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365 appendix Appointment Data for Qing Provincial Governors Historians of monarchical appointments in other empires are somewhat more fortunate than historians of late imperial China. In other realms, the circumstances of individual appointments are revealed in memoirs, correspondence , and, in some cases, even letters of appointment. In China, these materials had much more limited value. While imperial comments on the occasion of a governor’s appointment were not uncommon in China, they were often tantalizingly brief. Moreover, the extant records of words spoken at the Qing court were not, in a strict sense, primary sources, being instead edited materials produced significantly after the events they purport to describe. unable to rely on what emperors said, we must rely on what emperors did. Fortunately, the facts of imperial appointments in China are well documented. every appointment of an official to the office of provincial governor was announced by an edict, and these edicts, arranged chronologically, were published in the Veritable Records of the Qing. Appointments recorded in the records tell us what the court intended and provide a more complete record of appointments than data recorded in provincial gazetteers or the personnel chapter of History of the Qing. These edicts have been indexed in a project led by Qian Shifu and his colleagues at Beijing university, completed in 1963 and published in 1980.1 The record of provincial appointments in volume 3 of this index is nearly complete; in rare instances, the researchers established information using sources other than imperial edicts. As a record of appointments, the entries in the Veritable Records are far more complete than the accounts in provincial gazetteers or the “Treatise on Officials” in History of the Qing, produced in the early twentieth century. The material has been used in this volume in two ways. For the seventeenth century, before the provincial order was fully evolved, the entries in A Chronological Chart of Official Appointments in the Qing Dynasty establish who governed where and when. Once these basic facts were determined, biographical materials filled in the details of careers, connections, and policy emphases. Since the provinces in these early years were very different from one another, comparisons among them had to proceed in qualitative rather than quantitative terms. Comparable data could be collected for each appointment only after the territorial system had developed fully, and provinces were more consistent units of the imperial order. 366 Appendix For convenience, comparisons begin in the year 1700. Of course, any date is arbitrary , particularly one from the Western calendar. But by this year in China, the great rebellion of Wu Sangui in the south had ended, most provinces had achieved their final form, and changes in personnel procedures in the capital made it more likely that officials could move readily from province to province. I chose 1900 as an end date in order to avoid the changes in personal order that resulted from the political reform the dynasty undertook in its last decade. A total of 1,512 appointments of 532 officials were recorded. Several of the charts record appointments made in the fifteen provinces that retained a consistent form between 1700 and 1900; in these charts, 57 appointments made in Zhili (3 appointments), Sichuan (17 appointments), Gansu (32 appointments), Taiwan (2 appointments), and Xinjiang (1 appointment) were omitted, resulting in a total of 1,455 appointments. For each appointment, the institutional, spatial, temporal, and ethnic data were recorded. Institutional data includes mode of appointment and mode of departure . Appointments were divided into promotions from lieutenant governor to governor, lateral transfers from one governorship to another, and special appointments . Since the term “special appointment” is used here to some extent as a proxy for imperial intervention in the appointments process, appointments of individuals serving as board presidents and censors have been classified as special appointments, even though there was a routine procedure for making such appointments. Since appointments of this type were not made for much of the eighteenth century, their inclusion does not affect many of the arguments made here. Modes of departure include unforeseen circumstances (illness, death, or the death of a parent and the required period of mourning this entailed), political circumstances (summons to the capital, being relieved of responsibility , demotion, or cashiering), and routine actions (promotion or lateral transfer ). Spatial data includes place of appointment and the applicant’s previous and subsequent locations. Temporal data includes year of appointment, year of departure, and length of term. The ethnic identity of the governor, as recorded in the...

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