This panel will explore the ways in which the Manchu emperor used landscape and architecture to represent and structure his political authority. During the eighteenth century, the Qing empire experienced a proliferation of sites associated with the emperor, including newly constructed imperial hunting parks, imperial libraries, summer palaces, and temporary lodges used during the northern and southern tours. These new buildings reflected the new sources of, and audiences for, imperial legitimacy, namely Manchu, Han, Mongol, and European. They also reveal the transferral of court taste to sites located outside the imperial capital, and the emulation of southern styles in northern constructions. Panelists will suggest ways in which new architectural forms reflect a changing relationship between the emperor and his empire.

The four papers will draw upon a wide array of sources that include stelae, official documents, poetry, letters, essays, maps, commemorative marginalia associated with the Southern Tours, and guidebooks. By taking an interdisciplinary approach to the symbolic representation of political power, we will create a forum for scholars working in history, art history, literature, and geography to explore these issues through visual and textual media.

Cary Y. Liu, Princeton University

With the establishment of the Qing dynasty in 1644, the Manchu rulers needed to find a way to occupy, order, and govern the far reaches of their realm. Archiving—naming and categorizing relationships between people, places, and things—was a means to map and occupy empire. Archival projects such as the Qianlong emperor’s Comprehensive Library of the Four Treasuries (Siku quanshu) encyclopedia allowed the dynasty to claim possession of all under heaven by the naming and ordering of knowledge. Likewise, in the Manchu architectural typology of the imperial garden-palace, sites and peoples across the nation and the world were encompassed within the framework of empire.

Relying on imperial documents, poems, and stelae records, this paper examines the architectural design of Imperial Summer Villa at Jehol as an act of archiving. After the early imperial southern tours, attention switched to the political and military situation in the north. Northern tours were conducted regularly starting in 1677, and the Summer Villa was constructed in the Kangxi and Qianlong reigns, as the second of a new Manchu "garden-palace." At the Summer Villa, archiving was achieved by means of the layout of the garden-palace plan and through the design of its component gardens and buildings. An implicit map of the empire was embodied in the spiritual and symbolic topography of the overall plan, and differences in architectural and garden design between the Kangxi and Qianlong periods reflects changes in approaches toward archiving.

Philippe Foret, University of Oklahoma

On April 2, 1696, the Kangxi Emperor led an expedition against the Juunghar Mongols. The Emperor and his army crossed the Gobi Desert and entered Outer Mongolia. The letters in Manchu that the Emperor wrote to his son in Beijing are intimate documents that describe the daily events of a military "promenade." At the same time, they express the Emperor’s impressions of Mongolia. The spatial concepts that the emperor uses in his personal writings are crucial to our full understanding of the Qing "Great Enterprise." More specifically the letters inform us of the values that underpinned two major projects that began shortly after the emperor’s return to Beijing: the creation of the new summer residence north of the Great Wall and the mapping of the Qing empire.

Using concepts developed by Michel de Certeau, I will examine these letters as if they were travel accounts in order to ground the imperial discourse in the landscape of the Other. The elusive Juunghars and the empty steppe generated a discourse that illustrates Kangxi’s relationship to his own geographicity. In Kangxi’s letters, new geographical knowledge is seen as the rational result of transition through practical space. This observation contradicts our usual assumptions, based on more formal discourses, that the Emperor always acts spatially within the ritual bounds of his hegemonic function. There is irony in this epistolary narrative: Kangxi as a geographer let himself be immersed in the naming, sampling and mapping of exotic Mongolia, while as a historian Kangxi immerses Outer Mongolia in a Qing empire that emulates the Yuan empire.

Michael G. Chang, University of California, San Diego

Previous interpretations of the Qianlong emperor’s mid-eighteenth-century Southern Tours have tended to locate them within an inexorable process of "sinfication" whereby Manchu rulers succumbed to the power of Southern literati ("Chinese") culture. This interpretation is not entirely inaccurate, but neither is it complete.

In this paper I will present a more complex picture of Qing imperial authority in the South by exploring the material forms of a mobile court that were the hallmark of the Qianlong emperor’s famed Southern Tours, and of imperial tours in general. Besides the immediate bodily presence of the emperor and his retinue, there were two other material manifestations of the mobile court: the imperial procession and the imperial encampment. The latter was a radical departure from the stereotypical, architectural manifestation of the court—the imperial palace—because it was, in effect, a military bivouac. A closer examination of the imperial encampment and entourage during Qianlong’s Southern Tours will reveal that Qing political authority in the lower Yangtze region remained simultaneously dependent upon notions of both conquest and benevolent rule well into the eighteenth century.

Tobie Meyer-Fong, George Mason University

In honor of the Qianlong emperor’s Southern Tours, the salt merchants of Yangzhou undertook the radical transformation of the city’s landscape. In particular, they reconfigured the scenic area north of the city wall, creating unprecedented views and gardens designed to suit the imperial taste. The new construction in Yangzhou followed new standards of architectural taste emanating from Beijing, and in some cases was explicitly modeled after particular neighborhoods and buildings in the capital. To some extent, these merchants recast the city as an extension of the imperial hunting parks, palaces, and retreats of the north, rather than invoking the city’s heritage as an exemplar of southern culture. This marked a change in architectural style from the Jiangnan model that prevailed in the seventeenth century, and mirrors a northward shift in the city’s cultural, political, and economic orientation.