From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy

The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China

Matthew Mosca

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780804785389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de China

Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, Qing rulers, officials, and scholars fused diverse, fragmented perceptions of foreign territory into one integrated worldview. In the same period, a single "foreign" policy emerged as an alternative to the many localized "frontier" policies hitherto pursued on the coast, in Xinjiang, and in Tibet. By unraveling Chinese, Manchu, and British sources to reveal the information networks used by the Qing empire to gather intelligence about its emerging rival, British India, this book explores China's altered understanding of its place in a global context. Far from being hobbled by a Sinocentric worldview, Qing China's officials and scholars paid close attention to foreign affairs. To meet the growing British threat, they adapted institutional practices and geopolitical assumptions to coordinate a response across their maritime and inland borderlands. In time, the new and more active response to Western imperialism built on this foundation reshaped not only China's diplomacy but also the internal relationship between Beijing and its frontiers.

PART ONE

The Qing Empire’s Vision of the World

ONE

A Wealth of Indias

India in Qing Geographic Practice, 1644–1755

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.¹ 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 (zhou^a) 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.”² 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).³ Alternatively, Zou Yan (ca. 250 BC) proposed that the world was composed of nine continents (zhou^a), and that China as described in the canonical Shangshu was simply one ninth of a single continent. Each of these continents was surrounded by a “lesser sea” (pihai), while a vast “ocean” (yinghai) encircled the nine continents collectively.⁴

Competing worldviews provoked scholarly debates, often with political subtexts. Supporters of Zou’s model argued that it described the vastness of the world better than the “Yu gong,” while its detractors retorted that it was unfounded and denigrated China. As Mark Edward Lewis has pointed out, the “Yu gong” was upheld by those inclined to venerate the words of the sages, Zou’s worldview by those who believed that state policies could innovate effectively beyond the classical heritage.⁵ Ideological implications could intrude into empirical arguments.

Beginning in the Western Han period (206 BC–AD 25), the new genre of standard histories brought readers more details about the outside world. Its prototype, Sima Qian’s Shi ji, included descriptions of the nomadic Xiongnu and other foreign peoples, and subsequent works in this pattern continued to chronicle the political relations of foreign states with Chinese dynasties. Gazetteers, the geographic counterparts to standard histories, added descriptions of foreign peoples when the locality in question bordered the outside world.⁶

Even in the most canonical of these sources, the “Yu gong” and standard histories, inconsistencies were obvious. For example, debate persisted over whether “four seas” really surrounded a central landmass, and if so, how they corresponded to known locations. The Song scholar Cheng Dachang (1123–1195), finding that the “Yu gong” did not specify the location of the West and North Seas, turned to historical evidence. A Han envoy, he noted, had reached a sea beyond Tiaozhi (the Seleucid empire), which Cheng took to be the West Sea, and other travelers reported a sea to the north.⁷ A more cautious contemporary, Hong Mai (1123–1202), was only willing to certify the existence of North, East, and South Seas. He believed that there was no evidence of a West Sea, the ocean beyond Tiaozhi being simply the western shores of the South Sea. Reference in the Shangshu to “four seas” was “probably a statement based on extrapolation” (gai yinlei er yan zhi).⁸ However, the Ming scholars Qiu Jun (1420–1495) and Yang Shen (1488–1559) believed that the West Sea indeed existed, based on rumors of a large body of water beyond Yunnan in the extreme west.⁹ All of these arguments were duly recorded in a commentary by Zhu Heling (1606–1683), who advanced no opinion of his own. Later, the Qing geographer and classicist Hu Wei (1633–1714) registered a radical dissent. The Erya, an early dictionary or thesaurus, defined “four seas” as the foreign peoples in each direction, a definition given moreover in the category for words concerning land (di) rather than water (shui). On this basis Hu denied that the “Yu gong” referred to oceans at all. Places described in subsequent histories as “West Sea” and “North Sea” did indeed exist as real bodies of water, Hu conceded, but at such vast distances as to be irrelevant to the cosmological schema of the classical text.¹⁰

All of these scholars tackled geographic research using their deep familiarity with classical and historical works and associated commentaries. They arrived at diverging conclusions despite applying similar textual methods to a similar range of orthodox sources. Significantly, none of them believed that one particular source could alone be considered comprehensive, and each found it necessary to reconcile, or at least to grapple with, apparently conflicting information from different works.

Around the end of the Han period, Chinese scholars began to confront a new and unfamiliar vision of the world presented by Buddhist sources. These claimed that the world revolved around a central axis formed by Meru (Sumeru), a mountain of supernatural height surrounded by four major continents (dvipa) within a salt sea.¹¹ Humans occupied only the southern continent of Jambudvipa, which in its form resembled the Indian subcontinent and Tibet, being narrow at the bottom and wider near the top, split in the middle by the mountain chain of Himavat (the Himalayas). North of those peaks lay Anavatapta, a sacred lake usually identified with Lake Manasarowar in western Tibet, from which was said to emerge the Indus, Ganges, Oxus (Amu Darya), and Śita (Tarim) Rivers.¹²

First propagated in Chinese by translated scripture around AD 300, Buddhist cosmology was also described in detail by pilgrims.¹³ Two monk-authored accounts, the Foguo ji of Faxian (ca. 337–422), who between 399 and 414 journeyed overland to India and returned by sea, and the (Da Tang) Xiyu ji of Xuanzang (596–664), whose journey was made entirely by land, were particularly influential. Claims made in Buddhist-derived sources could not easily be reconciled with other accounts. Cosmologically, the theory of four continents around Mt. Sumeru had no Chinese parallel. Even if ocean-enveloped Jambudvipa could be equated to the lands within the “four seas,” this Buddhist continent still contained unknown features bearing unfamiliar names. Moreover, Buddhist worldviews had strong Indo-philic biases, presenting northern India, and particularly Bodh Gaya, as the center of the world.¹⁴ Although scholars preferring orthodox Confucian works denounced this bias, Buddhist sources gradually cross-pollinated with older ideas into a variety of synthesized positions. Anavatapta, lodged within high mountains at the center of Jambudvipa, began to be conflated by some authors with Kunlun, a legendary peak regarded in pre-Buddhist Chinese sources as a central pillar supporting the heavens.¹⁵ Such syntheses extended to riverine geography. Pre-Buddhist sources differed over the source of the Yellow River, producing complex theories—often with ideological implications—of multiple sources connected by underground streams.¹⁶ In time Kunlun and Anavatapta, both considered to be the origin of major rivers, began to be associated with each other. Xuanzang, for instance, cautiously asserted that according to some people the Śita River, which Buddhist sources claimed to flow from Lake Anavatapta, ran underground and emerged elsewhere as the source of the Yellow River.¹⁷ This remained a live question: in the Qing period the Kangxi emperor used Chinese histories, Buddhist scripture, and his own survey maps to analyze the Anavatapta-Kunlun relationship (see below). Synthetic trends also emerged in cartography. Maps of Jambudvipa prepared in the Tang or Song period for devotional purposes concentrated at first almost exclusively on India, but ultimately evolved into world maps that placed other countries within the Jambudvipa framework. Intermediate stages show evidence that monks had trouble reconciling Buddhist statements of India’s geographic centrality with an impulse to give China prominence. By the late Ming, however, integral maps of Jambudvipa, cent...