Topics for Research in Ch'ing History

Vol. 8, No. 1 Late Imperial ChinaJune 1987 TOPICS FOR RESEARCH IN CH'ING HISTORY Susan Naquin and Evelyn Rawski For the last several years we have been reading through the secondary literature on eighteenth-century China in order to write a chapter (as yet unpublished) on "Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century" for the Cambridge History ofChina. (We found the subject sufficiently interesting that we have since undertaken to write a book with the same title.) In the course of this research, we noticed a number of topics that were interesting but under-studied. Although our list is scarcely exhaustive, we have here discussed each of these topics briefly, indicating in a general way the relevant source materials, in order to bring them to the attention of scholars in the field. We assume that our readers are familiar with the secondary literature in the Ch'ing field and therefore have not mentioned at all the existing works that touch on aspects of the problems discussed here. A recent bibliography of the secondary literature in Chinese (covering publications from 1900 until mid-1981) is Ch'ing-shih lun-wen so-yin (Index to Articles on Ch'ing History), compiled by the Ch'ing History Section, Institute of History , Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Ch'ing Research Institute at People's University (Peking, 1984), but there are also relevant articles in Japanese and Western languages. We have only occasionally noted work in progress, but would be gratified to know that research on more of these topics is already underway. (Perhaps Late Imperial China would welcome brief statements by scholars doing work on these subjects.) We also assume the reader's general acquaintance with the standard primary sources, both archival and published, available for Ch'ing history. We have therefore only noted here general types of materials that could be useful for a given topic. Those not familiar with these sources might turn to one slightly-out-of date bibliographical guide that includes the Ch'ing, Endymion Wilkinson's The History ofImperial China: A Research Guide (Harvard East Asian Monographs 49, 1974), and to more recent articles in Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i on archives in Peking and Taiwan. Some of these topics may be suitable as books, some as Ph.D. dissertations , some as articles, some only as research notes. On some subjects, 187 188Susan Naquin and Evelyn Rawski our general understanding may have to be built up out of a number of small studies; on others, large-scale collaborative projects may be most appropriate. For some topics there are straightforward and voluminous sources; others invite fieldwork; for still others, little is known and a research strategy is not obvious. We have clustered the topics for which lack of sources seems to be a serious problem at the end of this article and marked them with asterisks (**); graduate students should be especially wary of them. The relationship between questions and sources is a dialectical one, however, and sources alone should not dictate our research agenda. We therefore recommend all of these topics in the hope that each may someday find an appropriate format and author. The Examination System Now that we know how the examination system was supposed to work, it is time to find out how it actually functioned. One could begin almost anywhere. A full description of any single exam might show: who wrote and graded the exams, how many candidates there were, what were the precise questions, how long it took until the results were known, what percentage passed, what distinguished the passing exams, what socializing took place between candidates and examiners before and after the exam. The relations between schools, education officials and examination should be studied. Generalizations about the fairness of the examinations as a route of social mobility would seem to require substantiation. What was the effect of the many new levels of exams added during the Ch'ing? What differences were there in content between the different levels of examinations? How did the content actually change over time? Did changing scholarly concerns influence the content? SOURCES: A careful study of the changing Ch'ing regulations for the examination would provide a...