Chang Po-hsing and the K'ang-hsi Emperor

CHANG PO-HSING AND THE K'ANG-HSI EMPEROR By Jonathan Spence In the summer of 1714 Chang Po-hsing, the governor of Kiangsu province, shut himself up in the city of Soochow and refused to come out. He would not leave the city to preside over the assizes at Ch'ang-chou; he extended the curfew long into the daylight hours so that business was seriously disrupted; he arrested a group of Shensi hat-sellers on the grounds that they were conspirators; and ordered the local chou and hsien officials to call up special constables to protect him. The reasons for these actions, according to Chang Po-hsing, were that he was faced with the danger of assassination, either from pirates or from the supporters of the province's former governor-general, the Manchu Gali. In response to strongly worded secret edicts sent by the puzzled K'ang-hsi Emperor, two officials tried to find the true reasons for Chang Po-hsing's odd conduct. "The Emperor knows [Chang Po-hsing'sJ unswerving integrity, " wrote Lang T'ing-chi, the director -general of grain transport, "so there is no point in my reporting on that. The fact remains that he is extremely suspicious by nature, and concerned with minutiae, so that business gets held up badly. In any conversation, if the speaker is extolling someone then Chang Po-hsing doubts him, if the speaker denigrates someone then Chang Po-hsing believes him. Consequently there are rascals who make up completely unfounded stories, baseless rumors, falling in with his wishes in the hopes of gaining his trust. " Li HsU, the textile commissioner of Soochow, developed a similar argument. "I have closely observed the governor; as a general rule he is extremely suspicious and extremely scared. Being extremely suspicious , whenever something happens he goes out of his way to find flaws and cannot follow things through to a clear conclusion. Naturally the innocent get involved, and numerous people are implicated. Being extremely scared, in his heart he's afraid to act, and puts an absolute trust in the quite unfounded statements of the meanest people. Being uneasy day and night, his behavior is naturally topsy-turvy. " Chang Po-hsing is famous in Ch'ing biographical compendia as a neo-Confucian philosopher and as an incorruptible official. Neither quality need be denied to him; but a close examination of the historical record, zeroing in on the fateful summer of 1714, shows at what cost that reputation was bought, and also tells us a good deal about the K'anghsi Emperor's character. - 4 Born in 1652, Chang Po-hsing was the only son of a wealthy landowner in Honan. He received a rigorous and conventional classical education, became a licentiate at twenty-five and, after failing each examination once, a chü-jen in 1681 and a chin-shih in 1685. In the palace examination he placed 80th in the third grade. In the next fifteen years he served on three occasions, for rather brief periods, as a secretary with one of the boards or bureaus in Peking. But his preference was clearly for the life of scholarship and contemplation in his native Honan, and it was at his I-jeng home that he spent most of his time. Here he wrote and talked with friends, leaving his study only occasionally to fulfill his obligations as a member of the local elite by helping in irrigation or famine relief works. At such work he was successful, dispensing the family money (his father died in 1695) with a generous hand. He had a large library, over fifteen hundred acres of land, two sons and three daughters, and now and again someone came to study with him. There is little doubt that he was a happy man. When in 1700, Chang Po-hsing being now forty-eight years old, the Director -gene ral of river conservancy took note of his local reputation as an upright man and self-made irrigation expert, and recommended him for office, Chang Po-hsing strenuously objected. He pleaded a combination of inexperience and sickness, but was overruled. After two years working on a stretch of the Yellow River, he was...