Civil Bureaucracy and Embassies

By the time of the establishment of the new Jin khanate capital at Shenyang (after 1634 called Mukden) in the early 1620s, the employment of literate Chinese men was not a complete novelty.

The nature of the conquest of Liaodong required that the two governments co­ordinate on some matters, and the pattern through the entire Qing period was that overlap or redundancy could frequently be found in the relationships among the governments.

This civilian government was most dramatically affected by the Qing conquest of north China in 1644/1645. By a complex process (which remained the subject of imperial judgment and revised judgment through the eighteenth century), Chinese civilian officials with personal histories of service to the former Ming Empire—or both the Ming and the Li Zicheng rebel state that had displaced it—were brought into service of the Qing.^[1994] A majority were employed and kept under some signif­icant level of surveillance at the new imperial court in Beijing. The occupied prov­inces were generally overseen by Chinese-martial, who assumed governorships and often supplied their own relatives or associates to local government roles.^[1995] Not until the 1670s and later did the civilian government of the Qing in China become open to regular appointments of civilian Chinese men, who by then were accred­ited through a traditional examination system.

This civil government had built within it a tradition, method, and locality (the Ministry of Rites, libu) for the reception of foreign visitors. “Guest ritual” (binli) rooted in classical history was the method by which ambassadors from foreign states were received at court. The offices managing visits to this court included a translation bureau, whose efficacy in the Ming and the Qing is dubious. A central feature of these guest rituals was the exchange of goods and the ritual obeisance of the visitor to the imperial throne (as illustrated on the cover of this volume). The ceremonies were an expression of, but not the substance of, a loose network of trade, patronage, political alliance, and occasionally strategic relationships across East and Southeast Asia. In the Ming and some earlier periods the use of these ritual halls and practices seems to have loosely replicated the early role of the Zhou rulers as the supreme moral intercessors between Heaven and humanity, but it is possible that in the Qing period the rituals were interpreted more as the act of sovereign rulers acknowledging the supremacy of a primus inter pares.^[1996] In any case, this office was a province of the Ming-derived civil government, and facilitated the expression of the Qing rulers in a continuing role with the Ming rulers as masters of the guest ritual. It was not in any practical terms the central avenue of economic or even po­litical relations; Portuguese merchants and ambassadors, for instance, had pursued complicated relations with the Ming court, and Portugal had a trade relationship with the south Chinese coast, but Portugal was not listed as an embassy state.

Under the Qing, Korea retained its rank at the top of the list, giving it the most fre­quent visits to the court and most opportunity for discussion of trade and strategic issues, while the Liuqiu/Ryukyu Islands and Annam ranked high on both Ming and Qing lists. However, the list of embassies received through the civil court during the Qing was much shorter and more focused than the Ming list before it. Japan was a very high- ranking embassy state of the Ming, and did not send embassies to the Qing court at all (partly because the Tokugawa shogunate had outlawed foreign trade). European imperial expansion in East Asia removed the Philippines from the Qing list; the same was true for Indonesian states with the exception of Sulu. Ottoman ex­pansion removed the Ming embassy states of Mecca and Medina. Qing conquests in Mongolia and Eastern Turkestan removed many of the federations and city-states of those regions who had sent embassies to Ming. On the other hand, while Europe had been represented in the Ming list by only the Vatican and the Netherlands, the Qing guest courts were visited by embassies from Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, the Vatican, and Russia. The last-named is a reminder that, as in many legal affairs, for­eign relations could also seep between the Qing governments—in this case, between the civil government and the Frontiers Department, until 1861.