Daniel Barish. Learning to Rule: Court Education and the Remaking of the Qing State, 1861–1912. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. xiii + 257 pp. $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-231-20329-6; $140.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-20328-9.
Reviewed by Emily Mokros (University of Kentucky)
Published on H-Asia (January, 2023)
Commissioned by Jenny H. Day (Skidmore College)
In Learning to Rule, historian Daniel Barish brings our attention to three men and two women who lived at the epicenter of the late Qing dynasty. Though they ruled a vast multiethnic empire, the Tongzhi, Guangxu, and Xuantong emperors and the Empress Dowagers Cixi and Longyu often appear as peripheral characters in the imperial drama. None of these men reigned for long in any real sense, and the empress dowagers had limited (though real, as shown in this study) political agency. Notably, “each ascended the throne at the same time they began their education in ruling the Qing Empire” (p. 168). An expansive and contentious supporting cast sought to mold these figureheads according to divergent priorities. At stake was the question of how best to design the moral, physical, and intellectual education of the monarchs, both to quell a troubled era and in anticipation of the coming restoration of imperial power. In its narrowest sense, the book profiles schemes to educate the emperors of China in the late Qing. In a second layer of analysis, it tracks how debates over imperial education connected to and sometimes foreshadowed broader trends in society, education, and politics. And most broadly, it contributes to the story of the “remaking of the Qing state”—namely, the reconceptualization of what knowledge, values, and behaviors should characterize Qing rulership. In the end, of course, Qing rulership was not successfully remade. The dynasty fell in 1912, when the main body of this study concludes. Learning to Rule, therefore, describes halting steps toward what might have been a modern Qing ruler.
Barish’s succinct monograph is divided into five body chapters. In chapter 1, he discusses the education of the Tongzhi emperor (r. 1861-74). Because Tongzhi was the only heir of the Xianfeng emperor (r. 1850-60), his rule was already anticipated in the last years of his father’s reign. As a result, much of the debate and planning for his education took place prior to 1861, in the heat of the Taiping Civil War that imperiled his father’s rule. Calamitous contexts propelled anxiety about enhancing the young emperor as a Confucian moral figurehead but also reinforced factional divides among those who sought to influence him. Guangxu (r. 1875-1908), like Tongzhi, was barely more than a toddler when he came to the throne. As with Tongzhi, the designation of Guangxu as heir and emperor was a delicate compromise among vested interests. Now, as described in chapters 2 and 3, new ideals of rulership and requisite knowledge for both rulers and subjects had changed the dynamics of the debate over imperial education. Notably, it was more and more accepted that the monarch should stand as a more public, unifying figurehead—a transformation of prior ideals of rulership. However, it was not easy to signify unity in the body and gesture of a Chinese-educated Manchu ruler of a divided imperial polity. In chapter 3, Barish moves into Guangxu’s brief period of actual rule (1891-98). Whereas the emperor began receiving English instruction upon taking the throne, his lessons lapsed around the time of the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95). Discussions in the press assessed these changes as reflecting China's weak position on the world stage. Barish also revisits the much-analyzed 1898 reform movement, seeing broad agreement among political factions that the emperor should take stronger hold of political power.
Cixi, the most notorious of the empress dowagers, features throughout, especially in chapter 4, perhaps the most interesting part of the book. Cixi in fact acted as both educator of the young emperors and pupil of her own imperial classroom. In so doing, she exercised the most agency in seeking out strategies to enhance her personal power of the rulers profiled in this book. In his discussions of Cixi, Barish draws on a recent upsurge of research on the empress dowager, much of it coming from the field of art history. Art historians have mined Cixi’s involvement in palace décor, portraiture, and photography to frame her as a savvy, resourceful, and intelligent woman ruler. These insights come after decades of misrepresentation and neglect of the empress dowager. This book adds to the revisionist portrait of Cixi by indicating that whereas Cixi did not begin life with a classical education, she doggedly pursued tutelage as soon as she was elevated to the role of imperial regent. Later, Cixi commissioned portraits and built alliances with female international communities in Beijing to enhance her stature and reputation. Whereas Barish amply connects with recent academic research, he has chosen not to engage with author Jung Chang’s recent popular press monograph on the empress dowager, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (2013). Though claiming a leading role for Cixi, Chang’s book repeats many of the fallacies that have followed Cixi’s legacy. Still, there might be something more definitive to be said about Cixi's evolution as a political actor and ruler given her constant presence in this book ostensibly about the education of a series of young male rulers.
In chapter 5 and the conclusion, we move to the one-time Xuantong emperor Puyi (r. 1908-12). Barish argues that even before China was transformed by the 1911 Revolution (Xuantong began his formal schooling only in September 1911), priorities for the monarch’s education had been affected by seismic intellectual and political shifts in China. Among these, the rise of constitutionalism and the ambition for China to prosper as a constitutional monarchy influenced new practices surrounding the emperor’s education. In fact, Xuantong’s first day of school was a national holiday, featuring parades and school celebrations. The book’s conclusion, which reprises the book’s arguments and discusses Puyi in the twentieth century, is substantive and deserves reading and reflection. As Barish points out, the legacies of imperial rule were not demolished as definitively in the twentieth century as is sometimes assumed. And given the disparities between imperial education and conditions of rule in the late Qing as compared to earlier reigns, we might well find threads of continuity in the postimperial era.
Showing the study’s ambitions to revise our understandings of late Qing politics, Barish engages with scholarship on the subject by Mary Clabaugh Wright, Lloyd Eastman, Marianne Bastid, and Edward Rhoads, among others. Most notably, Wright’s classic work, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T’ung-chih Restoration, 1862–1874 (1957), details the development and ultimate failure of a program of Confucian-minded “restoration” in the middle of the nineteenth century. Wright characterized the Manchu court and Mongol nobility as traditionalists whose rigidity ultimately curtailed the potential of Chinese-led reform attempts. Subsequent scholarship has refined Wright’s thesis, but most has defined the post-1850 throne as utterly impotent, apart from works on the 1898 reform period. Barish is among those now paring away problematic aspects of this thesis. In this work, the would-be traditionalists are framed on equal footing with Chinese scholar-officials. Each appears as a political actor vying to press their position to the fore. Meanwhile, the imperial center may have been weak, but it was by no means irrelevant. In Learning to Rule, Barish makes clear that who occupied the throne and how they ruled was a discursive subject of urgent importance in nineteenth-century China. For late Qing political actors, it was imperative that the throne be occupied in real terms and that imperial activities be adapted to align with a transformed future for Qing China. In a short monograph, there seems not to have been space for more extensive profiles of the imperial tutors, regents, clansmen, and other personages who would influence the throne, but future studies should flesh out their motivations and agendas in a fuller sense.
Finally, lest one believe that the author had access to a standard archive on imperial education, a look through the book’s back matter reveals the very opposite. The author has reconstructed imperial education from the outside in, piecing together curricula and agendas from descriptions in some fifty-eight period newspapers and journals. Given the constant upheaval of the period under study, it is notable that some of the same discursive themes recurred frequently. In part, the prose and style of journalistic sources may have created this effect. However, the book says relatively little about how the author coped with apparent gaps in the archival record and whether other original sources might exist. A bibliographic essay on research sources for the late Qing throne would be an attractive supplement to this highly readable and enlightening monograph.
In conclusion, this intriguing study is highly recommended for scholars and students of late imperial and modern China, particularly those with interests in late Qing political transformations, ethnic relations, and imperial culture.
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Citation:
Emily Mokros. Review of Barish, Daniel, Learning to Rule: Court Education and the Remaking of the Qing State, 1861–1912.
H-Asia, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2023.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=58349
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