Controlling from Afar

Reviewed by: Controlling from Afar: The Daoguang Emperor’s Management of the Grand Canal Crisis, 1924–1926* Mark Elvin (bio) Controlling from Afar: The Daoguang Emperor’s Management of the Grand Canal Crisis, 1924–1926. By Jane Kate Leonard. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1996. Pp. xxv+331; illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $50.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper). In 1826, four hundred years after the Ming dynasty had rehabilitated the Grand Canal and ceased shipping supplies of southern grain north by sea transport, approximately from Shanghai to Tianjin, a crisis in the functioning of the canal prompted Emperor Daoguang of the Qing dynasty to send a proportion of grain once again by sea, using private shipping. Jane Leonard’s excellent monograph puts this episode into historical context, both bureaucratic and environmental. The introductory chapter of Controlling From Afar surveys the development of the Yuan-Ming canal, which ran across the south-course Yellow River north of Huaian, then over the western spurs of the Shandong hills. The second chapter pinpoints how the perspective of the Qing emperors on the canal was different from that of their predecessors: they saw it as a key to the logistical support of a capital at the hinge of the Chinese and non-Chinese parts of their extended empire. The third chapter summarizes canal administration, and the canal’s “growing ecological degradation.” The fourth focuses on the crisis caused in 1824 by the collapse of the Gaojia dike [End Page 664] that contained the Hongze Lake, whose manipulation was critical in getting the grain-transport ships across the Yellow River without an influx of river water containing a heavy load of sediment impairing the canal. The fifth and sixth chapters tell how officialdom scrambled through grain delivery for 1825 by the expensive use of transshipment into vessels with a shallower draught than that of the standard ships. The seventh describes the emperor’s dissatisfaction with his regional officials and how his personal initiative was needed to effect the temporary recourse to sea transport. The point should have been made here that the technical development of shipbuilding since around 1600 had made the journey between the lower Yangzi valley and southern Manchuria much safer than in early Ming times. The eighth chapter shows how corruption in the local bureaucracy inhibited reconstruction of the fiscal system supporting the grain transport. The final chapter tells how sea transport was a success, in part because of the generous terms afforded the merchants whose skills and assets made it technically feasible. A study of this sort requires real mastery of Qing administrative documents. Leonard has this in abundance and writes in the tradition pioneered by Tom Metzger, stressing the adaptability of the Chinese administration even in the early nineteenth century. Regrettably, she lacks full familiarity with the Japanese secondary literature. Knowledge of a work such as Tani Mitsutaka’s Mindai Kakô-shi kenkyû (Studies in the history of hydraulic works on the Yellow River during the Ming Dynasty) would have spared her misjudgments—for example, on the overrated hydraulic engineer Pan Jixun. Pan and the more conventional Yang Yikui, who had to try to clean up the mess Pan had made, faced problems that had many similarities (and one or two key differences) with those of the 1820s. A comparative discussion would have been illuminating. Leonard also omits the paleohydrological literature in journals such as Shuili xuebao (Journal of water control), Dili xuebao (Geographic journal), and others. Using this could put hard figures under such phenomena as the rise in the level of the bed of the Ming-Qing south-course Yellow River. She likewise bypasses the Zhongguo shuili-shi gao (Draft history of water control in China) produced by the Academy of Hydraulic and Hydroelectric Sciences. This reconstructs how various systems worked, including that at Nanwang, which stored, allocated, and diverted water at the summit of the canal’s crossing of the Shandong hills. Leonard also thinks there was a six-hundred-year cycle in the alternation of the Yellow River between a north and a south course. Even a glance at an appropriate historical map should have convinced her that there is

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