*翁垟镇商品房A幢10号*: 2013

10/14/13 Monarchs and Ministers "d0e620" 10:48 AM Preferred Citation: Bartlett, Beatrice S. Monarchs and Ministers: The Grand Council in Mid-Ch'ing China, 1723-1820. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft287004wt/

PROLOGUE

This book describes the great eighteenth-century transformation of Ch'ing (1644–1911) rule by which many of the central-government agencies were consolidated under a new supervising and coordinating high privy inner-court organization, the Grand Council (Chün-chi ch'u ). Early Ch'ing emperors had for the most part discharged the relatively uncomplicated government affairs of their day by dealing personally and directly with the multiplicity of subordinate agencies in the capital. For most of these responsibilities the monarchs had only a few ministerial assistants and small staffs. As a result of the mid-Ch'ing transformation (1723–1820), several of the scattered groups of imperial assistants were gathered in a new body—the Grand Council—and that organization was interposed between the monarch and the central-government agencies, creating an entity able to deal with the greatly increased business of the mid-Ch'ing polity. The transformation was an important factor in the final defeat of China's ancient Mongol enemy on the northwest frontier as well as in the military successes of the Ch'ien-lung Emperor's Ten Campaigns, which pushed the boundaries of the Chinese Empire to their greatest extent in history (except for the period when China was part of the Mongol Yuan Empire, 1260–1368). After the Opium War (1839–42), the experienced council was in place to deal with the dynasty's final half-century of emergencies wrought of great rebellions, infant emperors, regencies, and the intensified western intrusion. Thus the eighteenth-century transformation from direct imperial personal rule to joint monarchical-conciliar administration enabled the dynasty to rise to greatness in its middle years and at the end prolonged its life.

The main concern of this book is to ask how and why this eighteenth-century transformation took place. What caused the formation of the Grand Council and enabled it to rise to the overlordship of almost the entire central government of the Chinese empire within such a short space of time? How was a new

― 2 ― high-level agency propelled to dominance in an administrative context that was frozen by legal codes of exhausting detail and susceptible to factional disputes between long-established ministerial and bureaucratic coalitions? Do the existing theories of Grand Council genesis, usually applied to the final seven years of the Yung-cheng Emperor (r. 1723–35), assist our understanding when we shift to the broader time frame of the council's first and formative century?

The Yung-cheng Three-step Model of Grand Council Genesis

Most accounts of Grand Council development in the Yung-cheng reign have followed the Ch'ing official view and looked back from the standpoint of the strong centralized council of subsequent reigns to describe how a supposedly wise, all-seeing Yung-cheng Emperor purposefully created the powerful, centralizing inner-court agency known in English as the "Grand Council." Although these analyses vary slightly, the usual story is that the early Grand Council—believed to have originated as an offshoot of the Grand Secretariat—developed in three precisely definable steps. It began in YC7 (1729) as the "Military Finance Section" (Chün-hsu fang ), set up close to the emperor in the inner court to deal with the northwest campaign against the Zunghar Mongols.

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10:48 AM Next it metamorphosed through an intermediate phase as the "Military Strategy Section" (Chün- chi fang ). And finally it became the powerful "Grand Council" (Chün-chi ch'u ). All three of these steps are said to have been accomplished within the final seven years of the Yung-cheng Emperor's reign.

[1]

This picture of a single agency growing in strength and undergoing name changes presents difficulties. As Chuang Chi-fa of the Taipei Palace Museum has pointed out, the term "Military Strategy Section" (Chün-chi fang ) does not regularly occur in documents of the Yung-cheng era.[2] In his 1970 book Communication and Imperial Control , Silas H. L. Wu also questioned the standard view when he described a small tightly knit group of imperial assistants who, while not members of a single changing agency that dealt with the northwest military situation, nevertheless performed duties characteristic of the later grand councillors. These inner-court assistants to the emperor, sometimes called "inner grand secretaries" (nei chung-t'ang ), were high-level imperial confidants who could be deputed to perform any task the emperor assigned. They were concerned with the other inner-court administrative staffs not as full-time members but as part-time supervisors.

[3]

With this brilliant insight Professor Wu's work supplied the essential step toward the understanding that the administrative part of Yung-cheng's inner court did not consist of a single powerful agency and thus did not precisely resemble the Grand Council of later times. Rather, the Yung-cheng inner court consisted of several informal nonstatutory groups, a design intended to facilitate imperial control.

My own subsequent archival discoveries have filled out this new framework.

― 3 ― At the Taipei Palace Museum in the 1970s, thinking that the Ch'ien-lung Emperor might have been briefed after coming to the throne, I unearthed a crucial memorial that revealed another flaw in the standard narrative. This document showed that after the Military Finance Section was founded subordinate to the ministerial level of the Board of Revenue, it never underwent name changes or any kind of metamorphosis at all but instead remained continuously in place, operating under its YC7 mandate and title right through to the end of the reign. In 1980–81, when I used Chinese materials in Beijing's Number One Historical Archives, I found repeated mentions of yet another inner-court group, the "High Officials in Charge of Military Finance" (Pan- li Chün-hsu ta-ch'en ), created late in YC8 (early 1731), whose title later changed to "High Officials in Charge of Military Strategy" (Pan-li Chün-chi ta-ch'en , also sometimes Chün-chi ch'u or, in Manchu, Cooha-i nashun-i

[*]

ba ). This proved to be yet another staff—nowhere near as strong as the later Grand Council but bearing the same name.

[4]

Like the other two groups, this one also had a separate existence and lasted to the end of the reign.

Finally, when I was in Beijing for a conference in the autumn of 1985, I was allowed to see some recently sorted court letter edicts and Manchu-language memorials and record books. These supplied further details about the inner-court confidants and the High Officials in Charge of Military Finance—their responsibilities, personnel, and organizational structure. These archival discoveries conclusively demonstrate that for the administrative sector of his inner court, Yung- cheng clung to the K'ang-hsi model of a divided inner court. Yung-cheng's inner court consisted of separate individuals and small staffs, not a consolidated Grand Council. This is the story told in Part One of this book. The key transformation from a compartmentalized to a consolidated inner court had to wait for the early years of the Ch'ien-lung reign (late 1735–95) and is recounted in Part Two.

The Inner/Outer-court Model and Grand Council Growth in the Ch'ien-lung Period

In contrast with the Yung-cheng–period Grand Council genesis, which scholars have narrated in dozens of chapters and essays, the council's astonishing rise to dominance over the central government in the Ch'ien-lung period has hardly been studied at all. Yet similar developments in dynasties before the Ch'ing have been described. These have frequently been analyzed as power struggles between the so-called inner court (nei-t'ing ), the emperor's faction, and the outer court (wai-ch'ao ), the bureaucracy's faction.

[5]

On the one hand were the emperor, his palace

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10:48 AM household, and his privy council assistants; on the other were the officials who presided over the departments that administered the empire. Specific elements in the contests varied from reign to reign and indeed within reigns. Strong emperors might direct the administra-

― 4 ― tors; strong bureaucrats might isolate the emperors and administer the realm independently. In some periods battles were fought entirely within the inner court, sometimes with the palace eunuchs playing a leading role. But with the notable exception of Huang Pei, who astutely grasped the significance of the council's early history as "essentially" a re-creation "of the inner court," most writing about the Ch'ing has failed to stress this kind of cleavage.

[6]

In fact, an inner/outer-court division did exist at the heart of the Ch'ing government. What is more, it was intimately related to Grand Council development.

The two communications systems that flourished through most of the Ch'ing period supply a good example of this bifurcation and offer an opportune means of studying it. The routine communications system inherited from the Ming flourished in the outer court. This was an open, public, regulated bureaucratic channel, many of whose documents—both the reports as well as their responding edicts—were eventually published in the Peking gazettes. To support and make further use of the routine communications system, the outer court had its own archival installations and drew on its archival holdings for official compilations such as the court chronicles (Shih-lu ) and official histories (Kuo-shih ).

By contrast, the palace memorial system began in the K'ang-hsi period as the emperor's private channel, with documents kept secret and limited to circulation between the inner court and provincial correspondents. The two main kinds of official responses to the palace memorials were rescripts written in vermilion, the emperor's own color that signified the source was the emperor himself, and court letter edicts. These responses were composed, dispatched, and processed entirely in the inner court. Under Yung-cheng the inner court also began to develop its own archival storage, first for the palace memorials and later of other types of documents. In the next reign the inner-court Grand Council acquired authority over its own publication projects, notably the campaign histories (fang-lueh ), which were based on its inner-court files. The special inner-court communications system played a key role in these Grand Council developments, supplying both secrecy and access to important information for the monarchs and their inner- court ministers.

Differences between the inner and outer courts were likewise exhibited in the structure of the central-government administration. The outer-court bureaucracy consisted of the major administrative organs, most inherited from the Ming and earlier times. The chief mission of these agencies was to process the documents of the routine system—reports from all over the empire concerning nearly all the major spheres of government enterprise. Most important for understanding eighteenth-century developments was the fact that the outer court operated according to statutory prescription: the administrative code governed the outer-court staffs that ran the empire.

Unlike the inherited and largely unchanging organizations of the outer court that were defined by law, the early-Ch'ing inner court was the creature

― 5 ― of imperial fiat and tended to change from reign to reign. Although the Yung-cheng Emperor, for instance, allowed his father's Deliberative Princes and Ministers (I-cheng wang ta-ch'en ) and the Southern [Imperial] Study (Nan-shu fang ) to continue, they were used less and gradually declined; in their place he conceived a new design for his inner court and appointed a top echelon of his favorites—one to four high assisting ministers—and two new middle-level staffs— the Board of Revenue's Military Finance Section and the High Officials in Charge of Military Finance (described above). When Ch'ien-lung came to the throne another major change took place as Yung-cheng's three new inner-court entities coalesced in one organization. The old name of the Office (or High Officials) in Charge of Military Strategy (Pan-li Chün-chi ch'u ), now appropriately translated into English as "Grand Council," was revived for the new consolidated

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10:48 AM agency, which became the major central-government administrative body for as long as the dynasty lasted. This explains why for the remainder of the Ch'ing and into modern times, people believed that the powerful consolidated inner-court Grand Council of the Ch'ing had been founded in the Yung-cheng period. But we now know that this was true only in the sense of its name.

In employing English-language terminology in this book I have used the words "bureaucrat" and "bureaucracy" much as Yung-cheng himself saw these men—to refer to the large outer-court staffs. By contrast, the inner-court upper-echelon officials whom I call "ministers" (certain grand secretaries, board presidents, and vice presidents who were the focus of imperial blandishments) were the emperor's personal appointees, usually in daily contact with the sovereign. Although they had become inner-court servitors, through their concurrent outer-court positions the emperor deputized them to supervise the outer-court bureaucracy. From Yung-cheng's as well as Ch'ien-lung's perspective these men were not ordinary outer-court bureaucrats, and I have accordingly avoided using outer-court terminology to describe them.

We would be wrong to regard causation in this study (that is, the reasons for the Grand Council's founding and growth) solely as the outcome of a long-term imperial plot to develop the inner court and thereby the capabilities of the autocrats. Other factors also contributed to the council's development into a large inner-court organization of more than two hundred persons directing the government of the empire. The council's monopoly of a fully developed communications channel played an important role in Grand Council growth, as did the secrecy that hid inner-court activities and council expansion from outer-court jealousy and retaliation. Special situations of the times—Yung-cheng's fear of outer-court tendencies to malfeasance, needs of the military campaigns, Ch'ien-lung's fondness for touring—also favored a small tightly knit council directed by ministers with whom the emperors were well acquainted and in whom they had confidence. Although ministerial ambition is difficult to measure, that must also be reckoned as a factor in the council's rise.

― 6 ― Finally, inner-court informality—particularly as manifest in Yung-cheng's inner court—was another important element in Grand Council growth. Yung-cheng's new inner-court staffs were neither enshrined in statute law nor awarded the prestige that would have accompanied formal establishment. Instead his three inner-court entities functioned beyond the reach of the administrative code, thus gaining an advantage that I call "the extralegal dynamic." In the Ch'ien-lung period, when these groups joined together and challenged the long-established outer-court agencies, this freedom from legal constraints promoted growth. The council's extralegal status allowed it to undertake new activities and so engage in expansion of kinds that the administrative codes did not permit its competitors, the outer-court agencies. One example of this advantage is recounted toward the end of Chapter 6, where the grand councillors' concurrent posts—which arose from the lack of formal positions on the council itself—are described. Some of the outer-court responsibilities of those holding the concurrent positions were transferred into the council's purview, thereby enlarging its capabilities. Concurrent posts also supplied council members with unofficial contacts throughout the capital bureaucracy, as well as access to widely scattered sources of information. Thus paradoxically, Yung-cheng's insistence on developing his inner court while keeping it weak, divided, lacking in formal status, and subservient to his will was a major factor that resulted in a Grand Council heyday in the following reign.

At this point the reader may ask how in an autocratic situation where the monarch supposedly made the law, an extralegal dynamic could confer an advantage. If the emperor wished to change the legal arrangements for either the inner or the outer court, it might be argued that he surely possessed the power to do so.

The key fact lies in the differing statutory status of the inner and outer courts. The outer- court agencies of the government were set up under the administrative code and generally ran according to its statutes and precedents. Although the monarch could probably change these arrangements at will (and indeed in a few instances did so), for most matters imperial respect for established statutes prevailed and advice on the wisdom of proposed changes was both sought and followed. The outer-court government thus ran more by a combination of law and consensus

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10:48 AM than by the imposition of raw imperial power, even though the rhetoric of governing always strongly implied that such power existed.

By contrast, in the early eighteenth century—and at the beginning of our story—statute law did not define the inner court. At that time the imperial assistants and staffs were regarded as the emperor's own men: his to appoint, his to command. In the inner court no statutes could be summoned to confound the monarch's desire. The sovereign's will was law. The inner court was free of legal restraints and enjoyed a flexibility denied its outer-court competitors.

― 7 ― Where did the mature Grand Council described in Part Two of this book fit in the inner/outer- court framework? Was it an inner-court privy council that loyally served the mid- and late-Ch'ing emperors and promoted their autocratic designs? Or did it eventually develop its own concerns and become an outer-court administrative staff that ran the bureaucracy? In other words, did the council enter the nineteenth century as the emperor's pawn or as the bureaucracy's directorate? My research suggests that the council did not take sides in this struggle but seized the opportunities provided by both worlds. It remained loyal to the emperor but at the same time extended its reach to direct most of the agencies of the outer court. The result was a greatly expanded inner-court dominance, but one where both ministers and monarchs could be strong. While the framework for autocracy continued in place, the expansion of inner-court work and the ministerial skill and labor essential to accomplishing it weakened the monarchs' ability fully to oversee and direct the government. As a consequence, much of the entire central government— inner as well as outer court—and the provinces too, came under the new inner-court consolidated council.

Plan of the Book

This book is divided into two main parts. Part One investigates the council's Yung-cheng–period origins at the hands of a monarch who distrusted organizations with plenipotentiary powers. These chapters (1–4) show how the Yung-cheng Emperor, jealous of possible alternative power centers that might rival his own, pursued a divide-and-rule policy, preferring to deal directly with selected individuals and small informal groups that were never intended to coalesce and become a single strong privy council at the heart of the inner court. In Chapter 1 I describe the inner/outer-court situation that Yung-cheng faced on coming to the throne and explain how he apparently decided that strengthening the inner court was the answer to his difficulties. Chapter 2 shows how two inner-court confidants gradually came to be used for a variety of high-level tasks. In Chapter 3 I explain how these two became the nucleus of a very small nameless high- inner-managerial echelon, which I call the "inner deputies." Chapter 4 completes the Yung-cheng period with a description of the two subordinate staffs set up to deal with the military campaign. Thus, although Yung-cheng founded the inner-court organizations ancestral to the Grand Council, he always kept them separate and strenuously avoided creating a single strong organization worthy of the translation "Grand Council."

Not all readers will be interested in the details of the first part; many will want to proceed directly to Part Two, which describes the mature eighteenth-century Grand Council. In comparison with Part One's focus on a short thirteen-year reign, the approach in Part Two, which covers a sixty-year reign plus the three years after the abdication, has had to be less detailed. The

― 8 ― introductory Chapter 5 narrates the consolidation of Yung-cheng's three informal inner-court staffs in the single mourning-period transition council (T sung-li shih-wu wang ta-ch'en ), which I have called the "Interim Council," and explains how the name of one of Yung-cheng's small inner-court groups, the "Office of Military Strategy" (Chün-chi ch'u ), was revived early in the Ch'ien-lung period and applied to the newly enlarged inner-court council, whose name is thenceforth properly translated "Grand Council." Chapters 6 and 7 then describe the council over

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10:48 AM the sixty-three years that Ch'ien-lung ruled. Some narrative of development is supplied but there has been little attempt to depict the twists and turns of council growth in detail. The main thrust of these chapters is to show the tremendous expansion of central-government paper-work and thereby of Grand Council responsibilities that took place during the long Ch'ien-lung reign.

Finally, Chapter 8 describes the Ho-shen abuses and Chia-ch'ing reforms of 1799–1820, following the height of the council's power. A few features of the council were reformed, but the reform process was limited and the council emerged largely unchanged from the Chia-ch'ing period. Although I would have liked to round out the Grand Council story with a detailed description of the effects of the new conciliar administrative and decision-making structure on central-government policy making, only a summary can be offered here. It would take another book to describe the council's nineteenth-century history and show how its influence probably did not cease with its demise in May 1911.

[7]

Future study may reveal ways in which council traditions have shaped Chinese government and bureaucracy in the present day.

Sources

The Ch'ing Grand Council is the only historic Chinese high privy council for which substantial numbers of archival materials survive. During the course of my research, the magnificent Ch'ing archives in both Beijing and Taipei were arranged and opened to foreigners. For my initial research, on a slightly different topic, I used the Taipei Palace Museum's superbly indexed Grand Council materials. But at the very moment that I was completing my work, a delegation of scholars led by Professor Frederic Wakeman was touring the mainland archives. As a result, the next year part of that treasure trove was opened to foreigners, and my application to go to Beijing found favor.

In Beijing I was confronted with an ocean of documents ten times as numerous as the holdings I had worked with in Taipei. I realized that the staggering number of new materials would make it possible to write a history of the eighteenth-century monarchical-conciliar transition, whose story had been only indistinctly visible in the Taipei archives. In the end I recast my focus and wrote an almost entirely new book.

The Beijing documents were both voluminous and difficult to use. In 1980–81

― 9 ― archive rules did not permit research assistants, nor were photocopying and microfilming easily available; everything that might be needed had to be copied out by hand and summarized in Chinese in a final report to the archive authorities. My report ran to 108 pages! A brief return trip late in 1985 yielded the pleasures of much-improved facilities but only a frustratingly short time to inspect the tantalizing sea of newly available documents now at my disposal. As a result, on both trips I had to limit my searches to periods of Grand Council history not well covered in Taipei—chiefly late Yung-cheng and early Ch'ien-lung (ca. 1728–60). Even these years could only be skimmed, while I reluctantly had to overlook the Beijing documentation for most other years. This concentration has resulted in an intensive examination of the council's formative years—up to approximately CL25 (1760) when the new conciliar system was being worked out—and less detail for the remainder of the reign.

Despite the importance of the Beijing materials to the final study, reliance on only one of the archival depositories would not have sufficed. Although the Grand Council had a policy of making duplicate and even triplicate (or more) copies of its documents as early as the eighteenth century, several unique items turned up in both places. The book could not have been attempted without recourse to crucial materials in both Taipei and Beijing.

Archival access is necessary to study the Grand Council. No surviving published primary sources tell the full story. The council's early growth depended in part on its being shielded by inner-court secrecy, a situation that has also shielded the facts of its development from later investigators. A policy of confidentiality appears to have prevailed well into the nineteenth century. When an official entry finally appeared in 1818 in the Chia-ch'ing Collected Statutes and Precedents (Hui-tien and Hui-tien shih-li ), the statutes provided a short description of the

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10:48 AM council, but little was supplied under precedents.[8]

Grand councillors also guarded the council's secrets. The published autobiographical writings and memorial collections of grand councillors such as Chang T'ing-yü (1672–1755) and A-kuei (1717–97) preserved confidentiality by omitting information on important council activities. Chang T'ing-yü's chronological autobiography, for example, fails to mention the new group of High Officials until YC11 (1733), more than two years after its founding, even though he had been intimately concerned with its labors throughout the period.

[9]

Moreover, while some eighteenth-century council clerks (Wang Ch'ang and especially Chao I) left useful descriptions of council processes, they too appear to have exercised self-censorship and avoided sensitive information. The same stricture probably applied to the extensive selection of surviving records made by the Grand Council clerk Liang Chang-chü (1775–1849) for his 1822 compilation on Grand Council history and working processes, Shu-yuan chi-lueh . Although Liang had access to the council's voluminous archival remains, his compendium is highly selective. In recent years some scholars have resorted to the piecemeal recollections of peripheral figures such as Hsi Wu- ao

― 10 ― and Yeh Feng-mao, who wrote about council origins many years after their tenuous early observation of some of the activities of its forerunners, but now that comparison with archival evidence is possible these remembrances have frequently proved only partly accurate or, even downright misleading. Reliance on them has sometimes thrown modern scholars far off the track and exacerbated the difficulties of researching the Yung-cheng period.[10] My emphasis on the role of Yung-cheng's loyal younger brother, Prince I (Yinhsiang), and the Board of Revenue ministers as significant formative elements of the Yung-cheng inner circle, for instance, derives from archival materials dating from long before the time that the authors of those hazy reminiscences got around to publishing their observations.

The documents relevant to the eighteenth-century Grand Council story probably number in the hundreds of thousands, with perhaps as many as several thousand items in Chinese and Manchu per year; needless to say, even if I had gained access to all these materials, it would have been impossible to read through them. As a result, at many points I have summarized strenuously in order to condense the material to meet the page limits of modern academic publishing. Among the multitude of state papers available for studying the Grand Council are the palace memorials—high officials' reports to the throne—preserved in their original form (chu-p'i tsou-che ) as well as in reference copies (lu-fu tsou-che ) and record books. All of these may now be tapped for a deeper level of detail and frankness than we have had heretofore.

For the Yung-cheng reign an even more unusual set of documents survives: the numerous holograph imperial responses (rescripts) to the memorials, inscribed in the emperor's own color, vermilion. Frequently the Yung-cheng Emperor composed these when he was off his guard, spontaneously confiding his thoughts for an audience of one or another of his most trusted favorites. Some of these imperial screeds run for several pages and amount to stream-of- consciousness letters. When we read these today we find Yung-cheng speaking to us directly and without subterfuge. We have nothing like their length and self-revelation for any other ruler of imperial China.

Yet although the Yung-cheng documentation frequently reveals what was on the imperial mind, this evidence is also difficult to use. The emperor's ruling style was chaotic at times—to deal with it I developed a card file category headed "Yung-cheng chaos." Notes from the file show that behind Yung-cheng's earnest and frenzied attention to governing there flourished an imperial preference for handling things independently and sometimes haphazardly or even capriciously. For instance, Yung-cheng frequently inscribed his decisions on memorials that were then sent back to the field without any record of what had been said being retained in the capital files. Not surprisingly, the high assisting officials soon developed methods for keeping track of the imperial detritus. Another feature that turned up in the Yung-cheng chaos file was the emperor's proclivity for using different terms to refer to the same thing, or the

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10:48 AM ― 11 ― same term for different things. Researchers familiar with the Yung-cheng materials will have little cause to wonder why officials of the times remedied the situation by instituting strict regularization at the very outset of the Ch'ien-lung reign.

Changes in archival documentation mark the Ch'ien-lung and Chia-ch'ing periods. Although fuller than the previous period, with many more record books (tang-ts'e ), nevertheless materials of these two later reigns lack the numerous spontaneous imperial confidences of the Yung-cheng papers. Thus in contrast with Yung-cheng's long-windedness and frankness, the Ch'ien-lung Emperor usually wrote pithy and routinized rescripts, a fact reflecting the regularization introduced at the beginning of the new reign. As a result, the researcher has to forgo the fascination of the many direct Yung-cheng holograph revelations in exchange for the pleasures of increased general information.

Another Ch'ien-lung–era phenomenon, one of many examples of the increased scope of Grand Council activities, came to light in the archival volumes of the Office of Military Archives (Fang-lueh kuan ). These ledgers reveal the operations and development of the archives and historical compilation offices that were directly supervised by the council. The new publications office was able to censor (approve, gloss, or suppress) original archival documents before publishing the many military campaign histories (fang-lueh ) that were issued in particularly large numbers in the Ch'ien-lung period to extol the dynasty's territorial conquests. The Grand Council also came to be in charge of some of the many publication activities bequeathed from earlier times. Other archival sources depicted the Grand Council's Manchu Division (Man-pan ), a group whose activities have been overlooked until now, possibly as part of the general faith that what the dynasty was claiming about the existence of an evenhanded Manchu-Chinese dyarchy was true. The Grand Secretariat record books of instructions for writing the routine draft memorial rescripts (P'iao pu-pen shih) depicted the previously unimagined extent of the bureaucratization in the Grand Secretariat and Six Boards system, where thousands of details were anticipated and little was left to the possibility of independent action in routing or framing decisions. In the Beijing archives I also ran down the Grand Council's own storage records, regular inventories that suggest the changing range of council responsibilities. Grand Council daybooks containing correspondence below the imperial level opened vistas on the activities of middle-level bureaucrats, a layer of the bureaucracy that heretofore has rarely reached the researcher's eye.

For the entire period the grand councillors' own memoranda (tsou-p'ien ), composed to convey explanations to the Ch'ing emperors, in the twentieth century performed the same service for this grateful researcher.

― 13 ―

PROLOGUE

Preferred Citation: Bartlett, Beatrice S. Monarchs and Ministers: The Grand Council in Mid-Ch'ing China, 1723-1820. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft287004wt/

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