Place-Making and the Patrimonial Public of the Qing Empire in Urban North China

Daniel Knorr, Illinois State University

Touring was one of the distinctive practices Qing rulers used to cultivate patrimonial power among both the inner circle of the court and across the realm. The construction of physical monuments like steles bearing imperial calligraphy lent a permanent dimension to the tours’ transitory performance of patrimonial power. This paper examines tours and responses to them in the city of Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province in north China. Despite visiting Jinan less frequently than the better-studied metropolises of the Lower Yangzi, like Suzhou, which he visited six times, the Kangxi emperor’s three stops in Jinan (1684, 1689, and 1703) generated a significant archive of texts inscribed on the landscape in full view of Jinan’s residents. However, in the absence of imperial visits between 1703 and 1748, local actors served as custodians of imperial presence. I use the term “patrimonial public” to describe the participation of diverse actors in the generation of patrimonial power. In this paper I focus on two members of this public: salt official San-bao, who undertook a renovation of pavilions housing the Kangxi emperor’s calligraphy at Jinan’s Baotu Spring in 1736, and local literatus Ren Hongyuan, who incorporated both imperial texts and an updated illustration of Baotu Spring’s landscape into his 1742 compilation of texts about it. By identifying the significance of public mediation to the generation of patrimonial power, I challenge narratives of the high Qing as a period of abeyance between the development of public politics in the late Ming and its resurgence in the nineteenth century.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 156. Elites, Bureaucracy, and State Formation