Ming-Qing Documents

Foreign Relations

There was a time when much, if not most, of what was written in English and other European languages about Chinese history was focused on the history of Western relations with China or on what might be called "foreign relations," including diplomatic history, the history of trade and commercial relations, and the history of missionary activity. The reasons for this are complex, and can be explained in part as the result of the types of sources that were then easily available to scholars, but one must also take into account prevailing biases in history writing generally at the time as well as the (typically limited) linguistic abilities of Western scholars. In addition, one must not overlook the preoccupation of intellectuals and many others during the period between, say, the Opium War and the Cultural Revolution, to understand the significance of the troubled and at times violent processes that brought about the gradual integration of the Chinese empire and afterward the Chinese republics into the emerging modern international order - processes that had turned familiar worlds upside down and that demanded explanations. It should be noted that a similar preoccupation characterized much history writing in Chinese and Japanese as well, though of course the frameworks within which that scholarship was conducted tended to differ greatly from those in English, French, and German.

The diversification of historical writing in the final third of the twentieth century, whereby social, economic, and institutional history (along with other subfields) rose to prominence led inevitably to a decline in interest in "foreign relations," which, rightly or wrongly, came to be seen as slightly "old-fashioned." The emergence in the late 1900s of cultural studies and postcolonial studies, of world history (or global history), and of new paradigms for multi-archival, international diplomatic history changed all that, and breathed new life into this area of scholarship, especially after the end of the Cold War. Many of the same sources as were used in the early 1900s were brought back, but subject to new critical interpretations; at the same time, a great many new sources have been made available in multiple languages (Asian and European alike) that a larger number of scholars today are better equipped to handle.   

Chinese Diplomatic Archives

Until the foundation of the Zongli Yamen in 1860, what we would properly call “foreign affairs” were mainly dealt with by the Board of Rites, the Lifanyuan, or, in case of extreme gravity, directly by the Grand Council. The Board of Rites handled tribute missions from Korea, southeast Asia, and Europe; the Lifanyuan (or “Court of Colonial Affairs”) was responsible for relations with Mongolia, Tibet, Russia, and Eastern Turkestan. Board of Rites materials are plentiful, but few original archives remain from the Lifanyuan; most were destroyed when foreign troops occupied Beijing in 1900. Some, however, have been preserved outside Beijing (e.g., in Hohhot, Lhasa, and Ulan Bator).

After the signing of the 1860 Convention of Peking, foreign diplomats began to reside in Beijing and established permanent legations there. This led the Qing government to create the “Office for the General Management of Matters Concerning the Various Countries.” Initially the Zongli Yamen was not thought of as a “Foreign Office.” It was just an informal group of statesmen, led by Prince Gong, an ad hoc structure intended to accommodate the unexpected outside of the usual institutions, and its position in the bureaucracy and its style of work remained fairly undefined. Much like the Grand Council in its formative years, the staff of the Zongli Yamen tended to remain small and to conduct its work secretly. Even though the Zongli Yamen never became a central institution of the Qing administrative structure, the court attempted to assure the importance of the office by instructing the Zongli Yamen to make independent decisions on specific issues of foreign relations, or at least to make the foreigners think that it was doing so. Reorganized in 1864 in a more structured way, the Zongli Yamen retained its form until 1901, when it was replaced by what to Western eyes was a more recognizable foreign office.

Jinshisuo dang'anguan guancang yingxiang jiansuo xitong 近史所檔案館館藏檢索系統 - 中央研究院.

This online database maintained by the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica contains more than 1 million digitized pages of the Foreign Affairs Archives from 1860 to 1928. It includes the huge Zongli Yamen archives (including 籌辦夷務始末 and others), Waiwubu 外務部 archives, and archives under the Northern Regime 北洋政府時期. There are functions of keyword search and name search (including both Chinese and foreigners). To view the documents themselves you will need to register for an account (free) and also need to download their viewer software, which works only on a Windows platform.

Chouban yiwu shimo 籌辦夷務始末. 260 juan. Beiping, 1929–31. W 50.2.7

This collection, which covers the period between 1836 and 1874, is a reproduction of the original official compilation begun by the Qing Yiwuju 夷務局 (“foreign affairs bureau”), effective from about 1845 to 1875. Since it was never meant for publication, it pulls no punches and was comparatively lightly edited (only about 50% of its contents are duplicated in the Shilu). A basic source for research on late Qing foreign relations and much else besides, this work lay behind much early Western scholarship on the subject. There is a very helpful index by David Nelson Rowe (see below). The collection is available online on the Erudition database.

Qingji waijiao shiliao 清季外交史料. 5 vols. Beiping, 1932–35. W 50.2.7

This set of documents picks up where CBYWSM leaves off, spanning the period from 1875 to 1911. There are 218 juan for the Guangxu period (1875–1908) and 24 juan for the Xuantong period (1908–1911). The series up to 1904 was compiled by Wang Daofu, a member of the Secretariat of the Grand Council. He drew chiefly on this council's official records, but also on materials from the Zongli Yamen. His son continued the compilation work until 1911. Valuable appendices with treaties and maps. There is also an index for this collection.

Jindai Zhongguo dui xifang ji lieqiang renshi ziliao huibian 近代中國對西方及列强認識資料彙編. Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica. 1972-1995. 20 vols.

Valuable collection of materials covering the period between 1821 and 1911 touching on the management of affairs involving Western countries and Japan. Sourced primarily from previously published sources such as the Jingshi wenbian xubian. Online and searchable.

 

During the initial phase of sorting through the Qing archives, the Palace Museum made available quite a large number of archives pertinent to foreign relations:

Qingji geguo zhaohui mulu 清季各國照會目錄. Beiping, 1935–1936. 

This index, in 4 ce, lists appoximately 3800 communications received from countries in Western Europe, the U.S.A., and countries of South America, dating from 1839 on. The communications are arranged chronologically under the headings of the respective countries.

Qing Guangxuchao Zhong-Ri jiaoshe shiliao 清光緒朝中日交涉史料. Palace Museum, 1932. 88 juan. 

This collection, compiled by the Palace Museum from the Foreign Affairs Bureau and Zongli Yamen archives, is of very high quality. There is also a Palace Museum publication under the same title for Xuantong. An abridged edition of these 88 juan appears in the first part of Zhong Ri zhanzheng, edited by Shao Xunzheng et al. (Shanghai, 1956).

Gugong Ewen shiliao 故宮俄文史料. Comp. Liu Zerong, with Chinese translation by Wang Zhixiang. Beiping, 1936. 

This collection contains 22 Russian documents in Chinese, dating from Kangxi and Qianlong periods, 1662-1722 and 1736-1795. An index gives the number, date, and content of each document.

 

A large portion of the Qing Foreign Affairs Archives were brought to Taiwan by the Nationalist government in 1949. Of these, many are now held in the collection of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica. These are catalogued in Waijiao dang’an mulu huibian 外交檔案目錄彙編, 2 vols. (Taipei, 1991). A large number of documents have been published in different topic-specific collections:

Haifang dang 海防檔. 9 vols. Taipei: Academia Sinica, Institute of Modern History, 1957. 

From the “green archives” (qing dang) of the Zongli Yamen and Waiwubu, 1860 1911. This collection contains materials on the purchase of ships and guns, the Fuzhou shipyard, arsenals, telegraphs, and railways for the period 1860-1911. There is a separate index done by Kuo T'ing-i.

Zhong-Fa Yuenan jiaoshe dang 中法越南交涉檔. 7 vols. Taipei: Academia Sinica, I.M.H., 1962.

135 han in seven volumes on Sino-Franch negotiations over Vietnam from 1875 to 1900.

Zhong-E guanxi shiliao 中俄關係史料. 9 vols. Taipei: Academia Sinica, I.M.H., 1959-62.

These documents are largely a product of the Foreign Affairs Bureau. Vol. 1 contains documents concerning Outer Mongolia. Vols. 2-3 concern negotiations on the Sino-Russian war; vols. 4-5 are on the Northeastern territories/border affairs; vols. 6-7 concern railroads; vol. 8 is on Xinjiang territories/border affairs; vol. 9 concerns the dispatch of troops to Siberia. Illustrations and maps are included.

Siguo xindang 四國新檔. 4 vols. Taipei: Academia Sinica, Institute of Modern History, 1966.

Supplementary materials on relations with England, France, Russia, and the United States.

Zhong-Mei guanxi shiliao 中美關係史料. 3 vols. Taipei: Academia Sinica, I.M.H., 1968. 

Documents dealing with Sino-American relations in three large, well-indexed, fully punctuated volumes through the Tongzhi reign. Vol. 1: Jiaqing, Daoguang, Xianfeng reigns, 1805-1874; Vol. II: Tongzhi reign, part 1, 1862-1867, 492 pp.; Vol. III: Tongzhi reign, part 2, 1868-1874, pp. 492-1202. Documents in vols. 2-3 are chiefly from the Zongli Yamen archives.

 

In addition, numerous documentary collections on foreign affairs have been published on the mainland:

Yapian zhanzheng 鴉片戰爭. 6 vols. Qi Sihe, ed. Shanghai, 1954.

This is one of eight series of documentary volumes published in the 1950s on modern Chinese history under the collective title Zhongguo jindaishi ziliao congkan. All are exhaustively reviewed by John King Fairbank and Mary Wright, “Documentary Collections on Modern Chinese History,” Journal of Asian Studies 17.1 (Nov 1957), pp. 55-11. There is also an index, Zhongguo jindaishi ziliao congkan suoyin (1983).

 

Also be aware of some collected works that include Chinese foreign affairs published in other countries:

Yŏnhaengnok chŏnjip 燕行錄全集, 100 vols. Im Kijung, ed. Seoul: Tongguk taehakkyo, 2001；

Yŏnhaengnok sokchip 燕行錄續集, 50 vols. Im Kijung, ed. Seoul: Sangsŏwŏn, 2008.

These collections include various writings of Korean ambassadors who traveled to China between 1200 and 1800. People in the Qing dynasty referred to Korean ambassadors as yanxing 燕行, and those ambassadors who traveled to China during the Ming period were called chaotian 朝天. For this reason, collected works of Korean ambassadors, mostly travel journals and poems, were collectively known as Yanxing lü or Chaotian Lü. Writings of Korean ambassadors provide rich information for historians to understand both the Chinese and Korean politics, culture, and society.

 

There are also collections of individual letters and papers (the modern equivalent of wenji) of Chinese (and non-Chinese) diplomats, which can be quite valuable, e.g.:

Last Chance in Manchuria: The Diary of Chang Kia-ngau. Chang Kia-ngau Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1989.

Chang, formerly head of the Central Bank, was chairman of the Northeast China Economic Commission, 1945-1947. His diaries contain much information on the economic situation in Manchuria at the end of World War II and Chinese-Soviet negotiations for the return of Manchuria to Chinese control.

The I.G. in Peking: Letters of Robert Hart, Chinese Maritime Customs, 1868–1907. Hart, Robert (1835-1911). John K. Fairbank et al., eds. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (1975).

Robert Hart served in the administration of China's customs for 45 years, and he bore the sole responsibility for the Chinese Maritime Customs as the Inspector General. In the meantime he was also a diplomat who settled the Sino-French war, changed Macao's status, got boundaries delimited with Burma and India, and mitigated the disasters of imperialism. His personal letters, henceforth, provide great information regarding that time period.   

Non-Chinese diplomatic archives

Insofar as material pertaining to the study of modern China is concerned, only the British Public Record Office (PRO) is a truly centralized repository (see Wilkinson 67.16). The Library of Congress has in its keeping most, but not all, the papers of presidents, secretaries of state, and ambassadors. The State Department and other U.S. government departments maintain their own archives. Most of the French ministries maintain their own repositories. The Deutsches Zentralarchiv in Potsdam has the guardianship of archives relating to China. Some of the material from the German foreign ministries of Japan, Belgium, Holland, and Italy have their own archives, with materials relevant to China. Some of the China holdings of these foreign ministry archives have been partly catalogued (e.g., Japan). All diplomatic archives have a period of “closure” to the researcher, which goes from 30 years (PRO, Japan) to 50 years. Until recently, the Vatican Archives had a closure period of 100 years, now reduced to 50 in some cases.

The PRO archives are the best organized and an incomparable mine of information for the student of modern China. They contain the files of the British Foreign Office, one of the best sources for many aspects of the financial history of China, including the Maritime Customs. The PRO archives have been used by many scholars to research various aspects of Sino-British relations. However, as observed by David Pong in 1975, “not too long ago, manuscripts concerning China deposited at the Public Record Office in London were used mainly for analyzing British relations with or policy and attitude towards the Chinese. The result of this lopsided interest quite regrettably led to the neglect of the PRO's rich archives in the Chinese language.”

An online index of the Foreign Office records is available. According to Wilkinson, the most useful papers are found in Foreign Office classes FO17 (China general Political correspondence, 1815-1905), FO 228 (China general consular correspondence, 1834-) and FO682, which has 20,000 documents in Chinese from the archives of the Chinese Secretary’s Office in the British Legation.

On the PRO archives, see the following works:

Useful selections of materials from the PRO are the following:

These files are the central archive of documentation created by the Foreign Office. They consist mostly of letters and telegrams between the Foreign Office (FO) and diplomatic posts. In addition, there are large numbers of documents created by the BFO such as minutes of meetings, reports, and correspondence with other government ministries and foreign embassies in London. The files also contain cabinet papers and parliamentary debates dealing with foreign policy.

The Japanese sources are also helpful to consult: 

Nihon gaikō monjo 大日本外交文書 Gaimushō Chōsabu hensan eds. Tokyo: Nihon Kokusai Kyōkai, 1936 . 

The Japanese equivalent of the PRO archives. Coverage is now up through the 1930s.

Checklist of Archives in the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1868–1945. Cecil H. Uyehara. Washington: Photoduplication Service, Library of Congress, 1954.

This contains a variety of archival checklists of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as multiple telegrams and documents of the MATSUMOTO. 

Catalogues and Indexes

Index to Ch'ing Tai Ch'ou Pan I Wu Shih Mo. David Nelson Rowe.Hamden, CT: Shoe String Press, 1960.

Index includes geographical features, insignia of rank or identification, institutions and organizations, items of exchange, official titles, personal names, religious titles and terms, ships and hulks, tax categories, tribal names, and weapons and fortifications. Entries arranged in alphabetical order by Wade Giles transliteration. There is also a stroke order index in the back. Under each reign period items are listed by book or juan number, page number obverse (a) or reverse (b), and line or column number.

Qingji waijiao shiliao suoyin 清季外交史料索引 12 Vols. Wang Liang eds. Beijing: Waijiao Shiliao Bianzuan Chu (1935) 

Covers documents in Qingji waijiao shiliao and the Xixun dashi ji Journal of the Western Inspection Trip. Entries are arranged mainly according to the country concerned and then according to topics, without cross reference. Main sections are relations with England, the U.S., Japan including the Sino Japanese War, France including the Sino French War, Russia, Germany, Italy, and other European countries, Siam, Korea, Latin American countries, international negotiations, domestic administration. For China categories include reform, missionaries, education, finance, railways, industry, and the Boxer Rebellion. An important appendix listing treaties from the Guangxu and Xuantong reigns is found in ce 12.

Qingji Zhong Ri Han guanxi ziliao sanshi zhong zonghe fenlei mulu 清季中日韓關係資料三十種綜合分類目錄 2vol. Li Yushu, comp. San Francisco: CMC, 1977. 2 vols.

This guide, compiled at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, is organized by subject under seven general categories: Sino Japanese relations prior to the Sino Japanese War (1894 95); Sino Korean relations prior to the Sino Japanese War; Korean foreign relations prior to the Sino Japanese War; the Sino Japanese War; Sino Japanese relations after the war; Sino Korean relations after the war; and the Russo Japanese War and the Manchurian crisis. Each entry includes a brief description of the contents of a particular document, the author, the Chinese and Western dates, and the source. This guide lists documents from thirty related collections, a list of which appears in each volume. The table of contents lists the seven categories and 400 subcategories and topics into which the guide is divided.

History of U.S. China Relations: A Bibliographical Research Guide. Wang Chi. Washington: Academic Press of America, 1990.

Part I is an introductory issue highlighting developments in U.S. China relations over several historical periods. Part II is a bibliography of periodical articles and monographs. Author index. Limited search in HathiTrust.

A Documentary Chronicle of Sino-Western Relations, 1644-1820. Lo-shu Fu. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1966.

Documents translated from Chinese, serve as a useful chronology of Sino-Western relations.

Customs publications

In progress. The best introduction to the varied tasks and resulting publications of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service, latterly the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, is to be found on the website of the Chinese Maritime Customs Project, a collaborative venture between the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge and the Second Historical Archives of China in Nanjing. Particularly useful are the bibliographies of official Customs publications.

Bibliography

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