The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 5 | Issue 6 | Article ID 2450 | Jun 04, 2007

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Taiwan in the Chinese Imagination, 17th-19th Centuries

Emma Jinhua Teng

Taiwan in the Chinese Imagination,17th–19th Centuries

By Emma Jinhua Teng

Winter 1697: After four days and nights aboarda junk crossing the treacherous waters of theTaiwan Strait, Chinese traveler Yu Yongheexcitedly spotted the peaks of Taiwan’smountains on the horizon. [1] In sight at lastwas the frontier island that he had longed tosee since the Chinese conquest of Taiwanfourteen years earlier. As Yu wrote in his traveldiary:

Taiwan lies far beyond the EasternOcean and has never, since thedawn of Creation, sent tribute toChina. Now we have made . . .Taiwan the ninth prefecture ofFujian. By nature I am addicted todistant travel and I am fearless ofobstacles and danger. Ever sinceTaiwan was put on the map, I havesaid that I would not be satisfieduntil I could see the place formyself. [2]

Yu Yonghe’s wish came true at last in 1697,when he volunteered for an expedition toTaiwan to obtain sulfur, a vital strategic itemused to manufacture gunpowder. Friends andassociates warned him against the voyage: theTaiwan Strait was perilous, filled with obstaclessuch as the notorious “Black Water Ditch,”

which had capsized countless junks; Taiwanitself was a dangerous place, a mountainousjungle inhabited by “savages” and rife withdeadly tropical diseases. Travelers told storiesof shipwrecked sailors cannibalized by theislanders and of headhunting raids across theTaiwan Strait. Taiwan had also gained infamyas a “pirates’ lair.” Above all, the island wasknown as a stronghold for the Ming loyalistforces of Koxinga, [3] who had waged a war ofresistance against the new Manchu Qingdynasty (1644–1911), and whose defeat by Qingforces in 1683 resulted in Taiwan’s becomingan imperial possession for the first time inChinese history. It was this feat that sparkedYu Yonghe’s desire to travel to the island.

Despite the risks the journey presented, Yu wasintrigued by the notion of seeing the empire’snewest frontier. Before the Qing conquest, fewChinese literati had traveled to this “savageisland.” This voyage was Yu’s chance foradventure, his opportunity to go beyond the oldboundaries of China and explore unchartedterrain.

Yu’s enthusiasm for the Taiwan frontier standsin sharp contrast to the disdain expressed bymany of his contemporaries, who regarded theacquisition of this new territory as a waste ofimperial resources. As one critic declared,“Taiwan is merely a ball of mud beyond theseas, unworthy of development by China. It isfull of naked and tattooed savages, who are notworth defending. It is a daily waste of imperialmoney for no benefit.” [4] Such objectionsreflected the prevailing Chinese perception ofTaiwan as a barren wilderness, an insignificantparcel of land beyond the pale of civilization.

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So deeply ingrained was this notion that thecourt had proposed in 1683 to abandon thenewly conquered island after repatriating Mingloyalist troops to the mainland. Admiral ShiLang, who had led the capture of Taiwan,vigorously protested this decision. In amemorial submitted to the emperor in February1684, Shi argued for the importance ofannexing Taiwan on both strategic andeconomic grounds.

I have personally traveled throughTaiwan and seen firsthand thefertility of its wild lands and theabundance of its natural resources.Both mulberry and field crops canbe cultivated; fish and salt spoutforth from the sea; the mountainsare filled with dense forests of talltrees and thick bamboo; there aresul fur , rat tan, sugarcane,deerskins, and all that is neededfor daily living. Nothing is lacking.. . . This is truly a bountifully fertilepiece of land and a strategicterritory. [5]

Shi Lang could speak with authority becausehe, unlike the emperor’s other advisers, hadtraveled to Taiwan and observed localconditions with his own eyes. Opponents ofannexation knew little about Taiwan beyondthe cliché of the island as a “miasmalwilderness,” for there was a dearth ofinformation about the island in the Chinesehistories and geographical records. With hispersonal knowledge of the island, Shi wasuniquely empowered to speak as an expert onthis subject. The emperor was sufficientlypersuaded by Shi’s eyewitness account of theisland and its riches to convene a meeting todebate the issue of annexing this territory.Shi’s faction eventually carried the day, and inthe spring of 1684, Taiwan was officially

incorporated into the Qing empire. Over twohundred years later, in 1887, the court wouldgrant the island full status as a province ofChina.

In Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: ChineseColonial Travel Writing and Pictures,1683–1895 (2004), I examine the place of travelwriting, pictures, and maps in Taiwan’stransformation from a “savage island” located“beyond the seas” (haiwai) into a “Chineseprovince,” an integral part of the Chineseempire. Qing travelers like Shi Lang and YuYonghe played a crucial role in the productionof geographic knowledge about this newestaddition to the Qing domain. Their writingshelped to demonstrate that far from being a“ball of mud” inhabited by “naked and tattooedsavages,” Taiwan was endowed with land worthcultivating and populated by natives deservingof inclusion as subjects of the empire.

The Qing incorporation of this island involvednot only a reconsideration of Taiwan’s place ini m p e r i a l g e o g r a p h y b u t a l s o areconceptualization of the Chinese domainitself. The Ming conviction that Taiwan was notpart of this domain was rooted in thetraditional conception of China as a territorybounded by natural geographic features, suchas mountains, rivers, the desert, and the sea.[6] Since Taiwan was separated from theChinese mainland by the Taiwan Strait, it was,ergo, outside China. The Qing expansion intoterritory “beyond the seas” entailed a shiftfrom the established conception of China to anew spat ia l image of an empire thattransgressed the traditional boundaries.

The annexation of Taiwan was only oneincident in the much larger phenomenon ofQing expansionism, a phenomenon thatscholars have recently begun to treat as anexample of imperialism, comparable toEuropean imperialisms. [7] Following the

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conquest of China proper, the Manchu rulers ofthe Qing dynasty pursued numerous militarycampaigns on China’s frontiers. Thesecampaigns were driven largely by the Qingneed to consolidate the empire and eliminatepotential military rivals, including the Mingloyalist regime in Taiwan and the Mongols andRussians on the Central Asian frontiers. [8] Agradual process that spanned approximately acentury, Qing expansionism was also motivatedin part by economic interests and by populationpressures in China proper, which generated ademand for new arable lands. Having annexedTaiwan in 1684, the Qing turned its attention toCentral Asia, “pacifying” the Mongols andbringing eastern Turkestan and Lhasa, thecapital of Tibet, under Qing rule. The Qingfurther expanded its control in south andsouthwest China, subjecting various non-Chinese peoples of this region to Qingdomination. At its height, in the eighteenthcentury, Qing influence extended into Korea,Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Burma, and Nepal, allof which came under the suzerainty of theempire.

Figure 1. Expansion of the Qing empire (cartographicdesign by Patrick Florance and Martin Gamache/AMG)

By 1760, the Qing had achieved the incrediblefeat of doubling the size of the empire’sterritory (see Fig. 1), bringing various non-Chinese frontier peoples under its rule. Theimpact of Qing expansionism was thustremendous, as the Qing not only redefined theterritorial boundaries of China but alsore fash ioned China as a mul t ie thn icrealm—shifting the traditional border betweenChinese (Hua) and barbarian (yi). In doing so,the Qing created an image of “China” thatdiffered vastly from that of the Ming.

In order to promote this new conception of theChinese empire, the court commissioned anumber of major projects to depict the

expanded imperial domain. Among them werethe Kangxi-Jesuit atlas (1717), a comprehensivesurvey of the empire; The ComprehensiveGazetteer of the Great Qing Realm (Da Qingyitong zhi; ca. 1746), a compendium ofgeographic information about the empire; TheQing Imperial Tribute Illustrations (Huang Qingzhigong tu; ca. 1769), an illustrated catalogueof the peoples of the empire and other“tributaries” (see Figs. 2–4); and the ImperialGlossary of the Five Dynastic Scripts (WutiQingwen jian), an encyclopedic, multilingualglossary of the five major languages of theempire. These texts at once served to definethe extent of the empire and to articulate thevision of a geographically diverse andmultiethnic imperial realm.

Figure 2. Picture of Raw Savages of Zhanghua County,Taiwan fromQing Imperial Tribute Illustrations (ca. 1751)

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Figure 3. Picture of Raw Savages of Danshui, Taiwan fromQingImperial Tribute Illustrations (ca. 1751)

Figure 4. Picture of Cooked Savages of Taiwan County,Taiwan fromQing Imperial Tribute Illustrations (ca. 1751)

I argue that travelers’ representations offrontier regions such as Taiwan played animportant role in the creation of the newimagined geography of the expanded Qingempire. Frontier travel writing emerged as avital genre during the Qing, as Chinese literati,military men, and merchants traveled to thefrontiers in unprecedented numbers. Not onlydid frontier travelers compose written accountsof their journeys, but a good number of them

produced various kinds of tu (maps, pictures,illustrations) as visual records of theirobservations (see Fig. 5). These tu includedpictorial maps, ethnographic images, drawingsof flora and fauna, architectural renderings,and pictures commemorating battles and otherevents on the frontier. (Henceforth, I will referto these various tu as “topographicalpictures.”) As the empire expanded, travelers’accounts and topographical pictures became animportant source of geographic knowledgeabout the newly acquired lands, knowledget h a t w a s c r u c i a l f o r s t r a t e g i c a n dadministrative purposes. Travel writing andpictures also served an important ideologicalfunction. In representing the distant lands andthe ethnically diverse peoples of the frontiers toaudiences in China proper, these workstransformed places once considered non-Chinese into familiar parts of the imperialrealm and thereby helped to naturalize Qingexpansionism through the production of a re-imagined imperial geography.

Figure 5. Chen Lunjiong, “General Map of the Four Seas”from Record of Things Seen and Heard at Sea (ca.1723–30)

The legacy of Qing imperialism for modern

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China has been profound: because the People’sRepubl ic o f China (PRC) now c la imssovereignty over virtually all the territoryacquired by the last dynasty, the impact of Qingexpansionism continues to be felt by the peopleof Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and other formerfrontier regions. Separatist (“splittist” in PRCjargon) movements in all these areas have metwith staunch opposition from the Chinese state,which considers such lands inseparable parts ofChina’s sacred territory. Hence, the PRC claimsTaiwan—which was a Japanese colony between1895 and 1945 and which has been ruled by aseparate (and recently democratic) governmentas the Republic of China (ROC) since 1949—as“sovereign territory” that must be returned tothe Chinese motherland with due speed.Ironically, the “territorial integrity” thatChinese nationalists seek to defend is based ona territorial image of “China” created by aninvading Manchu dynasty, and not the olderMing image.

Of the former Qing frontiers, Taiwan is ofparticular interest because the question of theisland’s sovereignty in the postwar era remainsunresolved and hotly contested: Is Taiwan defacto a “sovereign state,” or is it, in the wordsof the U.S. media, a “renegade province” ofChina? [9] Taiwan’s relationship to the PRC andthe question whether Taiwan might officiallydeclare independence were leading issues inthe 2000 presidential race in Taiwan, andremain hot-button topics. In an attempt toinfluence the outcome of that election, the PRCissued a thinly veiled threat of force: “Tosafeguard China’s sovereignty and territorialintegrity and realize the reunification of thetwo s ides of the strai ts , the Chinesegovernment has the right to resort to anynecessary means.” [10] The “Taiwan issue”(involving arms sales to Taiwan) is theprickliest thorn in U.S.-China relations and hasthe potential to bring the two powers intoarmed confl ict. [11] The geopolit icalimportance of Taiwan combined with Taiwan’s

emergence s ince 1987 as a “Chinesedemocracy” has contributed to the growth ofTaiwan Studies as an important new field inAsia and the United States.

In examining the process by which Taiwan wasincorporated into the imagined geography ofthe Qing empire, Taiwan’s Imagined Geographyhelps to explain how an island that was terraincognita for the better part of Chinese historycame to be regarded as an integral part ofChina’s “sovereign territory.” My work viewsTaiwan-China relations as a product of ap a r t i c u l a r h i s t o r y — t h a t o f Q i n gexpansionism—rather than as a matter of vague“ancestral ties.” [12] By elucidating the natureof this historical relationship, I seek to add toour understanding of current political events inthe region.

Expanding Colonial Discourse Studies

Although the primary focus of Taiwan’sImagined Geography is the Qing constructionof Taiwan’s imagined geography, in writing thisbook I also hoped to challenge prevailingpreconceptions of “the colonizer” and “thecolonized” by examining a non-Westernimperial power. The presumption thatcolonizers were European and the colonizednon-European is deeply entrenched both insideand outside the academy. The very notion ofstudying “Chinese colonialism” thus seemsalien to many. On more than one occasion, Ihave been asked: “What do you mean by‘Chinese colonial travel writing’? Do you meanEuropean colonial travel writing about China?”The idea that “imperialism” is essentially aWestern phenomenon has also been reinforcedb y s c h o l a r s o f m o d e r n C h i n a ’ s“postcoloniality,” who have tended to focus onChina’s historical experiences with Westernimperialism while ignoring China’s own historyas an imperialist power. [13] This is due in nosmall part to the PRC’s ardent denials that the

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Chinese were ever anything but victims ofimperialism; hence official PRC discourserefers to Qing expansionism as “nationalunification,” and talk of “Chinese imperialism”is heresy. [14] I seek to remedy this situationby asserting that China’s postcoloniality mustalso be understood in terms of the legacy ofQing expansionism.

Expanding colonial discourse studies to includeimperial China is no easy task, for oneimmediately runs into terminologicaldifficulties. Scholars (both Western andChinese) frequently argue that terms such as“imperialism” or “colonialism” cannot beapplied to China on the grounds that Qingexpansionism does not fit the model ofEuropean imperialism. Of course, the Chinesehad an empire, just as Rome had an empire, itis often argued, but an empire is not the sameas “imperialism.” Yet the notion of “Europeanimperialism” is itself problematic. Thescholarship of the past several decades hasshown that there is no single model ofEuropean imperialism: British imperialismdiffered from French and German imperialisms;nineteenth-century imperialism differed fromthe earlier conquests of the New World and themercantile colonialism of the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries. And then there is thematter of American “neo-imperialism” or “neo-colonialism.” Theorists have debated whetherimperialism is best understood primarily as apolitical system (as in late nineteenth-centuryEngland) or as an economic system (as by earlytwentieth-century critics). Definitions of“imperialism” range from Lenin’s (1916)restrictive “monopoly stage of capitalism” toMichael Doyle’s broadly inclusive “imperialismis simply the process or policy of establishingor maintaining an empire.” [15] Thus, there isno universal agreement, even amongEuropeanists, on the precise definition of“imperialism.”

Theorists have also been concerned with

d i s t ingu i sh ing “co lon ia l i sm” f rom“imperialism,” although the two terms are oftenused interchangeably. Again, there is noconsensus on this score, with some theoriststak ing “co lon ia l i sm” as a subset o f“imperialism” (e.g., Benita Parry) and otherstaking “colonialism” as the more general termand “imperialism” as the particular, latenineteenth-century European phenomenon(Nicholas Thomas). [16] Because of thisambiguity, there will necessarily be someslippage in discussing theoretical approachesto “imperialism” and “colonialism” here. Like“imperialism,” “colonialism” is a complex andmultivalent term that refers to a variety ofhistorical and regional experiences, rangingfrom the “settler colonialism” of Australia tothe “internal colonialism” of the Americanghetto. [17] Since “colonialism” derives fromthe Latin colere (to cultivate), the distinctionthat I find most useful is Edward Said’s:“‘Colonialism,’ which is almost always aconsequence of imperialism, is the implantingof settlements on distant territory.” [18] Thisdistinction notwithstanding, followingconvention I employ the term “colonialdiscourse,” rather than “imperial discourse,” todescribe the complex of signs and practiceswithin which the Qing empire was known. AsDavid Spurr writes: “In speaking of thediscourse of colonialism, the distinction[between colonialism and imperialism] tends tocollapse, since the basic principles of thisdiscourse . . . also constitute the discourse ofimperialism.” [19]

My use of the term “Qing imperialism”therefore rests on the premise that, to quoteRaymond Williams, “imperialism, like any wordwhich refers to fundamental social and politicalconflicts, cannot be reduced, semantically, to asingle proper meaning. Its important historicaland contemporary variations of meaning pointto real processes which have to be studied intheir own terms” (italics added). [20] To thisend, I use the word “imperialism” to refer to

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the Qing conquest of vast tracts of non-Chineselands through military force, their rule of thesedistant lands from an imperial center, and theirincorporation of significant numbers ofethnically distinct, non-Chinese peoples assubjects of the empire. Since an importantaspect of Qing imperialism was the implantingof Han Chinese settlements on distant frontierterritories, I consider Qing expansionism atonce an imperial and colonial phenomenon.

More fundamenta l ly , I use the term“imperialism” to denote the set of practices,policies, and ideologies through which the Qingempire was fashioned and maintained. In this Ifollow Edward Said’s definition: “‘Imperialism’means the practice, the theory, and theattitudes of a dominating metropolitan centerruling a distant territory.” [21] I find Said’sdefinition useful, since it is neither sorestrictive that it inhibits cross-culturalcomparison nor so general that it losestheoretical rigor. Moreover, it speaks directlyto my concerns, for my work does not dealprimarily with imperialism as an economic orpolitical system, but rather with imperialism asa set of attitudes and power relations: preciselythose aspects of imperialism that seem to bethe most intransigent and that some arguehave outlasted formal colonial rule. In shiftingthe focus to the cultural and ideologicaldimensions of imperialism/colonialism, I drawon Nicholas Thomas’s argument: Colonialism isnot best understood primarily as a political oreconomic relationship that is legitimized orjustified through ideologies of racism orprogress. Rather, colonialism has always,equally importantly and deeply, been a culturalprocess; its discoveries and trespasses areimagined and energized through signs,metaphors and narratives; even what wouldseem its purest moments of profit and violencehave been mediated and enframed bystructures of meaning. [22]

I w o u l d a r g u e t h a t i t i s i n

imperialism/colonialism as a cultural processthat we can begin to find the common groundon which “European imperialism(s)” and “Qingimperialism” can be discussed. This is not todeny the historical specificity of latenineteenth-century European imperialism or ofQing imperialism. Nor is it a plea for a returnto general, universal theories of imperialism.Rather, it is an attempt to extend the ground onwhich particular, historical, and localizedaccounts of imperialisms and colonialisms canbe delineated. It is an attempt to initiate adialogue where there has been none.

My intent in reclaiming the use of the word“imperialism” for China studies is not tosuggest the equivalence of Qing and Europeanimperialisms; although recent scholarship inthe China field has shown that, despite themanifest differences, Qing and early modernEuropean imperialisms bear enough similaritiesin terms of institutions and processes to meritcomparison. [23] What I want to do instead isto suggest a problematic: Why is it that Qingexpansionism, which involved territorialconquest, political control, economicexploitation, and cultural hegemony, cannot beconsidered “imperialism”? What does it meanto ca l l t he Q ing an emp i re w i thou t“imperialism”? What difference would it makeif we were to see Qing expansionism asimperialism and not simply as an imperium? Iaddress this problematic further in theEpilogue to Taiwan’s Imagined Geography andsuggest that it informs our understanding ofChina-Taiwan relations today.

Setting Qing expansionism within the broaderframework of colonial studies rather thanconfining it within the perimeter of “areastudies” allows us to see China in the context ofglobal historical processes, rather than as aunique and timeless civilization unto itself. [24]An intriguing statement made by a nineteenth-century travel writer demonstrates that therewere Chinese literati who perceived the Qing

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imperial project in global terms. This traveler,Ding Shaoyi, compared his own observations ofQing Taiwan to Guileo Aleni’s description of theEuropean colonization of North America:

The savagery of the nat ivebarbarians of the newly openedfrontiers of North America is nodifferent from that of the savagesof Taiwan. In the past, they wereextremely ferocious, yet Europeanshave managed to guide them withtheir senseless, confused religionand have finally changed the nativecustoms. So it is a real injustice tosay that the raw savages of Taiwanhave absolutely no human moralsdespite their human appearanceand that they cannot be civilizedwith our Kingly Governance(wangzheng)! [25]

D i n g a d d r e s s e d h i s c o m m e n t s t ocontemporaries skeptical about the possibilityof civilizing the “savages” of Taiwan. Since theEuropeans had succeeded in North America, heconcluded, surely the Chinese, with theirsuperior civilization, would prevail in Taiwan.Although recognizing differences in specificbeliefs and institutions, Ding perceivedfundamental parallels between European andChinese expansionism and their civilizingenterprises. Historian Laura Hostetler has alsodemonstrated that the Qing emperors werekeenly aware of imperialism as a globalphenomenon and perceived themselves asplayers in an international game of territorialexpansionism. [26]

The notion of “Chinese imperialism” isrendered particularly complex by the fact thatthe Qing was itself a conquest dynasty. Themajority, Han Chinese population of China

proper was subjugated to the Manchu rulingclass. Yet the Qing adopted many of thefundamental political, economic, and culturalinstitutions of the Chinese imperial system,becoming somewhat “sinicized” in the process.At the same time, ethnic Han Chineseparticipated actively in the military andpolitical life of the Qing, becoming part of theru l ing c lass and perhaps somewhat“Manchuized” in the process. [27] This ethniccomplexity only intensified with Qingexpansionism. Whereas the Qing army, with itsmultiethnic troops, conquered the frontierterritories, the colonists who settled thesefrontiers were nearly exclusively Han Chinese.[28]

What we find in frontier regions such asTaiwan, then, is no simple dichotomy ofcolonizer/colonized, but a multilevel hierarchyof colonial officials (both Manchu and Han),Han Chinese settlers, and indigenous peoples.Each group had its own interests—sometimesthese interests competed with those of othergroups; sometimes they intersected. Qingadministrators did not necessarily view HanChinese settlers as natural allies on thefrontiers. Indeed, given the island’s history as abase for Ming loyalists, Qing officials regardedthe settlers in Taiwan with suspicion. Duringthe initial years of Qing expansionism, inparticular, the court often adopted policies thatfavored indigenous peoples over Han Chinesecolonists, in large measure to prevent costlyethnic unrest. [29] The study of Qingimperialism therefore seems particularly apt ata time when scholars of colonial studies arearguing for the need to rethink older models ofa strict colonizer/colonized dichotomy and toconsider the complexity of ethnic interactionsin colonial contexts. [30]

The analysis of frontier travel writing andtopographical pictures promises to enhance ourunderstanding of the Qing frontier experiencegreatly. Historians have produced excellent

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studies of the political, economic, and militaryadministration of the Qing frontiers, butrelatively little has been written on culturalrepresentations of the frontiers. [31] LikeEuropean imperialisms, Qing imperialism was acomplex and dynamic convergence of strategic,economic, political, cultural, and ideologicalinterests. Studies of Western imperialism haveemphasized the vital role of colonial discoursein sustaining empires and producing colonialsubjects. [32] I would argue that if we wish tounderstand the Qing format ion o f ageographically and ethnically diverse empire,scholars of China must similarly attend to therole of colonial discourse in this process andthe cultural dimensions of the frontierexperience. Travel literature and topographicalpictures, both of which constitute forms ofcolonial discourse, are valuable resources forsuch a project: these texts express andarticulate ideologies of imperialism even asthey engender ideas about the frontiers.

The study of colonial discourse has largely beeninspired by Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978).Although widely critiqued as reductionist orone-sided in the decades since its publication,this provocative work nonetheless remains afoundational text in the field. Said described“Orientalism” as a complex set of ideas andimages through which European culturedefined the East as “other” to Westerncivilization. Chinese representations of thefrontiers as exotic, uncivilized, and barbarousbear fundamental similarities to EuropeanOrientalism. If European culture, as Saidargued, derived its sense of identity andstrength by setting itself off against the Orient,Chinese civilization gained its sense of identityas “the Middle Kingdom” (Zhongguo) inopposition to the “barbarians of the fourdirections” (siyi). Both traditions attempted toestablish their own civilization as the normativeideal and to project “over there” qualities andtraits (lasciviousness and indolence, forexample) that they sought to repress in their

own societies. Painted in the broadest strokes,European Orientalism and Chinese discourseon barbarians can be regarded as comparable.Indeed, the similarities are striking and point tothe existence of shared, cross-cultural modes ofconstructing foreign “others.”

In my work on Qing travel literature andtopographical pictures, I consider Chineserepresentations of the frontiers as a form ofdiscourse roughly equivalent to Orientalism yetshaped by the particular conditions of the Qingimperial enterprise. [33] Much as EuropeanOriental ism has out lasted Europeancolonialism, its Chinese counterpart hasoutlasted the particular institutions andcircumstances of Qing imperialism and lives onin contemporary representations of ethnic“minorities” in the modern Chinese nation-state. This phenomenon has been described byanthropologist Dru Gladney as “orientalorientalism” and by anthropologist LouisaSchein as “internal orientalism.” [34]Expanding the scope of colonial studies allowsus to view China not simply as the object ofOrientalist discourse or as a mimic of WesternOrientalism but also as the producer of its ownbrand of exoticist discourse.

One aspect of my research has been to askwhat the concepts of “race” and “ethnicity”meant in the Qing context. [35] Were Qingrepresentations of frontier peoples culturalistor racialist? Or a combination thereof? Like“imperialism” and “colonialism,” “race” and“ethnic i ty” are two terms that bearcomparative treatment across culturalcontexts. These two terms are perhaps themore difficult pair, for they are inadequatelydefined (even in contemporary Americanusage) and, moreover, have long andcomplicated histories tied to the histories ofimperialism and conquest. Anyone trying todefine these terms quickly enters a swamp inwhich concepts of race, ethnicity, culture,nation, and tribe are inextricably tangled.

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“Race” and “ethnicity” are, furthermore, loadedterms in English; “race,” in particular,immediately brings to mind racism andeugenics. Using the word “race,” even inreference to a historical idea or construct, isoften mistaken as a signal that one believes inrace as an objective fact—which I certainly donot. [36]

Without entering too deeply into thisterminological morass, it is safe to assert thatboth race and ethnicity essentially refer to thecategorization of peoples based on some notionof difference; how this difference has beendefined has varied historically and culturally(witness the latest U.S. Census Bureauattempts to redefine its categories of race andethnicity). [37] As such, my analysis focuses onthe ways in which Qing writers conceptualizedhuman difference and categorized groups ofpeople within the empire. [38]

In frontier travel writing, Chinese literati werec o n c e r n e d w i t h a r a n g e o f h u m a ndifferences—physical, cultural, linguistic,intellectual, and moral, as well as in humannature (xing). For Qing authors, the relativesignificance of these types of differences was amatter of debate. In my analysis of Chinesesources on Taiwan, I identify two discoursesconcerning human difference: what I call a“racialist discourse” and an “ethnicaldiscourse.” I roughly define the first as adiscourse that focuses on physical differencesand innate differences in human nature. Theracialist discourse further constructs differenceas categorical and absolute, along the lines ofthe distinction between humans and animals. Incontrast, ethnical discourse focuses on culturaldifferences and constructs difference as amatter of degree within certain humanuniversals.

In labeling these discourses “racialist” and“ethnical,” I imply certain parallels with

Western discourses that place “race” on theside of nature and “ethnicity” on the side ofnurture, in the “nature” versus “nurture”debate on human difference. However, indrawing these parallels, I by no means suggestthat Qing concepts of race and ethnicity areprecisely equivalent to their Westerncounterparts (of any place or period). [39] Why,then, use a loaded word like “race” at all? Whynot stay with a seemingly more neutral termlike “ethnicity”? Like Pamela Kyle Crossley, Iargue that “unless one has resort to the term‘race,’ ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ would remainmingled with each other, the process ofdifferentiation forever muddled by the notionthat ‘ethnic group’ is just a better word forwhat was once called ‘race.’” [40] I thereforeuse the word “race” primarily to distinguishwhat I call “racialist discourse” from “ethnicaldiscourse,” rather than to highlight thesimilarities between Western and Chinesethinking on race, as does Frank Dikötter in hisDiscourse of Race in Modern China.

As a form of colonial discourse, travel textsprovide crucial data for the analysis of Qingconstructions of race and ethnicity, for theyallow us to see in greater detail Qing views onf r o n t i e r p e o p l e s b e y o n d o f f i c i a lpronouncements on ethnic policy. In myanalysis of Qing accounts of Taiwan, Idemonstrate how the Qing ideology of empire,which sought to accommodate different ethnicgroups and to suppress the distinction betweenChinese (Hua) and barbarian (yi), came intoconflict with older attitudes of Han Chinesechauvinism, often expressed in racialist terms.

Imagined Geography

The “imagined geography” of my book title isintended to distinguish between the geographythat exists on the ground and geography as acultural construct. Thus, although Taiwannever moved from its position at 23.5 degrees

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north/120 degrees east, 96 miles from theChinese coast, in terms of the Chinesegeographic imagination, between theseventeenth and nineteenth centuries theisland shifted from “far, far beyond the seas” toa location firmly situated within the Chineseempire. Then, between 1895 and 1945, theisland that had only recently “become Chinese”“ b e c a m e J a p a n e s e , ” a s L e o C h i n gdemonstrates. [41] In focusing on the role ofdiscourse in these processes, I concur withEdward Said that the “struggle over geography. . . is complex and interesting because it is notonly about soldiers and cannons but also aboutideas, about forms, about images andimaginings.” [42] My use of the term “imaginedgeography” draws on Said’s notion of“imaginative geography,” as well as theconcept of “imagined communities” introducedby Benedict Anderson.

In Orientalism, Said proposed the notion of“imaginative geography” to denote the complexset of ideas and images by which geographicentit ies such as the “Orient” and the“Occident” were historically produced. Saidargued that it is through “imaginativegeography” that meaning is assigned to thespace “out there,” beyond one’s own territory.As Said wrote: “All kinds of suppositions,associations, and fictions appear to crowd theunfamiliar space outside one’s own.” [43] Saidthus highlighted what he saw as the arbitraryand imaginative dimensions of geographicknowledge. Following Said, the term“imaginative geography” has been used to referto the culturally constructed nature ofgeography and to the role of discourse inproducing geographic knowledge. WhereasSaid’s work in Orientalism primarily focused onEuropean texts about the Orient, recentscholars such as Joan M. Schwartz, AnneGodlewska, and Derek Gregory haveconsidered imaginative geography as thep r o d u c t o f a v a r i e t y o frepresentations—literary, cartographic,

pictorial, photographic, and so forth—workingin concert. [44]

The concept of “imagined communities” derivesfrom Anderson’s pioneering work onnationalism, in which he described the nationa s a n i m a g i n e d p o l i t i c a lcommunity—”imagined” because “the membersof even the smallest nation will never knowmost of their fellow-members, meet them, oreven hear of them, yet in the minds of eachlives the image of their communion.” [45]Borrowing from Anderson, I suggest the Qingempire not as a community but as an “imaginedgeography,” a defined and limited spatial imagethat existed in the minds of Qing elites despitethe fact that most would never travel to thedistant reaches of the empire. This imaginedgeography delineated the territory thatbelonged to the “our land” of the Qing empire,in distinction to the “barbarian lands” that laybeyond its boundaries. As such, imaginedgeography describes the process by which the“geo-body” of an empire is produced.

The term “geo-body” was first used byThongchai Winichakul in 1994 to describe theterritoriality of the Thai nation:

Geographically speaking, the geo-body of the nation occupies acertain portion of the earth’ssurface which is objectivelyidentifiable. It appears to beconcrete to the eyes as if itsexistence does not depend on anyact of imagining. That, of course, isnot the case. The geo-body of thenation is merely an effect ofmodern geographical discoursewhose prime technology is a map.[46]

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Although there are essential differencesbetween empires and nation-states, sinceThongchai concedes that the definition of theterm is neither strict nor conclusive, I will alsouse the term “geo-body” in reference to theQing empire, which I regard as an effect ofmultiple geographic discourses—textual,pictorial, and cartographic. [47]

My use of the term “imagined geography” thusdistinguishes this particular form from otherforms of imaginative geography moregenerally. “Imaginative geography,” as Saiddescribed it, tends to dramatize the distanceand difference of what is “out there.” FollowingOrientalism, studies of imaginative geographyhave generally focused on the “barbarian land”side of the “our land–barbarian land”distinction that Said posited as fundamental toimaginative geography. [48] In my formulation,“imagined geography” is concerned primarilywith defining “our land” and thus focuses onthe other s ide of the equat ion. Morespecifically, the imagined geography of empiredescribes the process by which “their land” isconverted into “our land.” Rather than simplydramatizing distance and difference, imaginedgeography at once exoticizes the other andattempts to convert otherness into familiarityand we-ness. I use the variant form “imaginedgeography” to connote this slight shift of focus.

Yet because attempts to construct identity outof difference can never be wholly successful,Qing imagined geography was characterized byan inner dissonance. The tension betweendramatizing difference and domesticating itmarked Qing representations of Taiwan andother frontier regions of the empire. It is thistension between difference and sameness,distance and union, the exotic and the familiar,t h a t I e x p l o r e i n t r a c i n g T a i w a n ’ stransformation from “savage island” into“Chinese province.”

Frontier Travel Writing and Pictures

Frontier travel writing and pictures had anintimate connection with the Qing imperialistproject. These works served as vital sources ofinformation about the new regions of theempire, especially during the early years ofexpansionism, when other sources of empiricalgeographic information were not readilyavailable. Frontier officials relied on travelaccounts, maps, and other topographicalpictures to familiarize themselves with localconditions—the terrain, natural resources, localcustoms, relations between various local tribes,and so forth. Compilers of local gazetteerslikewise employed such texts as sources for theproduction of these compendia of geographicand historical information and crucialadministrative aids. Travel accounts alsoserved as important source materials forgeneral geographic and historical works,encyclopedias, guidebooks, and even thezhiguai (records of anomalies) collections thatChinese literati read for entertainment.

Frontier officials themselves seriously engagedin the collection of geographic informationabout the frontiers. An excerpt from aneighteenth-century travel account gives us apicture of how officials went about this activity:

In the course of my duties, I touredaround and inquired after customsand strange products. I saw allkinds of unusual and weird thingsthat have never been seen in Chinaproper. . . . In my spare time fromofficial duty, I ordered a painter tomake i l lustrat ions of thoseconcrete things that I had seen andheard. . . . I will keep [this pictorialalbum] in my travel trunk, so thatwhen I return I may present it tothe learned and accomplished

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gentlemen at the capital andthereby expand their knowledge.[49]

Officials produced such textual and pictorialaccounts both as personal mementos and asaids for colonial administration. In addition,they sometimes submitted travel accounts,maps, or illustrations to the emperor as recordsof conditions on the frontiers or of their ownachievements in frontier service. The courtitself occasionally ordered frontier officials tosubmit geographic information and illustrationsfor use in the compilation of grand, empirewideprojects such as the Comprehensive Gazetteerof the Great Qing Realm or The Qing ImperialTribute Illustrations. [50]

The subjects taken up by travel writers wereshaped to a large degree by the conventionalc a t e g o r i e s o f g e o g r a p h i c a lrecording—topography, climate, buildings andinstitutions, transportation routes, local ethnicgroups and their customs and languages, floraand fauna, local products, geographic marvels,and so forth. Although the subjects of travelwriting were fairly uniform, travelers chose tocompose their accounts in a variety offormats—the travel diary, the essay, thenotation book, or the geographical record (agenre consisting of short entries under variouscategorical headings) [51]—each with its owngeneric conventions. [52]

Topographical illustrations, which wereproduced either by the travel writersthemselves or by professional painters in theiremploy, generally focused on similar subjects(see Figs. 6–11). For the most part, frontierpictures can be divided into three maincategories—maps or landscape pictures (ditu orshanchuantu), ethnographic illustrations(fengsutu), and illustrations of flora and fauna(fengwutu)—but a wide range of tu exist

outs ide these categor ies . There arearchitectural drawings of civil, military, andreligious structures, pictures of localindustries, and illustrations commemoratingevents such as the annual review of troops oran official’s tour of inspection. As with travelwriting, a variety of generic conventionsshaped these pictorial representations. [53]

Figure 6. “Drinking Party,” from the Zhuluo CountyGazetteer (1717)

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Figure 7. “Pounding Rice,” from the Zhuluo CountyGazetteer (1717)

Figure 8. “Hunting Deer,” from the Zhuluo CountyGazetteer (1717)

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Figure 9. “Fishing,” from the Zhuluo County Gazetteer(1717)

Figure 10. “Picking Betel Nuts,” from the Zhuluo CountyGazetteer (1717)

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Figure 11. Figure from the “Country of Wild People” fromWang Qi’s Pictorial Compendium of the Three Powers(1609)

The development of frontier travel literature inthe Qing was encouraged not only by thedemands of expansionism but also by the newstatus accorded geography as a discipline.According to Benjamin Elman, the kaozheng(evidential scholarship) movement—one of themajor intellectual trends of the late imperialera—elevated geography to a key disciplinethrough important methodological innovationsin the seventeenth century. [54] The newgeography emphasized empirical observation,the systematic gathering of data, andphilological research. It often focused on topicsrelated to issues of frontier or maritimedefense. Evidential scholarship also generatedinterest in historical geography, including thehistorical geography of China’s frontiers andborders. Thus, in frontier geography colonial

imperatives coincided with the scholarlyinterests of Qing literati, and these interestsreinforced one another.

Other cultural trends of the late imperial eraalso stimulated interest in the frontiers. Thisera has been described by many literaryscholars as an age of surfeit, an age wheneverything seems to have been done,everything seems to have been said. [55] Thiswas particularly true in the case of travelliterature, for all the famous mountains, all thescenic spots in China, had been overinscribedwith the writings of earlier travelers. [56] Inconventional travel writing, the traveler wasexpected not so much to describe the scenebefore him but to meditate on his relationshipto those who had come before him. Paintings ofthe famous scenic spots similarly were boundby convention and the precedents of famousmasterworks. Frontier travel gave the literatusthe opportunity to do something new and fresh,to cover new ground, as it were. Liberated fromthe need to dwell on historical models, thetraveler as explorer and eyewitness observertook center stage. Travelers to Taiwan hadperhaps the greatest leeway for originality, forunlike travelers to the Central Asian frontiers,for example, there were virtually no literaryprecedents for their journeys.

Qing travel literature evinced a new attitudetoward the frontiers. Canonical Tang dynasty(618–907) literary treatments of the frontierswere filled with images of hardship andsuffering—whether the bitter winds of theCentral Asian frontier or the miasmas ofsouthern border lands. The theme of exilepermeates this literature, with unfamiliarterrain causing tears of homesickness andalienation to well up in the eyes of the poet. AsHan Yu wrote from exile in Chaozhou in thesouth:

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Typhoons for winds, crocodiles forfish—Afflictions and misfortunes not tobe plumbed!South of the county, as youapproach its boundary.There are swollen seas linked tothe sky;Poison fogs and malarial miasmasDay and evening flare and form![57]

In contrast, we find Qing travelers, like YuYonghe, proclaiming a passion for “distanttravels” (yuanyou) and even relishing thedanger and strangeness of the frontiers. As YuYonghe declared: “In searching for the exoticand visiting scenic spots, one must not fearterrible inclinations: if the voyage is notdangerous, it will not be exotic; if theinclination is not terrible, it will not beexhilarating.” [58] In similar terms, anothertraveler vowed: “If the journey is not distant,then it will not be lusty; if the journey is notdangerous, it will not be exotic.” [59] Thesesentiments were echoed by numerous otherfrontier travelers who insisted on theunconventional and adventurous journey as theonly authentic form of travel.

In the classic Chinese World Order (1968), JohnKing Fairbank argued that traditional Chineserelations with non-Chinese peoples werecolored by the concept of sinocentrism and theassumption of Chinese superiority. One wouldexpect Chinese accounts of frontier peoples tobe marked by this attitude of Han Chinesesuperiority. As I shall demonstrate, in frontiertravel literature this was not, however,uniformly the case. Rather, Chinese views oft h e o t h e r w e r e c o m p l e x a n d o f t e ncontradictory. As in Western travel literature,encounters with the other provided Chinesetravelers with an opportunity to look back atthe self, and literati representations of Taiwan

and its indigenous people frequently expressed,and were colored by, their author’s political,social, or philosophical concerns.

Encounters with difference on the frontiers alsoprompted travelers to engage in culturalreflection, leading them to new understandingsof Chinese culture and often to culturalrelativism. Questioning the universality ofChinese culture, travel writers suggested thatit was fitting for each place to have its owncustoms and tastes: as many a writer proposed,“Perhaps our customs seem just as strange tothem.” Traditional Western historiography haspresented China as culturally static and self-satisfied until the encounter with the West inthe nineteenth century. However, anexamination of frontier travel writingdemonstrates that long before the “response tothe West,” Chinese intellectuals wereinterested in exploring the ways in which othercultures challenged their own societal norms.

Qing literati expressed a penchant for readingabout exotic geographies and for collectingethnographic illustrations of exotic peoplessuch as the Miao of southwestern China or the“savages” of Taiwan. Their enthusiasm for thesubject is ref lected in the number ofanthologies devoted to travel writing producedduring the Qing. Travel accounts and picturesoriginally circulated in manuscript form amongthe author’s friends and colleagues, as well asamong front ier of f ic ia ls . Many suchmanuscripts were subsequently published,either as part of an author’s collected works orin collectanea. Wang Xiqi’s mammothGeographic Collectanea of the Little FanghuStudio (Xiaofanghuzhai yudi congchao,published 1877), for example, reproduced overa thousand travel accounts representing exoticlocales from Taiwan to Turfan. [60] Travelliterature and topographical pictures thusappealed to a dual audience: frontier officialsand others who needed practical geographicinformation and armchair travelers who sought

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to experience the thrills of the frontiervicariously.

Unfortunately, although a significant corpus oflate imperial travel writing was preservedthrough reprinting in collecteana, due to thedifficulties of reproduction, pictures weregenerally not included in such reprintings. [61]Subsequently, many pictures have been lost orexist only in rare manuscript editions inmuseums or private collections. Sometimes ouronly clue that pictures once accompanied aparticular travel account is a colophon writer’slament that “it is a pity that the pictures havelong been lost.” [62] Thus, although travelliterature and topographical pictures originallycirculated within the same milieu, the modernreader of Qing travel anthologies generallyreads as though texts existed in isolation frompictures—a practice reinforced by the academicdistinction between literary studies and arthistory. I argue, however, that travel writing isbest understood within a system of geographicrepresentation that includes visual materials.

Travel and Visuality

Indeed, visuality plays a central role in thepractices of travel and travel writing. As MaryLouise Pratt has shown in Imperial Eyes: TravelWriting and Transculturation, it is primarilythrough the sense of sight that the travelerconstructs the other. [63] The claim to have“seen for oneself” is a recurring motif in lateimperial Chinese travel literature, withtravelers insisting that “I have been theremyself and seen with my own eyes,” or “I amonly recording that which I have seen with myown eyes.” [64] Another frequent move is forthe traveler to refute common beliefs about aplace based on what he has seen firsthand. AsMing literatus Zhang Hong explained after ajourney to eastern Zhejiang in 1639, “Abouthalf [of the things I saw there] did not agreewith what I had heard. So when I returned I got

out some silk and used it to depict what I hadseen, because relying on your ears is not asgood as relying on your eyes.” [65] Theprivileging of the eye as the most reliable senseis related to the privileging of experientialknowledge in travel writing. [66] The ears, incontrast, are associated with hearsay, a type ofknowledge regarded as particularly suspect intravel literature. [67] It is the traveler’s claimto have been an eyewitness to all he recordsthat confers authority on the travel account.[68]

The role of the eyewitness acquired a specialimportance in Chinese accounts of thefrontiers, as it did in European accounts of theNew World. In the absence of a canon of textsconcerning these “uncharted terrains,” onlyfirsthand experience could lend credibility tothe explorer’s report. [69] As one Qing literatusasserted:

Of all the books written aboutTaiwan, works such as Ji Qiguang’sBrief Account of Taiwan [sic] andXu Huaizu’s Random Jottings onT a i w a n a r e b a s e d o nunsubstantiated rumor. . . . OnlyLan Dingyuan’s Record of thePacification of Taiwan and HuangShujing’s Record of a Tour of Dutyin the Taiwan Strait are written bymen who rea l ly went therethemselves and traversed theterritory. Therefore, what theyhave to say about the mountainsand streams, the environment,customs, and products can betrusted. [70]

Thus, among the various forms of geographicrecords available to Qing readers, travelwriting, as a document of personal experience,

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had privi leged status. Travel writersthemselves frequently claimed that only thosewith firsthand experience could producereliable geographic knowledge—therebybolstering their own authority. Qing literatialso considered it crucial for topographicalpictures, especially maps, to be based onempirical observation. This does not mean thatartists necessarily drew pictures from life.Rather, pictures might be produced (either bythe traveler or by a professional painter) basedon the traveler’s memory of what he had seenor perhaps samples of plants and otherproducts that he had collected. Nonetheless,the basis in firsthand experience is whattheoretically separated the topographicalpicture from an imaginative painting, just as itseparated the travel account from fiction. [71]

Given the importance of “seeing for oneself,” itis not surprising that travelers like Zhang Hongchose to record their experiences in visual aswell as textual forms. Indeed, art historianshave written much on the association betweendomestic Chinese tourist travel and landscapepainting (shanshui hua). But comparativelylittle has been written on the traveler’sinvolvement with the class of visual materialsknown as tu, a broad term that includespictures, illustrations, maps, charts, anddiagrams. [72] This neglect is largely due to thelow status of vernacular visual forms within thediscipline of art history. As art historian JamesCahill writes of Chinese pictorial maps: “Manysuch picture-maps were painted in China fromearly to recent times, but they have receivedlittle attention from either Chinese or foreignscholars, because they have been considered(usually with good reason) to have practicalrather than aesthetic value.” [73] At the sametime, historians and scholars of cartographyhave traditionally discounted pictorial maps onthe grounds that such maps have moreaesthetic than practical value. [74] Pictorialmaps and other kinds of topographical pictureshave therefore largely fallen between the

cracks of disciplinary divisions.

Craig Clunas has recently argued for theimportance of pictures (tu) and visuality inearly modern China and demonstrated thatpictures permeated virtually every aspect of lifein this period. [75] Certainly, visual materials,especially maps and astronomical charts, hadlong been considered vital to geographicknowledge in China. [76] By the Ming,illustrated books of all kinds, includinggeographic works, were widely available. Thus,readers were accustomed to looking at picturesin conjunction with texts. Robert Hegel’s studyof Ming and Qing illustrated fiction has alsogreatly added to our understanding of thetheory and practice of reading texts withpictures. Following the approach suggested byscholars like Clunas and Hegel, I seek toreinsert the reading of pictures into the readingof travel literature. [77]

The idea that topographical pictures representan important complement to written texts inthe production of geographic knowledge wassuccinctly expressed by Xia Xianlun, thecompiler of a nineteenth-century collection ofTaiwan maps (see Figs. 12 and 13):

The ancients had histories on theirright and maps (tu) on their left,granting equal importance tovisualizing and perusing (guanlan).When [Han dynasty general] XiaoHe entered the passes, the firstthing he did was to collect mapsand written records. Without maps,one cannot have comprehensiveknowledge of all the roads andtheir obstacles, of the terrain andits strategic passes. [78]

Xia emphasized the importance of looking in

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addition to reading, implying that images allowfor a different way of comprehending space andplace than words alone. Thus text and picturesare essential to one another: visual knowledgewas an important counterpart to textualknowledge.

Figure 12. Xia Xianlun’s “General Map of the CismontaneandTransmontane Territory” from Maps of Taiwan withExplanations (1879)a

Figure 13. Xia Xianlun’s “General Map of theTransmontaneTerritory” from Maps of Taiwan with Explanations (1879)

W o r d a n d i m a g e e n j o y e d a k i n d o fcomplementary division of labor in late imperialgeographic representation. Cordell Yee and

others have demonstrated that gazetteer maps,for example, were primarily intended asillustrative accompaniments to the gazetteertext, which contained verbal descriptions of thegeography. Maps provided a general idea of thetopography and aided in understanding thespatial relations between these landmarks (seeFigs. 14a and b). The text supplied suchdetailed information as distances betweenlocations and the names of villages, mountains,and other topographical features. Map and textthus assumed complementary functions, withmaps allowing for qualitative understandings ofthe terrain and texts providing quantitativegeo-graphical information. This complementaryrelation was expressed in the idea that the“narration of events without maps is not clear,and maps without explanation are notintelligible.” [79] A similar dynamic can be seenin a genre known as “p ic tures w i thexplanations” (tushuo), which combinedpictures and explanatory text. Thus, word andimage worked together in the production ofgeographic knowledge.

Figure 14a. Map of Fengshan County from the TaiwanPrefecturalGazetteer (1696)

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Figure 14b. Map of Zhuluo County from the TaiwanPrefecturalGazetteer (1696)

The Qing court clearly recognized the politicalimportance of visual in addition to textualknowledge of the frontiers. For the Qing, thevisual representation of the frontiers, especiallymapping, was bound up with the assertion ofimperial power on both the practical and thesymbolic levels. [80] And so the Qing sponsoredworks such as the Kangxi-Jesuit atlas and theQing Imperial Tribute Illustrations. TheQianlong emperor also commissioned a seriesof French copperplate engravings tocommemorate Qing conquests on the frontiers.Such pictures helped not only to visualize theextent of Qing imperial possessions but also todefine, order, and celebrate these possessions.Pictures therefore played an important role inthe fashioning of empire.

Although the surviving visual record of theQing frontiers is far smaller than the textualrecord, it is no less significant. Like travelwriting, pictures are a highly mediated form ofrepresentation: thus, these images reveal agreat deal about how Qing travelers “saw” thefrontier. In reinserting pictures into the readingof travel literature, I demonstrate that anexamination of pictures may bring to the foreissues or perspectives that do not emerge from

an examination of literary texts alone.Therefore, a more complete understanding ofthe cultural meanings that the frontier had forthe Qing can be gained by examining picturesin conjunction with texts such as travelaccounts and gazetteers.

As a study of Qing colonial discourse, my worknecessarily privileges both texts and theperspective of the Qing elite. [81] This islargely a function of my sources: travelaccounts, gazetteers, maps, pictures, and otherdocuments produced by Qing literati. Due tothis limitation, neither the perspective of theTaiwan indigenes nor that of the Han Chinesesettlers is represented.

The Qing Transformation of Taiwan

After the Qing conquest of the island, thecourt’s Taiwan policy went through a numberof phases over the course of the next twocenturies. John Shepherd’s Statecraft andPolitical Economy on the Taiwan Frontier,1600–1800 gives a detailed and thoroughaccount of these policy shifts during the firstcentury of Qing rule on Taiwan. According toShepherd, the Qing court alternated between apro-quarantine approach and a pro-colonizationapproach to Taiwan policy throughout thisperiod. [82] Pro-quarantine policies sought topreserve the status quo on the island byrestricting Chinese immigration to Taiwan andprotecting the indigenes’ land rights. Pro-colonization policies promoted Chineseimmigration and the aggressive appropriationof indigenous lands for Chinese settlers.Policymakers alternated between these twoorientations, as they sought to balance theinterests of the indigenous people and theChinese settlers and thereby avoid costlyconflict on the frontier.

Despite the efforts of pro-quarantine officials,

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the Qing could not stem the tide of HanChinese immigration to this frontier, and by thenineteenth century, the court had decided toproceed with the final colonization of the islandas a whole. In 1875, the Qing adopted the“Open the Mountains and Pacify the Savages”(kaishan fufan) policy.

This policy legalized the entry of Han Chinesesettlers into the last of the remainingindigenous territory on the island. In order toaccomplish this appropriation of lands, theQing employed the military to “pacify thesavages.” With the adoption of this policy, thetenuous balance between Han Chineseinterests and indigenous interests definitivelytipped in favor of the Chinese settlers. WhenTaiwan was promoted to provincehood in 1887,it seemed that the island was to be once and forall Chinese terrain.

When the Qing first conquered Taiwan, therewere only a handful of firsthand accounts of theisland. Thus, the Ming image of the island as a“ball of mud” predominated. Over the course oftwo centuries of Qing colonial rule, Chineseliterati produced a significant corpus of travelaccounts, maps, and pictures of Taiwan,providing a wealth of knowledge about theonce-unknown island and concomitantlytransforming its image. The pioneering Qingwriters strove to make the island known andstruggled with the question whether the islandwas worth colonizing. In the eighteenthcentury, when the issue of annexation had beensettled, colonial officials recognized the needfor accurate geographic information about theisland. Eighteenth-century authors rejected theworks of the earlier period as unreliable andattempted to replace these writings with theirown empirical observations. It was during thissecond phase that the dominant tropes of Qingcolonial discourse about Taiwan emerged. Bythe nineteenth century, Chinese attitudestoward Taiwan and the material conditions ofthe colony had changed so dramatically that

“the ball of mud” was now considered a “landof Green Gold.” [83]

In 1895, only a short time after Taiwan hadbecome an official province of China, the Qingwere forced by their defeat in the Sino-Japanese war to cede the island to Japan. Thereaction of Chinese elites to the signing of theTreaty of Shimonoseki demonstrates how farChinese ideas about Taiwan had come sinceannexation. Officials and students in Chinavigorously protested the Treaty, signingdeclarations condemning what they called the“selling of national territory,” and the “severingof the nation.” Whereas Chinese officials twocenturies earlier had protested the annexationof Taiwan as a waste of money, theseprotesters now declared that Taiwan should notbe sold for any price. Pessimists predicted thatonce this piece of China was lost, the restwould soon fall like dominoes to imperialaggressors.

Writers also mourned the loss of Taiwan intheir private writings. As one nostalgic travelerwrote: “Does this not hurt? Is this not cause forregret? How I blame the responsible officialswho severed our national territory to end the[Sino-Japanese] war!.... I cannot stop the floodof my old tears. Alas!” [84] That the loss ofTaiwan could evoke such emotions in writerslike this reveals the profound change in theidea of Taiwan’s place in China’s imaginedgeography. The image of Taiwan severed, orcut off, from China implies that Taiwan hadcome to be conceptualized as an integral partof the Chinese geo-body. Taiwan was no longera lone ball of mud beyond the seas, but a fullpart of China’s terrain, which would have to be“reunified” in order to make the national bodywhole again. The act of severing leaves a scar,a constant reminder of the pain of the knife:hence the “old tears” that our author sheds.The “loss” of the island to the Japanese onlyserved to convert Chinese nationalists evenmore ardently to the idea that Taiwan rightfully

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belonged to China. The history of frontier travelliterature thus traces the emergence of Chinesenationalist sentiment toward Taiwan.

The scar that was left when Japan annexedTaiwan was temporarily healed when China—this time the Republic of China—once againtook possession of the island following WorldWar II. But the wound would be opened fouryears later by the Chinese Civil War. With thevictory of the Chinese Communists (CCP)imminent, the Chinese Nationalists (KMT)packed up their government, army, and manyof the treasures of the Qing Imperialcollections, and fled to Taiwan, establishing aprovisional government of the Republic ofChina on the island.

It was out of this history of the Chinese CivilWar that the current “Taiwan issue” emerged,with the KMT declaring the provisionalgovernment on Taiwan the legitimategovernment of “Free China,” and the PRCstaking its claim over the “renegade province”of Taiwan. In order to bolster the legitimacy ofthese claims, both sides promoted thehistorically inaccurate contention that Taiwanhas been “a part of China” since antiquity andeffectively erased the rich history of the Qingcolonization of the island. This Chinesenationalist discourse (both the KMT and theCCP varieties) has naturalized the idea thatTaiwan is an inalienable part of China’ssovereign territory, a sacred part of theChinese geo-body. The success of this discoursecan be measured by the disappearance fromthe Chinese collective memory of the pre-Qingconviction that Taiwan was “beyond the pale.”

In Taiwan’s gradual transformation from a“savage island” into a “Chinese province” wesee the profound changes in the imaginedgeography of the Chinese domain wrought byQing expansionism. In the contemporaryconstruction of Taiwan as a “renegade

province” that must be “reunified” in order torestore China’s territorial integrity we see thelasting impact of Qing expansionism on theimagined geography of the modern Chinesenation-state.

Emma J. Teng is an Associate Professor ofChinese Studies at the Massachusetts Instituteof Technology. She is the author of Taiwan’sImagined Geography: Chinese Colonial TravelWriting, 1683–1895, from which the presenttext is drawn. She is currently working onChinese and Chinese American representationsof Eurasian interracialism at the turn of the20th century. Her publications on this subjectinclude “Eurasian Hybridity in Chinese UtopianVisions: From ‘One World’ to a ‘Society Basedon Beauty’ and Beyond,” positions: east asiacultures critique (Volume 14.1, Spring 2006).Posted at Japan Focus on June 14, 2007.

Notes

1. There is some ambiguity in the English word“Chinese,” since it refers to two differentChinese concepts, Hua and Han. The latter is amore restrictive term that refers to the majorityHan Chinese ethnic group.

2. Yu Yonghe, Pihai jiyou, p. 1.

3. “Zheng Chenggong” in Mandarin Chinese.

4. See Yu Yonghe, Pihai jiyou, p. 31.

5. Shi Lang, Jinghai jishi, p. 60.

6. Millward, Beyond the Pass, p. 37; Waldron,The Great Wall of China, pp. 42–43.

7. In this work I use the word “comparable” in

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the sense of “suitable for comparison.” SeePerdue, “Comparing Empires,” pp. 255–61;Adas, “Imperialism and Colonialism inComparat ive Perspect ive”; Harrel l ,“ Introduct ion”; and Mil lward, “NewPerspectives on the Qing Frontier.”

8. See Perdue, “Boundaries, Maps, andMovement.”

9. The term “renegade province” is used in U.S.media to represent the PRC’s position onTaiwan, but it is not a Chinese phrase. Mythanks to Tom Christensen for pointing thisout.

10. Foreign Desk, “China’s Statement,” p. 10.

11. See Christensen, “Posing Problems WithoutCatching Up.” See also Cohen and Teng, LetTaiwan Be Taiwan.

12. This is not to deny that ethnic Chinesefamilies on Taiwan, including my own, haveancestral ties to China, just as many Americanshave ancestral ties to England.

13. For a critique of this “China as victim”approach, see Millward, Beyond the Pass, p.16 . On the prob lemat ic o f app ly ing“postcolonial discourse” to China, see Lee,Shanghai Modern, pp. 308–9.

14. For example, a recent publication of theNational Museum of Chinese History includesthis statement under the heading of “NationalUnification”: “During the Qing Dynasty, thepolitical, economic and cultural relationsamong various nat ional i t ies becameincreasingly harmonious, reinforcing thefoundation of national unity” (Yu Weichao, AJourney into China’s Antiquity, p. 164).

15. Doyle, Empires, p. 45.

16. Parry, “Problems in Current Theories ofColonial Discourse,” p . 34; Thomas,Colonialism’s Culture, p. 9.

17. See the Epilogue.

18. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 9.

19. Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, p. 5.

20. Williams, Keywords, p. 160.

21. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 9.

22. Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, p. 2.

23. As Peter Perdue (“Comparing Empires,” p.255) has provocatively argued: “The QingEmpire of China was a colonial empire thatruled over a diverse collection of peoples withseparate identities and deserves comparisonwith other empires.”

24. See ibid.; Perdue, “Boundaries, Maps, andMovement”; Shepherd, Statecraft and PoliticalEconomy on the Taiwan Frontier; andHostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise.

25. Ding, Dongying zhilüe, p. 79.

26. Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise, pp.37–41.

27. For example, the Qing required HanChinese men to adopt the Manchu hairstyle ofthe queue.

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28. On the multiethnic composition of the Qingmilitary, see Crossley, “The QianlongRetrospect of the Chinese-Martial (hanjun)Banners.”

29. In Taiwan, the Qing recruited indigenoustroops for deployment against rebellious Hansettlers. In response, Han Chinese settlerssometimes forged alliances with rivalindigenous groups against these troops; seeShepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy onthe Taiwan Frontier. For more recent work on“ethnic politics” on the Taiwan frontiers, seeKa, Fan toujia.

30. Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture; Stoler,“Reth ink ing Co lon ia l Categor ies” ;JanMohammed, “The Economy of ManicheanAllegory”; Bhabha, The Location of Culture.

31. See, e.g., Millward, Beyond the Pass;Perdue, China Marches West; Gaubatz, Beyondthe Great Wall; Shepherd, Statecraft andPolitical Economy on the Taiwan Frontier;Herman, “Empire in the Southwest”; Giersch,“‘A Motley Throng.’”

32. Said, Orientalism; Said, Culture andImperialism; Lowe, Critical Terrains;Greenblatt, New World Encounters; Spurr, TheRhetoric of Empire.

33. All this is not to argue, of course, that Qingcolonial discourse is identical to EuropeanOrientalism (which itself had many variations,British, French, etc.). It is simply to say thatOrientalism was not a uniquely Europeanphenomenon and that the Chinese had aroughly equivalent discourse by which theyproduced their others (a category that includedEuropeans). Indeed, the very idea ofcomparison undermines the Orientalist notionthat China is “utterly different” from the Westand therefore beyond comparison. At the same

time, this is not to say that Western colonialdiscourse theory is universally applicablewithout regard to cultural specificity. Thisstudy attempts to walk the fine line betweenthese two extreme positions.

34. Gladney, “Representing Nationality inChina,” p. 94; Schein, “Gender and InternalOrientalism in China,” p. 70.

35. See Crossley, “Thinking About Ethnicity inEarly Modern China.”

36. Despite the fact that the recent mapping ofthe human genome has demonstrated thatthere is no genetic basis for race, the currentobsession with Tiger Woods shows that the ideaof race is alive and well in twenty-first-centuryAmerica.

37. For the development of nineteenth-centuryracial theory, especially the debate overmonogenesis and polygenesis, see Young,Colonial Desire. See also Stocking, Race,Culture, and Evolution.

38. My research into issues of race andethnicity builds on the work of scholars such asPamela Kyle Crossley, Frank Dikötter, StevanHarrell, Dru Gladney, and others. See Crossley,“Thinking About Ethnicity in Early ModernChina”; Dikötter, The Discourse of Race inModern China; Harrell, “Introduction”; andGladney, Muslim Chinese.

39. Although I use the terms “race” and“ethnicity” in this work to describe Qing ideasabout human difference, in referring tohistorical aspects of Qing frontier managementI follow James Millward in using the term“ethnic.” As Millward (Beyond the Pass, p. 14n)notes: “In describing these categories ingeneral terms, it is extremely convenient to

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have a single word for this sort of distinction.”Thus I speak of “ethnic policy,” “ethnicgroups,” and “interethnic conflict.” Wheneverpossible, I have avoided the awkwardconstruction “race/ethnicity.”

40. Crossley, “Thinking About Ethnicity in EarlyModern China,” p. 8.

41. Ching, Becoming “Japanese.”

42. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 7.

43. Said, Orientalism, p. 54.

44. Schwartz, “The Geography Lesson,” p. 36;Godlewska, “Map, Text, and Image”;

Gregory, Geographical Imaginations.

45. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 15.

46. Thongchai, Siam Mapped, p. 17.

47. I propose that one key difference betweenthe territoriality of nations and empires is thatthe boundaries of the nation are generallyimagined as fixed, whereas the boundaries ofthe empire are often imagined as expandable.

48. Said, Orientalism, p. 54.

49. Liu-shi-qi, Fanshe caifeng tukao, p. 99.

50. Such information was either culled from thelocal gazetteers or based on officials’ ownobservations during tours of inspection.

51. Travelers also composed poetry, which they

often included in their narrative accounts.

52. The notion of the “travelogue” (youji) as adistinct Chinese genre is essentially a moderninvention.

53. These include the genres of shanshui hua(landscape painting), renwu hua (figurepainting), huaniao hua (bird-and-flowerpaint ing) , and j iehua (ru led- l ine orarchitectural drawing). The format of suchworks included the painted handscroll, thehanging scroll, the painted album, the paintedfan, the woodblock print, and the line drawing.The tu produced by such professionals arefinely rendered gongbi works, painted in coloron paper or silk. Less privileged travelers, andgazetteer compilers who did not enjoy theservices of a professional painter, had to settlefor producing their own drawings. Thesedrawings served as the basis for the woodblockprints reproduced in the gazetteers. The qualityof tu thus ranges from the painterly to thesketchy.

54. Elman, “Geographical Research in theMing-Ch’ing Period.”

55. See, e.g., Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange,p. 11.

56. Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes.

57. Schafer, The Vermilion Bird, p. 128.

58. Yu Yonghe, Pihai jiyou, p. 27.

59. Dong, Taihai jianwen lu, p. 1.

60. Other similar, but less ambitious,anthologies include the Geographic Collectanea

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of Imperial Dynastic Barbarian Colonies(Huangchao fanshu yudi congshu) and the FiveCollected Works on the Frontiers (Bian¬jiangwuzhong).

61. Wang Xiqi’s mammoth travel anthology, forexample, contains no pictures.

62. Liu-shi-qi, Fanshe caifeng tukao, p. 20.

63. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 5.

64. It was the desire to see for himself thatmotivated Yu Yonghe, for example.

65. Quoted in Cahill, Chinese Painting of theLate Ming Dynasty, p. 39. Zhang Hong’scomment further suggests that he viewedmimetic representation as an importantfunction of painting. Zhang implied that what ispictured on silk directly correlates to, orimitates, that which is seen with the eyes. Inrepresenting “what he has seen” on silk, Zhangattempted to translate visual experiencedirectly into visual artifact. In contrast, travelwriting translates visual experience into words.Through the production of such an image,Zhang hoped to enable the viewer to “rely onthe eyes,” thereby deriving more authoritativeknowledge, perhaps, than could be foundthrough reading a travelogue.

66. The importance of visuality in late imperialChinese travel writing is underscored by thefact that vivid description is commonly praisedas ruhua, “like a painting,” or rutu, “like apicture.”

67. Travelers, including the famous Xu Xiake,frequently mention being inspired to travel by adesire to ascertain whether what they haveheard about a particular place is either right or

wrong. Moreover, travel writers oftenemphasize that they record only what theypersonally witnessed and exclude any materialthat could be considered hearsay. Thus, despitethe fact that one subgenre of travel writing iscalled wenjian lu (records of things heard andseen), I would argue that seeing is still theprivileged term: that is, wen is no good withoutjian.

68. Similarly, Anthony Pagden (“Ius etFactum”) and Clifford Geertz (Works and Lives)have argued that it is through the sense ofsight that the travel writer constructs theauthority of his account.

69. See Pagden, “Ius et Factum.”

70. Wu Xiqi, “Preface,” in Zhai, Taiyang biji, p.1.

71. The notion that only firsthand experiencecould guarantee the reliability of geographicinformation became a particular problem onthe frontier. In Taiwan, for example, the densejungle of the mountainous areas was oftenimpenetrable to Chinese travelers. Such terrainwas, therefore, impossible to map and difficultto document. When firsthand information wasunattainable, hearsay had to substitute forempirical observations. For the frontiers, then,the expansion of geographic knowledge oftenwent hand in hand with the extension ofChinese control.

72. Unlike landscape paintings, or other kindsof hua, which could stand on their own asobjects of appreciation, these tu were generallyproduced and consumed in conjunction withwritten texts.

73. Cahill, Chinese Painting of the Late MingDynasty, pp. 206–7.

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74. Cordell Yee is one notable exception.

75. Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in EarlyModern China.

76. Maps and other tu were a centralcomponent of local gazetteers, as well as themore comprehensive Yitong zhi. Cosmologicaldiagrams and charts were produced with thehopes of making visible the “patterns ofHeaven” (tianwen). Emperors as far back as theLiang dynasty (502–77) commissioned thepainting of tribute illustrations (zhigong tu) torecord the appearance of foreign peoples.Illustrated versions of the Shanhaijing (Classicof mountains and seas) were in circulation atleast by Tao Qian’s (365–427) time. Many ofthese tu have been analyzed by scholars ofgeography, cartography, and the history ofscience in China.

77. The role of the visual in anthropology hasalso become a subject of renewed interest inrecent years; see Banks and Morphy,Rethinking Visual Anthropology.

78. Xia Xianlun, Taiwan yutu, p. 1.

79. Yee, “Chinese Maps in Political Culture,” p.91.

80. Strategic maps, of course, greatly aided theQing in the conquest of frontier lands.

81. I include both Han Chinese and Manchuswho wrote in classical Chinese. Because of myown linguistic limitations, I do not use Manchusources.

82. These terms are used by John Shepherd inhis analysis of Qing Taiwan policy in Statecraft

and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier.

83. “Green Gold” is a Chinese term for tea; seeEtherington and Forster, Green Gold.

84. Chi Zhizheng, Quan Tai youji (Travelogue ofall Taiwan), preface.

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