Imperial Rulership and Cultural Change in Traditional China.

• Author: Holcombe, Charles

This handsome conference volume presents ten articles, culled from twenty-three originally read at a 1992 conference sponsored by National Taiwan University. To these, the editors have added an introduction and a final chapter of "Reflections." The essays range across the entire imperial era of Chinese history, from the third century B.C. to the start of the twentieth century, and represent the disciplines of history, literature, philosophy, and religion.

In reviews of conference volumes it is fairly conventional to express some dismay at the unevenness of the contributions. Here, however, the problem is not one of uneven quality, but rather the simple impossibility of writing a single comprehensive review that does justice to the entire book. Each article really needs to be discussed separately - demanding not one review, but ten. Since that is impossible, I will merely comment here on how some of these articles contribute to what I take to be the main theme of the volume: the influence of the imperial monarchy on the development of Chinese high culture.

In its ideal form, imperial government in China was envisioned as consisting of a sage-king presiding benevolently over a hierarchically ordered and harmonious universal state. As this volume makes clear (see the chapter by Brandauer), even critics and rebels in traditional China commonly shared this ideal, and objected only that individual monarchs - or their advisors - were not living up to the terms of their mandate. From a critical external perspective, therefore, Chinese intellectuals might even thus appear to have been co-conspirators in imperial autocracy. If Confucian morality is assumed to be nothing more than a disguise for the harsh reality of imperial despotism, we might feel compelled to join W. J. F. Jenner in denouncing China's long history of "tyranny."(1)

Against this despotic image of absolute imperial power, however, might be set Ray Huang's rather pathetic portrait of one late Ming emperor as "less the Ruler of All Men than a prisoner of the Forbidden City."(2) The various authors represented in this volume all seem to agree that there was often a large gap between the image and the reality of absolute imperial power.

No Chinese emperor exemplifies the image of imperial despotism better than the first one, Ch'in Shih-huang. In an essay here by Stephen Durrant, the principal historical source for the study of the First Emperor, Ssu-ma Ch'ien's (145-85? B.C.) Shih-chi, is...