Treason by the Book

320 Pages·2001·7.326 MB·English

by  Jonathan D. Spence

PENGUIN BOOKS
TREASON BY THE BOOK
Jonathan D. Spence’s twelve books on Chinese history
include The Gate of Heavenly Peace and The Death of
Woman Wang. He is Sterling Professor at Yale University.
His awards include a Guggenheim and æMacArthur
Fellowship.
ALSO BY JONATHAN D. SPENCE
\
Mao Zedong: A Penguin Lives Biography
The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds
The Chinese Century: A Photographic History
of the Last Hundred Years
(coauthor with Annping Chin)
God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly
Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan
Chinese Roundabout: Essays in History
and Culture
The Search for Modem China
The Question of Hu
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese
and Their Revolution, 1895-1980
The Death of Woman Wang
Emperor of China: Self-Portrait
of K’ang-hsi
To Change China: Western Advisers
in China, 1620-1960
Ts’ao Yin and the K’ang-hsi Emperor:
Bondservant and Master

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First published in the United Sûtes of America by Viking Penguin,
. a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2001
Published in Penguin Books 2002
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright ©Jonathan D. Spence, 2001
All rights reserved
Excerpt from “Reflections on Espionage” by John Hollander
reprinted by permission of the author.
Map by Compass Projections
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED
THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Spence, Jonathan D.
Treason by the book / Jonathan D. Spence,
p. cm.
ISBN 0-670-89292-0 (he.)
ISBN 0 14 20.0041 8 (pbk.)
1. Tseng, Ching, 1679-1736. 2. Revolutionaries—China—Biography.
3. Yung-cheng, Emperor of China, 1677-1735. I. Title.
DS754.74.T74 S64 2001
951 '.032'092—dc21
[B] 00-043805
Printed in the United Sûtes of America
Set in Stempel Garamond
Designed by Jaye Zimet
Except in the United Sûtes of America, this book is sold subject to the condition
that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise
circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other
than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including
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To
Annping

... putting the plain
Sense into travelling garb is a kind of
Singing.
John Hollander,
"Reflections on Espionagen

Foreword
One of history’s uses is to remind us how unlikely things can be. The
strange case of the conspirator Zeng Jing, the emperor he tried to over­
throw, and the text that they ended up coauthoring, seems a perfect proof
of that contention. And yet, another of history’s uses is to show us how
pragmatically people can respond to the most unlikely circumstances.
Once again, Zeng Jing and his emperor light the way.
That there is so much documentation to illuminate these particular
moments from the 1720s and 1730s in imperial China is due to the as­
tounding thoroughness of the scholar-officials of the last dynasty, who
witnessed—and sometimes gave wings to—the events as they unfolded.
Not only did their streams of reports to the throne encapsulate their own
responses to what was happening in their various jurisdictions all across
China, but also the rules of procedural propriety led them to repeat in
their own reports the exact words used by the emperor in all his comments
x ^ Foreword
to them, and in addition to enclose for the emperor’s benefit the drafts of
any treasonous material that happened to fall into their hands. These doc­
uments, infinitely precious to the historian, were in turn preserved by gen­
erations of court archivists; after the Qing dynasty fell in 1912, these
archives entered a precarious stage of their existence, often moving in their
crates just ahead of the encroaching battle zones. But at the close of the
twentieth century they ended up stored in climate-controlled sanctuaries,
some in Taipei-and some in Beijing, waifs of the political revolution that
for so long ravaged China, yet, magically,Mot its victims.
The Zeng Jing case erupted in 1728, and by 1736 the court considered
it officially closed. But almost from its beginning the antecedents to the
case were seen to lie far back in the past, partly in the military and intel­
lectual battles of the mid-seventeenth century, when the Ming dynasty
succumbed to the conquering Qing, and partly far earlier, back in the clas­
sical age, when the earliest Chinese philosophical and historical texts be­
gan to take form, before even the time of the teacher Confucius. Similarly,
the resonances of the case continued long after its declared terminal date,
not only into and through the collapse of the Qing dynasty in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, but right on down to our present
day: as recently as 1999 a Chinese publishing house produced a transcrip­
tion of many of the key documents from the case to answer the curiosity
raised among Chinese viewers by a successful TV series on the life of Em­
peror Yongzheng, the ruler Zeng Jing sought to destroy;
The Zeng Jing case is not, however, just a story of an emperor and his
enemies; it is also a story about words, about the manuscripts in which
they first found expression, and the books in which they gained a chance
at a wider readership. And it is a story about one book in particular, called
Awakening from Delusion (Dayi juemi lu\ which thanks to an imperial
command became the most widely read and recited book in China during
the early 1730s. And thus my own book becomes, in part, a book about
book making and distribution, about lecture tours and self-advertisement,
about captive audiences and hostile critics.
This is, especially, a story of eighteenfh-century Chinese struggling to
be accepted as scholars, yet at the same time enmeshed in a web of tests
and qualifying examinations; of people greedy for learning, forced to en-