This dissertation bridges the gap of modern Chinese history divided by the Taiping wars. The first three chapters cover the consolidation of commercial taxes and charitable organizations by the central state, which culminated in the reinvention of the lijin merchant funds for public finance in the 1850s. The middle chapter on upper-gentry activism during the Taiping wars details how elites altered national policies in diplomacy as well as military deployment. From Shanghai, upper-gentry elites persuaded the central state to request foreign powers to intervene in the Chinese civil war. Elites also lured the Hunan army commanded by Li Hongzhang to Shanghai with lijin revenue. The final two chapters document how upper-gentry elites drew from both recent experiences and long-established practices to achieve the gentrification of lijin by perpetuating war-time contingencies for the long-term successes of their families. By formalizing lijin as a replacement of land tax in the post-war reconstruction period, upper-gentry elites shifted the fiscal burden from landowners to everyday consumers.At the core of this dissertation is a prosopography on a group of upper-gentry elites associated with Suzhou. Having earned the official status with exam degrees and/or office purchase, their experience as refugees in Shanghai during the Taiping wars enabled new plans for the future: some left officialdom and became indulged in collecting art; some continued to work for the public sector and benefited from social networks forged during the war; some built new business empires and expanded them to charitable organizations; some got lost in the economic downturn after the war and had to live on borrowing. By joining individual experiences with long-term structural changes, this study revises prevalent conclusions on post-Taiping China as either in devolution or restoration. Challenges from the Taiping rebels and foreign imperialists in the new era were simultaneously opportunities for the elites and the state to bound more firmly. This trusting and interdependent relationship between the emperor and his ministers in and out of office, I argue, is the crucial condition to understand Qing history, which also hints why everything seemed different in the twentieth century.

This dissertation documents the evolution of geography as a scholarly field from the high point of the Qing dynasty to its last decades, and its enduring impacts on China and the world. Specifically, I examine how a paradigm shift in geographical scholarship contributed

to the Qing’s reconquest of Xinjiang in the British-Russian Great Game and the establishment of the Xinjiang province in the 1870s and 1880s. My research reveals that in the wake of the sweeping socio-political transition at the turn of the eighteenth century, a policy-oriented geographical scholarship that connected the knowledge of archaic toponyms with that of present terrains and subjects took form. The fiscal and geopolitical lenses provided by the new scholarship shaped the ways the imperial state overhauled the Xinjiang society in the 1870s and 1880s.

This dissertation is composed of five chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 investigate the burgeoning of geographical literature on Xinjiang from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century in conjunction with the expansion of resident bureaucrats and exiles’ efforts to make Xinjiang fiscally legible. Military governors and exiles were the pillars of the Qing administration. The two chapters respectively examine travel writings and gazetteers produced by the two groups and the transmission of these texts, which provided Chinese scholars with a fiscal perspective into the once-mystical “Western Regions.”

Chapters 3 and 4 discuss how the changing domestic and international environment urged the Qing to reevaluate Xinjiang’s fiscal and geopolitical value, thereby providing geographical scholars in official and non-official capacities with the means to participate in national politics. Their studies of fresh water and other natural resources aimed to persuade statesmen that Xinjiang was a fertile borderland with enormous revenue potential: with proper management, the revenues generated by agricultural colonies were bound to meet control costs. The studies of Russia and Britain in the post-Opium War era urged policy makers to reassess the strategic importance of Xinjiang in the international order.

Chapter 5 looks at how geographical knowledge played a critical role in the grand policy debate on the fate of Xinjiang in 1874 and the Qing’s negotiation with Russia on the return of the Ili region in 1880-1881. Through two cases, I demonstrate how scholarship was translated into policies, thereby influencing the empire’s grand strategy in Inner Asia.

This dissertation examines the epistemic breakthroughs and complexities in the study of “things” (wu) in mid-Qing evidential learning, a prevailing intellectual movement in China circa 1750-1850 which sought for truth from solid facts. By focusing on the multifaceted natural and ritual objects in the Book of Odes (Shi), this work offers a new understanding of mid-Qing intellectual history from the perspective of historical epistemology. Overall, I argue for a parallel development and contending authority between the textual and material aspects of evidential learning, which, in giving rise to an emerging inwardness of wu, collectively shifted the focus of epistemic inquiry from the referential surface of cosmological “coherence” (li) to the well-ordered “textures” (li) of specific wu.
Tracing back to the earlier cosmological tradition, this dissertation first demonstrates how the name and the object, text-derived features and natural traits had already merged into hermeneutical loops in the Song dynasty. These complicated wu were then incorporated into broader epistemic networks in the late Ming, creating an extensive referential surface which frequently left competing theses unresolved. I then elaborate how these unresolved problems were overcome through newly developed philological techniques such as ancient phonology, general pattern, and paleography, as well as intensified observations, frontier evidence, and technocratic inclination on the material side. Given the comparability of the newly revealed philological and material textures, the mid-Qing intellectual movement can be better categorized as a collective inquiry for the refined textures of specific wu.
Nevertheless, due to varied epistemological takes and methodological preferences, these breakthroughs guaranteed no convergence in knowledge making. This dissertation then examines the fickle and frequently irreconcilable working premises behind bifurcating philological theses, as well as the contending evidential authorities between textual and material aspects of a holistic wu. Such complexities suggest both an internal explanation for the trivialization of philological learning and an indigenous propensity for disciplinary division in the nineteenth century. The specified yet holistic inquiry of wu, rigorous in the epistemic construction of “facts” while loose in the epistemological attaining of “truth,” displays an important epistemic mode between the fade of Neo-Confucian cosmology and the advent of disciplinary science.