Carl Friedrich Neumann (1793-1870), the Haichuang Temple’s Cult of the Book, and Anti-Imperial Politics East and West

• In Event: Alternative Alliances: The Haichuang Temple in Guangzhou as a Local, Regional, and Transnational Platform of Cultural Exchange, 1650-1850

Abstract

This paper examines how in the early 1800s Haichuang Temple publications served to subvert the hegemony of imperial and royal institutions in Qing China and in Bavaria respectively. In Qing China, such a challenge was mounted in the form of entrusting a poetic collection proscribed by the Qianlong Emperor to a visiting foreigner for safekeeping. In Bavaria, the monastic rules of the Haichuang Temple were used to make a case for a secular, nonmonarchical government. The nexus between these activities was C.F. Neumann, a Jewish high school teacher newly converted to Protestantism, who traveled to Guangzhou in 1830/31 to acquire a representative collection of Chinese books in exchange for a permanent academic post. This unprecedented maneuver was successful not only because Neumann was able to tap into the commercial book market of Guangzhou despite the official prohibition on book sales to Westerners, but also because he became the beneficiary of the Haichuang Temple’s Mahayana cult of the book. Among other Haichuang imprints, he obtained a rare copy of the outlawed poetic works of one of the Ming loyalist founding fathers of the Haichuang Temple. Upon his return, drawing on the widely perceived similarities between Buddhism and Catholicism, Neumann translated the Haichuang Temple’s rules for novices to express his sympathies for the burgeoning secular revolutionary movements in France, in German-speaking kingdoms, and elsewhere, thereby amplifying the Haichuang Temple’s anti-Qing sentiments into a broader argument about the evils of absolute monarchy.

Author

• Patricia Sieber, The Ohio State University