“No Such Portents under This Dynasty”: Reinventing Wonders in Qing Institutional History

Wondrous things (wuyi) carried meaning in Chinese dynastic historiography as portents that manifested the ruler’s adherence to the Heavenly Mandate. In Wenxian tongkao (Comprehensive Studies of Government Documentations, 1317), Ma Duanlin treats wonders as one of twenty-four key aspects of China's institutional history. Drawing from neo-Confucian cosmology, Ma Duanlin went to great lengths in classifying all sorts of wonder by their origin in one of the Five Phases: Water, Fire, Wood, Metal, and Earth. Later, Wang Qi (fl. 1565) continued this fascination with wonders in his sequel to Ma’s work. Following the Qing conquest, early Manchu rulers espoused ambitious encyclopedic projects that drew on previous literature in the same vein, albeit at a more impressive scale.

The status of wonders in historiography only came under substantial scrutiny and attack during the second half of the eighteenth century. The Qianlong emperor commissioned official sequels to Ma's institutional history, but the coverage on Qing institutions was treated in a separate monograph. This paper argues that this extraordinary gesture of temporal discontinuity sanctioned a new ideology of wonders, one that gave rise to a systematic critique of cosmic portents and the notion that inauspicious portents should not be allowed to exist under Qing rule. As a result, the Qing sequel to Ma and Wang's works only contained a very short chapter on wonders. I argue that the purge of wonders from historiography was consistent with the adoption of a pronounced technocratic approach to disasters, as veteran bureaucrats (or descendants of them) such as Ji Huang (1711-1794) and Liu Yong (1719-1804) were put in charge of the Santongguan, where the Comprehensive Histories were compiled. When disasters became manageable by bureaucratic means, their previous documentations as subversive portents came to be severed from the present.