Guy R. Kent (ed.) Qing governors and their provinces: the evolution of territorial administration in China, 1644-1796

Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2013. — xii, 462 p. (A China program book) — ISBN: 9780295992952.This book uses the records of provincial governors’ appointments made under four emperors — the Shunzhi emperor (r. 1644–61), the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661– 1723), the Yongzheng emperor (r. 1723–36), and the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736– 96)—to examine the evolution of provincial government in late imperial China. Each of these emperors had his own approach to provincial appointments; indeed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the differences among them were probably more apparent than the similarities. The Shunzhi emperor was concerned with finding people who were at least moderately loyal to the new dynasty to fill positions originally established by the Ming. The Kangxi emperor, the first ruler to confront the diversity of the Qing empire, built a system to contain it. The Yongzheng emperor sought governors with energy and vision equal to his own and endeavored, through their appointment, to infuse provincial bureaucracy with new vigor and probity. The Qianlong emperor built a multiethnic corps of governors who functioned within an increasingly standardized and regulated administrative world. At the beginning of their reigns, the Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors even announced by edict their different preferences for provincial governor. But together, the three monarchs built one of the central pillars of Qing rule, the structure of provincial administration.