Mid-Qing Historiography as a Trail of Cases: The Case of the Yuan History

In the eighteenth century, Chinese scholars asserted that the historiographical vocation has lost its prestige, importance, and meticulousness since the Song dynasty (some notable exceptions notwithstanding). They aimed to restore its former stature and produce a new, better, line of historiography, as part of their strategy to “save the world.” The study of the dynastic Histories was considered as one of the most important tasks in that regard, and, indeed, it was understood as even more difficult than the study of the Classics. More recent histories, and the Yuan in particular, challenged mid-Qing historians even further. The “task of the historian” involved disentanglement of textual knots, and, much like the philological work needed for the Classics, getting the textual details right while also checking the historical facts. The Yuan History presented, perhaps, the most daunting challenge as not only was its compilation (during the early Ming) done in relative haste and sloppiness, it also involved knowledge of another language, Mongolian, and the links between textual sources in Chinese and their Mongolian counterparts.

This paper aims to consider: the style and mode of writing history during the mid-Qing by prominent evidential-learning scholars; the methodology of historical research of the time and the formation of “historiographical cases” as its main form of assembly and presentation; the strategies of dealing with the Yuan History, especially when it came to delving into Mongolian names; and, lastly, the reasons the Yuan attracted the historians’ attention at the time.