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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Monarchs and Ministers "d0e620" 10/14/13 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-ofconsciousness
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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Monarchs and Ministers "d0e620" 10/14/13 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.
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
http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft287004wt;chunk.id=d0e620;doc.view=print Page 6 of 8
Monarchs and Ministers "d0e620" 10/14/13 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-ofconsciousness
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
http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft287004wt;chunk.id=d0e620;doc.view=print Page 7 of 8
Monarchs and Ministers "d0e620" 10/14/13 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.
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