The Inconvenient Imperial Visit: Writing Clothing and Ethnicity in 1684 Qufu

The twenty-third year of the Kangxi reign (1684) marked a turning point in the Ming-Qing transition.² By this year, the Qing government had quelled the rebellion of the Three Feudatories (1673–1681), and opposing forces in Taiwan had submitted to the central government (1683). As political and military conflicts gradually settled down, the Manchu government embarked upon a series of cultural projects to consolidate its rule, a campaign some historians call the “second wave” of the Qing conquest.³ As part of this cultural campaign, the Kangxi emperor (hereafter Kangxi) embarked on an inspection tour of east and south China in the ninth month of this year, a ritual event symbolizing the beginning of an era of peace and prosperity.⁴ During his tour, Kangxi visited Qufu, Confucius’ hometown in Shandong province. It was the first time in Qing China that a Manchu emperor personally visited Qufu and performed the utmost salutation of “three kneelings and nine bows.” Significantly, it was also the first time that the Manchu state introduced Manchu-style costumes into the core of a ritual performance that took place in the Kong household in Qufu.⁵

Historians have considered Kangxi’s performance—in particular, the three kneelings and nine bows—at this Confucian ritual event as significant evidence of Sinicization.⁶ Clothing, however, gainsays such a proposition. In 1684 Qufu, not only the emperor but also the other participants, including musicians and ritual dancers, were wearing ritual costumes in the Manchu style—a sartorial system imposed upon the Han Chinese as a symbol of conquest. One can thus contend that whereas Confucian rituals sinicized the Manchus, Manchu costumes infiltrated Confucian rituals. Manchu clothing employed at a Confucian ritual performance thus exemplified the co-existence, tension, and balance between Manchu and Han elements in Qing society.⁷ This paper reveals the uneasy complexities of the sartorial transition—and in turn the complexities of the dynastic change itself—in the seventeenth-century China and beyond.

Clothing was a crucial yet sensitive facet of ritual performance and was thus of great concern to both the Manchu government and the Kong family. Several groups of documents are available to explore how different parties in early Qing China perceived, interpreted, and represented clothing. A cluster of early Qing documents produced by the central authorities about Kangxi’s 1684 visit to Qufu reflect the perspectives of the Manchu state. Such sources include the Imperial Diaries of the Kangxi Reign (Kangxi qijuzhu), the Collected Statutes of the Great Qing (Da Qing huidian), the Grand Ceremony of the Imperial Visit to Lu (Xing Lu shengdian), and the Veritable Records of the Kangxi Emperor (Shengzu Ren Huangdi shilu).⁸ Another group of materials produced by the Kong family in Qufu provide local and personal accounts of the event. Kong Shangren (1648–1718), Confucius’ sixty-fourth-generation descendant, served as a ritual instructor, imperial tour guide, and lecturer during the imperial visit. After the imperial visit, Kong Shangren added an account of the event to the Gazetteer of Queli (Queli zhi), a historical document featuring the Kong family of Qufu. Kong Shangren later composed another account, “The Extraordinary Events Whereby I Came Down from the Mountain” (“Chushan yishu ji,” hereafter “Extraordinary Events”), which recounted his personal experience of receiving the Manchu emperor.

This study focuses on writings by the Kong family about clothing and body on display during Kangxi’s visit to Qufu in 1684, and situates the events of 1684 in Qufu within the larger context of the negotiations between the Manchu government and the Kong family in early Qing history. It pays special attention to the discursive practices about clothing—more specifically, the fissures between clothing as material objects and clothing as a theme for historical/literary writing. It argues that literati scholars of the Kong family integrated Manchu clothing into Confucian rituals through their strategic interpretation of the body and clothing in the ritual setting. More broadly, the article demonstrates how the Manchu government and the Kong family negotiated with each other over the meaning of clothing through the long seventeenth...