This attractive volume, enhanced by over 150 illustrations and benefitting too from the very best Slovenian production values, is simply a triumph of editorial dedication and skill, admirably fulfilling its aim of bringing a human face to innumerable opening lectures on the burgeoning flood of courses now dedicated to tracing “The Rise of the Dragon” in Anglophone academe. My sense as an outsider to late Qing history is that such a book was urgently needed, and that nothing quite like it existed before. Arthur W. Hummel's Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period, 1644–1912 (Washington, DC: United States Printing Office, 1943), which was produced over nine years during the 1930s and 1940s by a team of over 50 scholars, admittedly provides some 800 biographies over a span of time two and a half times as long, but as a work of reference it does not make for agreeable browsing. David Der-wei Wang's A New Literary History of Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), which draws on an international team of more than 140 scholars to create a chronological coverage from 1635 to 2014, predominantly on the twentieth century, in over 160 short essays on literary figures and their works, is a wonderful resource but does not stray far beyond literature, even if it is an account of literature that every historian should be familiar with. Here by contrast the over ninety contributors have been brought together in a work that celebrates the lives of men and women who are remembered for the impact they made in a variety of walks of life, a window on the late Qing that anyone seeking to inform themselves better on the period cannot afford to ignore.
The biographical sketches are grouped together into a sequence of eight rather loose categories: “the court”, “religious figures”, “militarists”, “artists”, “observers”, “business people”, “statespeople”, and “makers”. In the case of a couple of entries we are warned that the subject probably did not exist (Number 24, the supposed martyr Huang Shuhua) or remains stubbornly anonymous (Number 54, the Manchu Teacher of the “One Hundred Lessons”). All biographies are equipped with further reading, mainly in Chinese and English, though in one or two instances only the former is given, justifiably so perhaps in the case of Number 51, the formerly unduly neglected Wu Songliang, only mentioned in passing in Hummel's work but here the subject of a very helpful entry by Charles Aylmer, but more bafflingly so in the case of Number 6, Imperial Consort Keshun, who even has an English Wikipedia entry with further English references under her misnomer, not mentioned here, of the “Pearl Concubine”. The cosmopolitan aspects of Qing rule are well illustrated, as for example may be seen not simply from the fair number of Mongol and Muslim names along with those of the Manchu elite but also from the inclusion of no fewer than ten personalities originally from outside the empire. In the case of the British Major General Charles Gordon, who once loomed large in all British accounts of nineteenth-century Chinese history as the alleged saviour of the dynasty, however, one suspects that he has been included mainly to disabuse an English-language readership of such fantasies.
By contrast for the most part the chief criterion for inclusion in this volume seems to have been influence on later stages of the Chinese story, though here one comes up against the frankly admitted qualms of the editors (p. 11) about their inability to include the many figures from the period specified whose names lived on, but for whom space could not be found in their allotted less than four hundred pages – Hummel's work runs to more than one thousand, and Wang's too. I recall, for example, how overseas Chinese in the 1970s still read the translations and original works of the marvellously cosmopolitan Su Manshu 蘇曼殊 (1884–1918), but while I fully endorse the editors’ hope that “other selections will follow”, I fear that the heroic scale of their efforts suggest that this may not happen in a hurry. For now, therefore, it may be worthwhile pointing out that the origins of this selection in conjunction with a British Museum exhibition may be discerned as having exerted some specific and readily understandable influence on its content. So, for example while the book shows a due awareness that it may well have Chinese readers as well as British ones, the thought that it may attract foreign readers not too far from London seems less prominent. While therefore it is certainly true that Number 56, Lu Xinyuan 陸心源 (1834–94), has been “generally overlooked in recent Western scholarship” (p. 190), in 1909 Paul Pelliot devoted two articles in French in the Bulletin de l'École française d'Extrême-Orient to his achievements that could have been added to the further reading.
Overall, there are probably three factors that the reader should bear in mind before taking this intrinsically very useful selection of biographies as fully representative of the late Qing achievement. First, the British Museum is not the Science Museum, so there is a natural tendency here to concentrate on the humanities, even if Number 94, Wu Qijun 吴其濬 (1789–1847), found fame for his expertise in mining and botany. But there is no mention here therefore of Li Shanlan 李善蘭 (1810–82), who makes it into Wikipedia not simply as a translator but also as an original mathematician. There was at least one noteworthy late Qing experimental scientist, too: David Wright, in his important monograph Translating Science: The Transmission of Western Chemistry into Late Imperial China, 1840–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 30–54, shows how Xu Shou 徐壽 (1818–84) built on much earlier Ming advances in acoustics to devise an experiment that clearly met the best international standards, since it was published in the journal Nature in March 1881.
Second, the museum connection perhaps inevitably means here that achievements in the realm of material culture tend to eclipse those in less tangible arenas, such as political thought. Naturally therefore the categories most closely associated with material culture, “Artists” and “Makers”, take up almost one-third of the selection, and this may arguably have resulted in the squeezing out of at least one major thinker of the age more important than one or two of the painters featured – though their numbers too might easily have been increased. When in 1999 Philip A. Kuhn (1933–2016) looked back to the nineteenth century to identify the thinkers who to his eye laid the foundations for the China that he saw in his own times, as he explained in the lectures first published in that year as Les origins de l’État chinois moderne, he did name Number 21, Wei Yuan 魏源 (1794–1857), but also his friend Gong Zizhen 龔自珍 (1792–1841), here mentioned only in passing by Charles Aylmer. Gong is accorded a substantial entry in Hummel's work that remarks both on the popularity of his verse with students at the time that Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period was being written, and on the influence of his ideas on the reformers at the end of the dynasty.
Finally, almost all the persons who did make the cut, whether loyalists, rebels, or revolutionaries, seem to have accepted the idea of the Qing empire or any imagined successor as a unified state, with possible partial exceptions in the case of the eminent Muslims, Number 16, Yusuf Ma Dexin 馬德新 (1794–1874), and Number 57, Mūsā Sayrāmi (1836–1917). But what of their co-religionists, Du Wenxiu 杜文秀 (1823–72), or Yakub Beg (1820–77), who both for a while managed to govern portions of Qing territory as separatist regimes that dealt independently with European powers? Perhaps they contributed nothing to the creation of modern China as we currently understand it, and so are ruled out. So, may the same be said of the thirteenth Dalai Lama and the eighth Jebtsundamba Khutuktu? The political entity brought into being by the latter still survives, and though that created by the former is no longer with us, it is the argument of Gray Tuttle that Tibetan Buddhists were even so important in the making of modern China. None of these persons rate a separate entry in Arthur Hummel's work, so the editors certainly cannot be faulted for excluding them; the only point that needs to be kept in mind is that in talking of the creation of “modern China” in the title of a book about the Qing this should not occlude the fact that the fit between these two entities is not a perfect one. In a work destined for a wide reading public the unqualified assertion embodied in the title of this book is of course quite justifiable. But one hopes that at least a few of its readers may be moved to ponder some of the complexities that distinguish the age described from our own. If so, the credit will still be due to the editors for providing such a rich feast of material to start them thinking.
