nanjing’s abundant natural advantages, which the Kangxi emperor admiringly enumerated in his essay. According to the emperor, Nanjing’s strategic position was superior to that of all other cities in the empire save Beijing, and its flourishing culture at the time of the Ming exceeded even that of the Six Dynasties. Why, then, did Nanjing so often fall? Kangxi took the Ming as his paradigmatic case:

After a long period of peace the maintenance of order came to be neglected. From the Wanli reign onwards, government affairs gradually received less attention. The eunuchs formed cliques and trumped up charges against each other. Clans and families became daily more divided and the qi of the literati more degenerated; taxes proliferated and the morale of the people collapsed . . . The result was that the enterprise established with such difficulty by the Ming, in less than three hundred years ended in a wasteland (qiu xu) Is it not truly to be lamented?¹¹

Because Nanjing’s potency could work either for or against a reigning monarch, Kangxi insisted that emperors must be vigilant in their rule, and concluded his essay with the formulaic—but still politically relevant—call to rely on Heaven, which responded to personal virtue rather than military might. According to the logic of the Mandate of Heaven, a sitting emperor pleased Heaven through his just rule, his moral bearing, and his sincere observance of ritual obligations. Failure to live up to Heaven’s demands meant that a ruler might lose the mandate, which Heaven would then bestow on the founder of a new dynasty.

In this context, the ruins of the Ming palace had meaning. They conveyed conquest; the invasion of China by Qing forces, the surrender of Nanjing to those forces in 1645, and the continued occupation of the former imperial city by a Qing banner garrison. All of these signs revealed Nanjing to be a subjugated place. The presence of an ethnically distinct emperor riding into the city and presenting its history to its residents highlighted this truth of conquest. And yet (uneasily, paradoxically) the emperor’s essay also asserted its position in a Chinese-language genre of nostalgia, evoking a sentiment that suggested not only the passage of time but the transfer of the Mandate of Heaven, a gesture that reached across the ruptures between dynasties and (at least in theory) joined Kangxi to a lineage of Chinese emperors stretching back into antiquity. Through the combination of a show of force and a mastery of poetic repertoires, Kangxi hoped to channel potentially seditious images into a legitimizing rhetoric.

The complexity of Nanjing’s poetic cityscape meant that others drew quite different lessons from the city’s sites. As the art historian Catherine Stuer has observed, in the late Ming and early Qing Nanjing inspired “two seemingly incompatible modes of representation: as an integral whole, and as a site of fragmentation and ruin.”¹² Both of these modes could take the form of a challenge to Qing authority. On the one hand, in the work of artists such as Hu Yukun (active ca. 1630s–1670s) and Gao Cen (ca. 1643–84), images of the city or of the Ming tombs could imply that Nanjing remained a Ming capital and that in some imagined way the possibility of the Ming remained.¹³ On the other hand, portrayals of a ruined city or laments for the former glory of previous dynasties could serve as criticisms of the Qing court. On tours, emperors sought to gain control over the ideas that sites in Nanjing might inspire. The process of encountering the city’s traces of the past (guji), drawing moral lessons from the encounter, and reflecting on one’s own identity took place throughout China. In Nanjing, however, emperors sought through their ostentatious occupation of the city to disarm a particular discourse of opposition to the Qing dynasty and to limit the capacity of local elites to propose alternative readings of the cityscape.

The Kangxi emperor’s concerns in Nanjing would remain german...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Reign Dates of the Ming and Qing Dynasties
• Introduction: An Age of Utopian Visions
• 1. The Qianlong Emperor’s Tours of the Imperial City, 1751–84
• 2. Literati Politics in the Early Nineteenth Century
• 3. Wang Shiduo’s Flight from the New Jerusalem, 1853–64
• 4. Zeng Guofan’s Construction of a Ritual Center, 1864–72
• 5. Chen Zuolin Reassembles the Poetic City, 1872–1912
• Conclusion: Elements of Utopia
• Abbreviations Used in the Notes
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index