Learning to Rule

It has been a while since we've had a court-centric study of the late Qing. This book, a revised version of the author's dissertation at Princeton, examines the education of the dynasty's last three emperors. These three emperors—Tongzhi, Guangxu, and Xuantong—all ascended to the throne before the age of six. The author asks, “What were the texts, who were the teachers, and what were the lessons that were important for the young emperors to learn?” (169). Three different political and social groups offered three contending answers. One “fought to preserve the Manchu core” of the dynastic tradition (the Manchu language, horsemanship, and archery), another “argued for the primacy of Confucian texts,” and the third advocated “the knowledge and practices of the Western world” (35).Because of their young age, all three of the emperors required a regency. In the case of the first two, the regent was, of course, Cixi. It was she who mediated among the different groups, as they contested with one another for influence over the emperor's curriculum. In 1891, for example, two graduates of the Tongwenguan were appointed to teach the Guangxu emperor English, to the horror of the Confucian scholar-officials; they turned to Cixi, who in 1894 dismissed the two tutors and put an end to the emperor's English lessons. The Hundred Days of Reform four years later brought about a very similar outcome. Soon thereafter, Cixi ceased to rule from behind the curtain and began to present herself as a female ruler modeled on Queen Victoria. It was Cixi, too, who during the post–Boxer New Policies spearheaded the “effort to remake the Qing state into a constitutional monarchy and emperor-led national community” and to transform “the autocratic son of heaven into [a] symbol of the people and nation” (165). This book, thus, is as much a study of the rulership of the empress dowager Cixi as it is of the emperors' education. It concludes “that the post-Taiping era was not simply a time of dynastic decline but also of dynastic reinvention” (17).One of the interesting findings in the book was “the continued importance of Manchu language and identity to court education” (12). During the early years of the reign of the Tongzhi emperor, “Confucian ideals certainly played a large part in [his] education, but a closer look at the texts of his curriculum demonstrate that Manchu materials and ideals in fact occupied a central space” (38), so much so that “the Chinese teachers were unnerved by the ways in which the Manchus dominated [his] education” (39). In the succeeding Guangxu reign, “The court . . . promised that the restoration project would include reinvigorating the martial and linguistic skills of the Qing founders” (61); thus, it mandated that the new emperor's days should “start with lessons in archery, Manchu and Mongolian” (58). In the case of these two emperors, their language lessons were sufficiently successful that “at audiences with foreign envoys . . . both Tongzhi and Guangxu spoke Manchu” (69)! And in 1885, when the Guangxu emperor “made the transition from a wooden to [a] live horse in his martial training,” his teachers “beamed with pride that the young boy was beginning to look like a Manchu monarch” (171).In many ways, however, this book is less about the emperors' education and more about debates over what the emperor should study and who should teach him. This was particularly the case beginning with the Self-Strengthening Movement in the 1870s and 1880s, when “an enlivened domestic press joined in arguing over the primacy of different subjects in the emperor's curriculum” (58). Shenbao, for example, published several articles in 1876 proposing that he be taught English. Yet later, in the late 1890s and 1900s, a number of scholars and would-be officials recommended that the emperor should go abroad to study, as Peter the Great had done. According to Kang Youwei, the Russian ruler had “traveled throughout the world, and was not ashamed to learn from others” (97). The chapter on the education of Puyi, the Xuantong emperor, is almost entirely about debates rather than actual pedagogy, as his lessons had barely begun before the dynasty was overthrown.The book, blessedly jargon free, is based on a wide range of Chinese- and English-language sources. They include “the diaries of Qing officials, archival materials related to the staffing of classrooms, public pronouncements from the court such as edicts, as well as newspapers and journals in both the Chinese and international press” (22).This scholarly monograph is not without flaws. The major one, it seems to me, is the extended discussion of Cixi's proposal in the post-Boxer years to establish a school for female nobles. Because the school would have included “both Manchu and Chinese women,” Barish writes, “this new group signaled a breakdown of the original Qing model of rule that differentiated between the hereditary Manchu military caste and Chinese civilian populations” (122). The school, however, was never established; and even if it had been, it would have been quite tangential to the idea of “court education.” Another flaw, as evidenced in the above quote, is the conflation of “Han” and “Chinese.” Finally, Cixi (ca. 1904) hired an American woman to tutor her in English. Inquiring minds would like to know: who was this woman, and how long did Cixi continue her English studies

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