Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (review)

Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China. By Laura Hostetler (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001) 257 pp. $35.00

Two related trends in recent Qing historiography meet in this attractive book. First is the acknowledgement that the Qing dynasty of the Manchus was an imperial power, engaged in expansion, colonialism, and the other activities that contemporaneous empires elsewhere performed; second, that much of what was happening in China under the Qing fits a general pattern of worldwide developments that growing numbers of scholars are calling "early modern." At the intersection of these concerns lie the "modes of representation," or imperial technologies of cartography and ethnography, that are Hostetler's subjects.

Hostetler argues that certain Qing efforts to depict territory and peoples of the realm are best understood not from a perspective that contrasts Chinese and European, or Eastern and Western techniques, but from one that focuses on a more general shift from an old, "pre-modern" style of geography to an "early modern" approach of distinct cartographic and ethnographic fields of endeavor. Old geography was characterized by romantic representations of peoples and places, descriptions often based on tradition or other texts, and images derived from artists' interpretations of the written description rather than from direct observation. In the early modern approaches, however, maps were drawn to scale and based on astronomical readings, and ethnography no longer relied on imagination or recycled old descriptions but was based on direct observation of the peoples themselves.

In discussing cartography, the author's main examples are the eighteenth-century maps of the realm and of Eurasia produced by the Qing court with the assistance of Jesuit cartographers, who applied the latest scientific principles to draw accurate, large-scale maps with gridlines of longitude and latitude. The commissioning and production of these maps corresponds chronologically to similar centralizing efforts by France, Russia, and other states. That they are part of a strategic project to map the world and demarcate its boundaries is beyond doubt; the author rightly argues that obsession with whether the techniques are "Chinese" or "Western" is misplaced. This section of the book performs a service with its nontechnical discussion of both European and Chinese cartography under an insightful new interpretive rubric.

The empirical core of this study concerns the "Miao albums" (Bai Miao tu), illustrated catalogs of the non-Han peoples found in southern China. Just as "orientalist" Western ethnographic taxonomies of peoples arose in tandem with European colonialism, Hostetler argues, so did Qing representations of these hill-peoples reflect a shift from an old tradition (illustrations of the exotic and monstrous, and of foreign "tributaries") to a new, more empirical approach based on direct observation. Qing scientific ethnography was likewise necessitated by raison d'etat: Eighteenth-century expansion of Han Chinese population and penetration of the Qing state into areas inhabited by Miao groups required accurate information, which the Miao albums, originally probably used as handbooks for Qing officials, provided. However, the character of the albums produced in the nineteenth century changed yet again, returning to exclusive reliance on previous albums rather than on new data, albeit while improving the quality of the artwork to appeal to the new market for the albums that arose among Chinese elites and, eventually, foreign buyers.

Through painstaking content (not art-historical) analysis of dozens of albums for Guizhou province, Hostetler convinces us that the eighteenth-century Bai Miao tu were indeed intended as ethnographic aids to colonial administrators, analogous to similar productions in European colonies. However, the fact that the Qing court and bureaucracy were by the mid-nineteenth century no longer as concerned about accurate information regarding these peoples, despite massive uprisings among them, is troubling for the general thesis that Qing and Europe were equally "early modern." There may not have been the time or resources for fieldwork during the rebellious years of the nineteenth century, but there was time...