"A Vietnamese King’s Homage to the Qianlong Emperor in 1790: Pictorial Documentation, Ritual Implication, and Sartorial Culture"

Fudan University's Ge Zhaoguang will speak at Harvard University.

This lecture will be in Chinese, with English summary provided.

The Qianlong emperor celebrated his eightieth birthday in 1790. Vietnam, Korea, Ryukyu Islands, Burma, and Mongol sent their delegates to the imperial summer resort at Chengde to pay their homage. Curiously, the Vietnamese king who had just defeated the Qing army offered to appear in Qing costume and kowtow to the Qing emperor. The unusual act pleased the Qianlong emperor and infuriated the Korean and Ryukyu delegates. What did the costume and ceremonial manner mean in the context of the East Asia political and cultural order? Why did the British embassy to China led by Lord Macartney three years later cause friction with regards to the sartorial and ceremonial manners? Professor Ge’s lecture will address these questions.

Ge Zhaoguang is professor of history and the director of the National Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, Fudan University, Shanghai. He has published numerous books on Chinese intellectual history, Daoism, and Chan Buddhism. His most recent book, I Have Thus Possessed the Middle Kingdom: Reconstructing "China" in Historical Perspective (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2011), addresses the key questions of what is "China" in view of cultural identity and political and geographic mapping, and how China was viewed by its neighboring countries and cultures.