The Board of Rites and the Making of Qing China

In the early seventeenth century, disparate groups of semi-nomadic peoples living in northeastern Eurasia united under a charismatic leader, called themselves Manchus, and aligning with agrarian Chinese went on to form one of the largest land-based empires in the early modern world, the Qing dynasty. That dynasty ruled China and parts of Inner Asia from 1636 to 1912. How these people were able to build a cohesive state to conquer and rule China for nearly three centuries is one of the most enduring questions in Sinology. Focusing on the symbolic practices that structured domination and legitimized authority, this paper challenges traditional understandings of state-formation, and argues that in addition to war making and institution building, the disciplining of diverse political actors, and the construction of political order through symbolic acts were essential undertakings in the making of the Qing state. Beginning with the establishment in 1631 of the key disciplinary organization, the Board of Rites, and culminating with the publication of the first administrative code in 1690, I show that the Qing political environment was premised on sets of intertwined relationships constantly performed through acts such as the New Year’s Day ceremony, greeting rites, and sumptuary regulations, or what was referred to as li in Chinese. Drawing on Chinese- and Manchu-language archival sources, I demonstrate how Qing state-makers drew on existing ritual practices and made up new ones to reimagine political culture and construct a system of domination that lay the basis for empire.