Making the Palace Machine Work: Mobilizing People, Objects, and Nature in the Qing Empire ed. by Martina Siebert, Kai Jun Chen, and Dorothy Ko (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Making the Palace Machine Work: Mobilizing People, Objects, and Nature in the Qing Empire ed. by Martina Siebert, Kai Jun Chen, and Dorothy Ko
Emperors, empresses, kings, and queens all need homes, servants, and spending money. Early modern history provides many examples of the institutional arrangements devised for these purposes—British, French, Japanese, Swedish, Austro-Hungarian, Thai, Ottoman, Vatican, and Russian. In eighteenth-century China, such supporting functions were performed by a single institution, the Imperial Household Agency (Neiwufu), the subject of Making the Palace Machine Work.
The Imperial Household of the Qing dynasty was a large and wealthy organization built on earlier foundations, headquartered in Beijing but with operations that stretched across an expanding empire. Veiled by the quasi secrecy associated with royal security, this powerful agency has been poorly understood and largely ignored by modern historians. Although the treasures of the Forbidden City and summer palaces have been examined by art historians, only in the 1990s did newly opened archives make clear that voluminous documentation for the workings of the Imperial Household had also been preserved. This book reflects the first phase of their scholarly exploration.
This volume, made up of nine long chapters and five short ones, is the result of a series of meetings supported by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. It introduces the pioneering work of a multinational cohort of mostly younger scholars whose research has either not been published in English or at all. Dorothy Ko and Dagmar Schäfer provided inspiration and support. Disparate chapters reflect the remarkable range of the Neiwufu's mobilization of people, objects, and nature, and they are given intellectual coherence by a shared attention to the organization's "machine-like" workings. There is a unified bibliography and detailed index. Although explicit comparisons beyond China are few and the intended audience is Qing historians, this book offers many points of interest for historians of technology.
As the volume emphasizes, to provide prestigious furniture, clothing, food, and entertainment for the emperor's family, the Imperial Household acquired, processed, and transformed raw materials from all over the empire [End Page 1256] and beyond. It prized technical expertise and variety, and it required skilled and trustworthy employees. The cosmopolitan Qing palaces employed Tibetans, Mongols, and Europeans in their workshops, as well as Manchus and Chinese servants of all sorts.
The newly mined archives provide rare, detailed information on how things were made and used. The objects discussed at substantive length in this volume include furniture, building components, bowls, tapestries, ceramics, roof tiles, Buddhist statues, lotus plants, medicines, and live elephants. Wood, jade, pewter, copper, porcelain, gold, mercury, rosins, pastes, and fur are among the materials investigated, and different chapters consider palace servants, laborers, miners, doctors, and artisans in general.
The technologies analyzed and illuminated include refurbishing, recycling, outsourcing, storage, moving, fire-gilding, polishing, welding, and quarrying, as well as garden agriculture, deterioration, transportation, and the use of models. It is, however, the Neiwufu's sophisticated organizational technology that receives the greatest attention throughout the book: the management of people, materials, skills, distance, time, and complexity; the use of accounts, filing systems, audits, and surveillance; and the reliance on paper tickets, labels, ledgers, reports, summaries, requests, and orders. Insights into comparable processes in the society at large are plentiful.
The eponymous analogy of the Imperial Household to a machine has encouraged a refreshing emphasis on the system rather than the willful emperors who made it run, but the mechanical implications are at odds with the lively flexibility illustrated in constant adjustments of rules and procedures; an editorial emphasis on "rationality" (pp. 291–92) seems misplaced. Moreover, a focus on production tends to slight the Neiwufu's immense appetite for making money and its many ways of doing so. Collectively, these authors clearly demonstrate how this private palace institution both worked with the well-studied, land-tax-funded public bureaucracy and competed in a vigorous commercial marketplace. Likening the Qing Imperial Household...
