Forgery and Impersonation in Imperial China: Popular Deceptions and the High Qing State by Mark McNicholas (review)

"You've won!" You open your email to find one from the representative of a Nigerian prince. The prince wants to get his considerable fortune out of his country, and asks your help in depositing funds in your bank account. In exchange for providing him with your banking information, social security number and other personal identifiers, and a small sum of money to assist in the transfer of funds, he offers you a sizeable percentage of his assets. If you agree to these conditions, of course, you've been had.

Mark McNicholas reminds us in his rich new book that such "advance fee scams" did not originate with the internet age, nor are they peculiar to the modern West. In the eighteenth-century Qing empire it was not unheard of for a distinguished looking person, bearing impressive credentials with official seals, to show up at a substantial home with news that the resident had just been accorded a flattering imperial honor. All that is necessary to receive it is to provide the representative suitable up-front handling charges. Got you!

This Qing equivalent of the Nigerian prince scheme was hardly the only type of fraud that dotted the late imperial landscape. McNicholas details—often very entertainingly—cases of phony princes, phony officials and yamen underlings, phony "secret agents" and imperial investigators, phony policemen, phony proxy agents for delivery of "contributions" (juanna) in return for civil service degrees and official ranks, and many others. Along with a growing number of previous scholars, including Thomas Buoye, Melissa Macauley, Bradly Reed, and others, McNicholas has mined Qing archives—especially the case files of the Board of Punishments (xingke tiben)—to explore the variety of routine crime in early modern China. Drawing upon archival collections in Beijing and Taiwan by means of keyword searches and other sampling techniques, the author assembles a source base of some 266 legal cases, which he supplements by close reading of successive legal codes, bureaucratic correspondence, and other materials. The cases span the years 1645-1850, but are overwhelmingly concentrated in the era from late Kangxi through the Qianlong reign, that of the "high Qing" or "prosperous age" (shengshi). The prolonged crime spree that McNicholas depicts, that is, took place precisely in the period when things went right.

Another authorial choice delimiting the subject is that all the crimes described entail, in some aspect or another, fraudulent claims of imperial or official agency. Given the ubiquity of contracts and property title documents in Qing society, there must have been countless instances of forgery of these, in which no invocation of official authority was advanced, but these are not the concern here. This is, in effect, a book about the early modern Chinese state.

That state was the embodiment of what Pierre-Etienne Will has called "doing the most with the least." High Qing capacity to get things done was genuinely impressive. It managed with tolerable success to defend its vast and significantly expanding borders, to maintain and extend a sprawling and intricate hydraulic infrastructure, to provision its mushrooming population (a source for the throne of both gratification and alarm), to manage (albeit loosely) a booming and diversifying economy, to maintain for much of the period domestic peace, and, not least, to adjudicate many thousands of civil and criminal legal cases. It did this while remaining small, in terms of the percentage of the population in formal state employ and of the domestic product under state fiscal control. This smallness was not only a function of limited technological capacity but also of deliberate choice—"benevolent governance" (renzheng) meant, in the Qing, light governance. Indeed, the Kangxi emperor's famous 1713 pledge to never raise the land tax (yongbu jiafu), and the frequent tax rollbacks of the early Qianlong decades, may well have contributed to a formal state presence on the...