Books of Revelations: The Importance of the Manchu Language Archival Record Books for Research on Ch'ing History

Abstract

Vol. 6, No. 2 Late Imperial ChinaDecember 1985 BOOKS OF REVELATIONS: THE IMPORTANCE OF THE MANCHU LANGUAGE ARCHIVAL RECORD BOOKS FOR RESEARCH ON CH'ING HISTORY Beatrice S. Bartlett* The received wisdom on the Manchu language archives of the Ch'ing dynasty has been that historians of the Ch'ing have little need either to learn Manchu or to use Manchu materials for research on historical subjects . Learning Chinese will suffice, the argument goes, because the Ch'ing dyarchical principle guaranteed that everything written in Manchu was also recorded in Chinese. Indeed, some Manchu specialists have averred that once the historian gets past 1644, Manchu materials merely provide opportunities to employ the many available dual texts to enhance knowledge of both languages. This outlook was so strongly ingrained in the profession that until Professor Joseph Fletcher formed a Manchu class of seven students at Harvard University in the autumn of 1981, only one student with an interest in Ch'ing history had previously received extensive training in that language from him. A handful of other institutions paid attention to the study of Manchu, but in general the study of other inner Asian languages, Mongol in particular, flourished , while few Ch'ing historians saw any necessity to take up Manchu. *I wish to acknowledge with gratitude the financial assistance and moral support of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China, both of which facilitated my research in the Ch'ing archives in Taipei and Beijing. In addition, the fellowship assistance from the ACLS and the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard for 1981-1983 furthered my acquaintance with the apparently infinite permutations and combinations of problems raised in the Ch'ing archives. For conversations on some of the subjects treated here I am also grateful to several archivists with Manchu language expertise: Chang Wei, Chuang Chi-fa, and P'an Shu-pi at the Palace Museum in Taipei; Chü Te-yuan (Ju Deyuan) and Liu Ching-hsien (Liu Jingxian) at the Number One Historical Archives in Beijing. I wish to thank Professor Jonathan Spence for his comments on the draft of the manuscript and Ms. Joanna WaleyCohen for suggestions. A summary of my findings was presented at the regional Association for Asian Studies meeting at Wesleyan University in October 1981. While at Harvard in 1981-1983 I benefited from discussing some of my findings with Professor Joseph Fletcher . Joan Hill and Ginny Guin assisted me with typing parts of the manuscript. 25 26Beatrice S. Bartlett My position on this issue was dramatically altered in April 1981 when I spotted a group of about a dozen record books with unfamiliar titles (such as Han [or Man] Chiin-chi tang-an tsung-ts'e [General list of Chinese, or Manchu, Grand Council Archival records]), in the Beijing Number One Historical Archives' Grand Council finding list. Once I had these ledgers in my hands I was elated to discover that they were a record series I had known of but for which I had seen no modern references - the Ch'ing Grand Council Archives Section's (Chiin-chi ch'u Man-Han tang-fang) own inventories, compiled at intervals as part of the required copying of records that had to be done once or twice each decade. Today we can use these ledgers to identify the major Grand Council record series, to measure their rate of survival to the present day (it is very high), and to study Ch'ing archival curatorship.· In contrast with what has hitherto been thought, these inventories indicate that many unique Manchu documents, never translated into Chinese, were produced in the middle and even the late Ch'ing. For the late Yungcheng period, for instance, there were ten times as many Grand Council record books in Manchu as in Chinese. The inventories also supply valuable clues about these records because the series titles inform us of the great variety of subjects we may expect to find treated in Manchu once we are given access to the documents. Future Ch'ing historians may well find the study of Manchu worthwhile. In what follows I shall ignore...