Painting vs. Practice: The Spectacles of the Qianlong Emperor’s Southern Tours, 1751-1784

• In Event: Intercultural Spaces in Eighteenth-century Beijing

Abstract

This paper focuses on the well-known southern tours of the Qianlong emperor (1711-1799, r. 1736-1795), the fourth Manchu emperor to rule over China proper. Each of Qianlong’s six southern tours, which took place between 1751 and 1784, were extended affairs during which the emperor and his rather sizeable entourage spent anywhere from 3-5 months traveling through one of the empire’s most prosperous and critical regions—the Lower Yangtze delta (Jiangnan).

But what did a southern tour actually look like? And what was the visual impact and symbolic meaning of the mobile court in the Lower Yangtze delta? In this paper, I will address such questions by considering a variety of sources including court paintings, imperial poetry, literati accounts, administrative regulations, and archival documents. By reading this wide array of sources in conjunction with and against each other, I hope to elucidate how court paintings of the Qianlong emperor’s southern tours and other imperial spectacles did not necessarily represent reality in any direct (positivistic) manner, but rather were themselves ideologically imbued documents that served to maintain strict and stereotypical boundaries between northern and southern landscapes, between civil and military spheres, and between Chinese and Inner Asian cultural and political sensibilities. However, the actual management of the two most basic material forms of the mobile court—that is, a court on horseback and a court in camp —allowed for the ethnically imbued projection of imperial authority in Jiangnan.

Author

• Michael G Chang, George Mason University