The Peking Gazette was a brief daily compendium of useful news about the Chinese government, including the schedule of the emperor; appointments, commendations, and dismissals in the imperial bureaucracy; and selections of edicts and memorials that the court wished to make known. Emily Mokros's remarkable book considers changes to gazette publication in the early Qing, the gazette's place as a vehicle for publicizing information alongside parallel policies of secrecy and censorship, its complex publication history, its varied uses for readers, and its global circulation once excerpted or translated in newspapers in treaty ports and around the world. The book is similar in approach and achievement to R. Kent Guy's The Emperor's Four Treasuries; both works look at forms of Qing textual production and base their arguments not mainly on the text itself, but on memorials, diaries, and literary collections.Footnote ¹

In The Peking Gazette in Late Imperial China, Mokros views the gazette as an example of “curated transparency” (p. 14)—that is, as a strategy for the Qing court to release information in a manner that would generate political authority by enhancing the state's public image. The example of gazettes is particularly rich because although the court carefully surveilled the release of information, it left the actual publication of gazettes largely in the hands of private enterprise. One exception is the Gongshen Tang edition beginning in 1760, which Mokros argues “ran more like a business than a government office” (p. 78). The book details the history of the printing of gazettes, showing how production changed over time and situating the process in the broader history of publishing culture and nascent journalism. Mokros also offers close readings of the testimonies of Qing officials concerning what gazettes meant and how the daily digests of court activity should be read and applied. We hear from famous commentators like Gu Yanwu and Zeng Guofan, from sundry disputatious denizens of the censorate, and from several minor officials. One of the book's highlights is the parsing of the diaries of an examination candidate and low-level bureaucrat, Li Ciming (1830–94), showing how he used gazettes as he attempted to further his own career. Beyond updates of current events at court, the gazettes offered to such officials examples of bureaucratic discipline, lessons in the many challenges they would face in their careers, and compilations of expertise on particular topics.

The structure of the book emphasizes change over time. Chapter 1, “The Qing Information Order,” summarizes the process of releasing documents for inclusion in the gazettes and compares the Qing to earlier dynasties. Chapter 2 demonstrates how the gradual development of palace memorials presented new challenges for the administration of information. Chapters 3 and 4 look at publishing and reading, with an emphasis on the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Chapter 5, “The Qing Gazette Goes Abroad,” examines the circulation of gazetteers, particularly in Europe, from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century. Chapter 6, “Information Wars,” shows how the Qing court changed its policies in the late nineteenth century as it came to realize how foreigners were using gazettes. An extraordinarily useful appendix describes current holdings of gazettes in library collections throughout the world.

Alongside meaty details of gazette production and reception, this book offers useful concepts for future research. Mokros's most capacious arguments concern the Qing “information order” (p. 20), meaning the variety of ways that state actors sought to channel news to and from the imperial center. This concept differs, for example, from Silas Wu's notion of the Qing “deliberative structure.”Footnote ² Wu focused on documents and court councils to show that control of communications constituted a form of political domination. Mokros also grants extensive discussion to disciplinary and deliberative mechanisms, but her account leaves more space for the flow of information beyond the capacity of the state to control it. Gazettes, in particular, helped shape ideas about the court within and beyond the Qing Empire. For example, excerpts in foreign newspapers meant that a global readership could form impressions of the Qing state.

Mokros is disciplined in her focus on the Peking Gazette (provincial gazettes receive only passing mention), but the concepts she develops and the questions she raises extend far beyond the relatively simple process of publishing selections of Qing documents. The ideas here gesture toward a history of the ways that people during the Qing period understood government to work. The court naturally cared about such perceptions, but its efforts to shape ideas were necessarily circumscribed. This insight resonates with much recent work on the Qing, including studies of legal culture, administrative handbooks, and intellectual history. The notion of “information” seems a useful way to highlight connections among what are now mostly separate historiographic strands of legal history, bureaucratic culture, print culture, and colonialism. This book will be required reading for those interested in Qing documents, and indispensable to scholars of publishing, journalism, and court politics.