An Imperial Nomad and the Great Game: Thomas Francis Wade in

China

James L. Hevia

Late Imperial China, Volume 16, Number 2, December 1995, pp. 1-22 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/late.1995.0003

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 AN IMPERIAL NOMAD AND THE GREAT GAME:
THOMAS FRANCIS WADE IN CHINA*

James L. Hevia

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Great Britain was engaged
in strategic warfare on the Asian land mass. This was not a shooting war,
but a cold war, a war of position designed to check or contain imperial Russia
and protect British interests that stretched from the Caucasus, around the
southern edges of Eurasia, to the eastern provinces of China. In the "Far
East" theater of operations, the worst case scenario for British strategists
would be the collapse and partition of the Qing empire, with the Russians
the only conceivable beneficiary in such a catastrophe.1
More than a struggle of muscle or military technology, this sort of lim-
ited warfare was a contest of wits, what Arthur Conolly dubbed the Great
Game,2 later immortalized by Rudyard Kipling in Kim.3 Played out in that
vast expanse of territory stretching in an arc from the Amur River region of
Manchuria to Afghanistan in the southwest, the Great Game required a "vigi-
lant and scrutinizing eye" 4 capable of gathering in and evaluating information
*I wish to thank Judith Farquhar, Tani Barlow, John Henderson, Lionel Jensen, and this
journal's reviewers for many helpful suggestions. Portions of this article were presented at
the American Historical Association's annual meeting in San Francisco, California, January
1994.
1TlIe literature on Russian-British rivalry in Central Asia is extensive. The classic artic-
ulations of the British position can be found in Rawlinson 1875 and Boulger 1879 and 1885.
For what might be termed the official history of this rivalry, see the appropriate sections
in Ward and Gooch 1923, vols. 2 and 3. On Russian concerns, see the various references to
Anglo-Russian rivalry in Fletcher 1978. In the portion of T. F. Wade's correspondence to
the Foreign Office used throughout this paper, he mentioned the danger of partition; see
Public Record Office, Foreign Office Archives, 17/748:397 (cited hereafter as FO).
2Cited in Edwardes 1975:vii. See also Cheng 1957; Davidson-Houston 1960; Lamb 1960;
and Morgan 1981. Hopkirk (1992) provides the most recent and comprehensive account.
3Although Kim was not published until 1901, Kipling demonstrated a precocious concern
over a Russian threat to the British empire as early as age sixteen (1878). At United
Services College, he proposed as a topic for debate, "That in the opinion of this Society,
the advance of the Russians in central Asia is hostile to British Power." Cited in Wilson
1977:43.
4The phrase is from Rawlinson (1875:203). In addition to writing extensively on Cen-
Late Imperial China Vol. 16, No. 2 (December 1995): 1-22
1
2 James L. Hevia

in order to plot British moves and counter-moves. Organized into a Utopian

project: the game was imagined as a means to insure that British domina-
tion in Asia would be maintained not simply through control of territory or
access to technological instruments, but "through comprehensive knowledge
of peoples" (Richards 1993:28). Knowledge, in turn, was produced by field
agents who carried out the surveillance of native populations and terrains,
and mapped unknown territories.5
It also involved more mundane operations such as the routines of the Asian
branches of the Royal Society, and as represented by commercial accounting
and census taking.6 Once gathered, the information was then transmitted,
sometimes in published form, from the periphery of the British empire to
trai Asia, Rawlinson served in the British colonial administration in India, translated
Herodotus, wrote on Assyrian and Persian history, and published translations of Assyr-
ian inscriptions. He also served for a time as president of the Royal Geographic Society.
5On the relationship between surveillance and colonialism, see Spurr 1993:13-27. The
number of expeditions to gather information about "unknown" territories are too numerous
to go into here. Two, however, are worth mentioning. The first of these is an operation
launched by Thomas Montgomerie to map Tibet. It is of interest because of the way in
which Montgomerie deployed local knowledge to surreptitiously carry out the project; for
a discussion see Richards 1993:17-19.
The other case involves Thomas D. Forsyth, whose indirect link to Thomas Wade is
discussed below. In addition to his many duties as an official in British India, Forsyth led an
expedition into Yarkand in the early 1870s (see his 1875 and under Yarkand Mission, 1878-
1891 in the bibliography). He also wrote the introduction to another kind of information
gathering, the translation of Russian sources on Central Asia into English. See Prejevalsky
1879, which describes a Russian expedition across Central Asia into Chinese Turkistan.
6The publications of the societies' branches, including ones in India and China, were
significant venues for the production and distribution of knowledge about Asia. The India
and China branches had their own journals, the content of which included local history,
philology, natural history, and travel accounts ofjourneys into new territories. In China, the
Branch was located in Shanghai. For an overview of the first quarter century of publications
of the Branch's journal see Cordier 1876:201-14. The North China Branch also had an
extensive library which was put together over the second half of the nineteenth century. It
contained Chinese language materials as well as the works on China then being produced
by Euro-Americans in China. For a catalogue of their holdings see the JNCBRAS 29 (1894)
and 30 (1895). Separate catalogues were published in 1909 and 1921.
By the 1840s, commercial dictionaries and statistical summaries of international trade
were combined in one publication. The dictionary of John R. McCulloch (1842), which was
updated regularly, can be taken as a standard (also see MacGregor 1850). McCulloch's
reference work is of particular interest because of the exhaustive information it supplies
on commodities and resources globally and how one goes about obtaining them. Robert
Hart apparently used McCulloch to demonstrate to the Zongli yamen the fiscal affairs of a
modern nation-state like Great Britain, see R. Smith et al., 1991:150.
British census taking in India is a striking example of the relationship between imperial
rule and information gathering. Moreover, insofar as such projects reworked Indian notions
of caste, the census also highlights the way in which imperial actions altered Indian realities.
For discussions see Cohn 1987 and Inden 1990.
An Imperial Nomad and the Great Game3

archival repositories at the imperial center: the Foreign Office, the British
Museum and Library, the Victoria L· Albert Museum, the Royal Geographic
Society, and the libraries of elite universities. It was at these sites that infor-
mation was retrieved for immediate processing, or catalogued and stored for
future use.7 As Thomas Richards has put it, in Victorian Britain the archive
was imagined as the interface between knowledge and the state (1993:14).
My concern here is not with the imperial center or the well-established
British colonial possessions in southern Eurasia, but with the ever-shifting,
heterogeneous frontiers, where relations of governance were less formal and
where the production, distribution, and consumption of information could
function as a means of indirect domination. These hybrid zones of activity
were peopled by nomads, highly mobile "creóles" of empire who operated
by means of local protocols and customs, consuming and repositioning local
knowledge as tactical assets in the Great Game.8
Thomas Francis Wade, British Minister to Qing China in the late nine-
teenth-century, inventor of a romanization system to better organize knowl-
edge about China, collector of a large Chinese language library that became
the basis of the Cambridge University collection, and prodigious reporter to
the Foreign Office, was an exemplary imperial nomad, an almost perfect fron-
tier agent.9 Wade never wrote memoirs, having dismissed the whole genre as
7The nineteenth century forms of cataloging information still exist in the archives of
many of these institutions and in the Public Record Office at Kew Gardens. For a discussion
of the form of cataloging at the Foreign Office see Ward and Gooch 1923, 3:590-91, who
also note that one way the archive was kept in order seems to have been to make the
position of librarian a family affair. Edward Herslet succeeded his father, while his uncle
was a sub-librarian.
8I have drawn liberally here for this framework from Richards 1993:16-27. He, in turn,
refers to Deleuze and Guattari (1986) for his development of the idea of state nomads,
see 1993:19-20, 23, 28. As an engagement with Richards' study, which relies primarily on
imaginative literature, I employ sources from the British Foreign Office and Cambridge
University records. The term imperial nomad is adopted to provide some sense of the
mobility of British agents in the African-Eurasian setting. I use the term creole not in its
usual sense, but to draw attention to the fact that identities were always an issue in the
colonial setting. It was not so much that Englishmen went native, but rather that they
could not help but be altered by their contact with the natives of the locales they wandered
through .
9Wade might be compared with other kinds of imperial nomads who inhabited the China
frontier. There were those, like Robert Fortune for example, who came to China to gather
commercial intelligence. In Fortune's case, the goal was to free Britain of dependence on
Chinese commodities such as tea by developing or improving production in India. See his
1847 and 1853. Others were consuls or minor diplomatic officials who occasionally became
engaged in intelligence gathering operations. Augustus Margary, who was killed on one
such expedition into Yunnan in 1875, is a good example (see Hsii 1960:176-77). A third
type was the missionary-cum-government official—that is, Christian missionaries who for
one reason or another found themselves in the service of the Qing government or their own
4 James L. Hevia

"vanity literature" (Cooley 1981:5, 136). He saved himself instead for the real
heroic work of nomadic laborer—filling the China portion of the British impe-
rial archive as part of the task of containing the Russians. At the same time,
Wade attempted to transform important members of the local aristocracy
into collaborators in the Great Game.
Before going on to discuss how these British objectives were put into play
on the China frontier, let me briefly explain my own position. Among my
opening comments were references to the burgeoning field of colonial stud-
ies, work that has only recently begun to have an impact in the field of
China studies. The reasons for this are complex, but have to do perhaps
with the generally held view that China was never a European colony in
the usual sense of that term. Recently, however, scholarship on colonialism
has redefined domination in such a way that modes of cultural practice, gen-
der construction, economic expansion, and knowledge production appear as
significant as direct political control or economic domination in defining colo-
nialism.10 Just as these re-workings challenge earlier views of colonization in
Africa and India, they also entice us to reconsider European imperialism in
other territories such as China. If one views British activities in China as an
aspect of the Great Game, it offers one possible route for re-thinking "semi-
colonialism," and at the same time de-stabilizing the soothing narratives of
Sino-Western contact, conflict, and cooperation that continue to tell stories
about reluctant or sentimental imperialists and benighted orientals.
As a way of reexamining the policies of the British government in China
in the second half of the nineteenth century, I would like to consider Thomas
Wade's activities at a particular historical moment in which the three inter-
related techniques of British Great Gamesmanship—information gathering,
containment, and the effort to produce useful collaborators—converged. The
moment in question concerns the negotiations between the foreign diplomatic
corps in Beijing and the Qing government over an imperial audience in 1873.

The Occasion
The Tianjin Treaty of 1860 established the right of European nations to
open diplomatic legations in Beijing. In recognition of this presence, the Qing
government, at the urging of Prince Gong, created the Zongli yamen, a unit
understood by the British to be something like a foreign office. The creation
of this new office of the Qing government realized only some of the diplomatic
government. This would include figures such as John Fryer, W. A. P. Martin, and S. Wells
Williams. On Fryer's and Martin's careers in China see Spence 1969:129-60.
10I think especially of the work of Ann Stoler 1989, Lata Mani 1985, Jean and John
Comaroff 1991, Gauri Viswanathan 1989, Robert Young 1990, and Timothy Mitchell 1988.
An Imperial Nomad and the Great Game5

desires of the British and other powers, however. Diplomats also wanted the
court to alter many of its procedures for dealing with foreign governments in
order to bring them in line with European diplomatic practices, which they
conceived of as international in scope, progressive, and thoroughly rational.
Among other things, diplomats demanded that they be able to deliver their
own credentials and communications from their sovereigns directly into the
hands of the Qing emperor at a court audience. From the ratification of
the Tianjin treaty in 1860 until 1872, they were unable to achieve this goal
because the reigning emperor, Tongzhi, was a child. In 1873 the emperor
reached his majority and begin to rule China. The diplomatic corps saw this
development as an excellent opportunity to resolve the audience question and,
perhaps more significantly, to introduce into China European-style audience
protocols (see Rockhill 1905:42-44 and Wang 1971). A key strategist in these
moves was Thomas Francis Wade.

Sightings
Who was T. F. Wade? As James Cooley, Wade's sole biographer, has
noted, answering this question is no easy task. Cooley characterized his
own efforts as a "thread job," the piecing together of Wade's life from "het-
erogeneous sources" (1981:5). In some ways, this is quite understandable.
In addition to his not having written memoirs, Wade's published works are
translations or involve Chinese language training. His other writings, the vo-
luminous record of his years in China, were not meant for the public, but for
the imperial archive. Indeed, in the case of the audience negotiations of 1873,
Wade urged the Foreign Office to maintain secrecy for fear that his reports
might get into the hands of Qing officials (FO 17/749:7-9, 125).
Nonetheless, Cooley's "thread job" makes interesting reading. Arriving
in China in 1842, Wade was an army lieutenant in Opium War mop-up op-
erations. While on sick leave in the new crown colony of Hong Kong, he was
recruited by Sir Henry Pottinger for the nascent China Consular Service. In
the male-dominated world of imperial nomadism, particularly its China coast
version, Pottinger became the first of a number of older men who would take
Wade under their nurturing wing.
His patrons seem to have guided Wade toward becoming a translator.
Sir John Francis Davis, Pottinger's replacement in Hong Kong, provided a
stipend for Wade to study Chinese intensively. Davis then forwarded him
to the new British plenipotentiary, George Bonham, in 1848. Wade and
Bonham became regular members of the Hong Kong Asia Society, an orga-
nization devoted to the study of Chinese morals and manners. At meetings
of the Society, Wade entertained fellow members with his skills at mimicry,
6 James L. ffevia

while announcing his expertise on China with a pamphlet entitled "On Con-
ditions and Government of the Chinese Empire." In it he argued against the
use of force and on behalf of more subtle methods of dealing with Chinese
authorities. Yet from 1850-55 his nomadic career languished. Transferred to
Shanghai in the mid-1850s, Wade became involved in the establishment of
the Foreign Inspectorate of Customs, and helped to train the future inspec-
tor of the Imperial Maritime Customs (IMC), Robert Hart.11 Stanley Wright
notes that during this period Wade seemed little interested in the customs
service itself, preferring instead to translate Imperial edicts and read Chinese
sources (1950:111). An entry in Robert Hart's journal appears to support
Wright's assessment—Wade expressed a desire to leave diplomacy and take
to philology, where, he said, he had "work cut out for the next twenty yearsl"
(Smith et al., 1991:317). But Wade had other ambitions as well. Lord Elgin
and the second Opium War catapulted him to greater things.
Serving on Elgin's staff, he helped to work out the details of the Tianjin
Treaty, sailed with Elgin up the Yangzi reconnoitering and gathering intel-
ligence, and was appointed secretary to the first British Minister in China,
Frederick Bruce, Elgin's brother. In the wake of the invasion of north China
in 1860, Wade appears to have helped choreograph the etiquette for the rat-
ification ceremonies of the Tianjin Treaty in Beijing.12 Pauthier adds the
tantalizing detail that during the looting of the Yuanming Gardens, Wade
selected a number of classic volumes to be shipped to one of the main depos-
itories of Great Britain's imperial archive, the British Museum.13 Perhaps
Wade also took this opportunity to begin putting his own archive together,
the collection that would become the core of the Cambridge Far Eastern Li-
brary. After serving as Secretary in the British legation for ten years, Wade
was elevated to Minister in 1871, remaining on duty until 1883. Five years
later he took a chair in Chinese studies at Cambridge, where he taught until
his death in 1895.14
11 The Customs Service placed a subject of the Queen of Great Britain and future Empress
of India at the head of an official department of the Qing government. As such, the IMC
might be understood as an institution having certain affinities with other indirect means
of control adopted by the British in more formal colonial settings. In addition to his duty
of insuring that the Qing government paid its indemnities to European powers, Hart, like
other imperial nomads in China, sought to teach China's leaders new lessons. See his
correspondence in Fairbank et al., 1975 and note 22.
12Cooley suggests this, 1981:38. Wade may also have been involved in the decision to
carry out the formal ratification of the treaty at the Board of Rites (Libu), just outside the
gates of the imperial palace complex in Beijing.
13See Pauthier 1861:366. I am indebted to Ann Chayet for bringing this article to my
attention.
14This biography is taken primarily from Cooley, 1981, though it should be clear that I
see Wade as something other than a "pioneer in global diplomacy."
An Imperial Nomad and the Great Game7

That is one kind of story that can be pieced together from fragmentary
sources. Other bits of evidence provide fascinating embellishments to this
tale. Consider, for example, the only two pieces of Wade's correspondence in
the Cambridge University Library—letters to Wade, that is, not from him.
Lord Mayo,15 writing from Calcutta in 1871, wondered if the availability of
jade had fallen off in China due to the loss of Yarkand, or Chinese Turkestan,
to Muslim rebels led by Yakub Beg. Six months later he told Wade that
Thomas Forsyth, another imperial nomad out gathering intelligence, had seen
Western Jade mines on his way to Yarkand the previous year. Mayo was
anxious to open trade, but first wanted specimens of Chinese jade sent to
him with annotations of their value in the Chinese market so that he could
"tell whether it is worth while to make any efforts in that direction."16 This is
Great Game intrigue at its best, seeking advantages on the edges of empires,
where Muslim adventurers like Yakub Beg created both chaos and commercial
and political opportunities. Perhaps that is why Wade kept these two brief
notes. Or perhaps it was because Lord Mayo was assassinated while visiting
the Andaman Islands in 1872.

Into the Library

As noted earlier, Wade's library forms the basis of the Cambridge Uni-
versity Chinese language collection. Yet, if it were not for Herbert Giles, we
would not know today precisely how Wade conceived of his library. For in
addition to modifying Wade's transliteration system for Chinese ideograms,
compiling a Chinese-English dictionary, and writing extensively on China,
Herbert Giles was also a conservator. He did not save Wade's library—by
1890 the books were already safely in Cambridge stacks to be overseen by
generations of dedicated bibliophiles—but rather the conceptual apparatus
that organized it, the means by which Wade processed Chinese information
for re-transmission to the imperial center. Three years after Wade's death,
Giles published A Catalogue of the Wade Collection of Chinese and Manchu
Books in the Library of the University of Cambridge (1898).
The library is made up of 883 works in 4304 volumes and bears the mark
of the things Wade thought most important. They included the tomes that
reflected China's unvarying tradition, the ancient and contemporary ritual
texts which supposedly confused diplomacy with decorum, and the histories,
accounts, and records of events going on beyond Wade's vision, out on the
frontier of this ancient imperial center.
15Richard Southwell Bourke, Lord Mayo, was Viceroy and Governor-general of India
from 1869 to 1872.
16See Cambridge Library MSS Additionals, 7490/44/180 and 7490 (E)/42/45.
8 James L. Hevia

Wade divided the library into eight main sections: 1) Classics and Phi-
losophy; 2) History, Biography, Statutes; 3) Geography, Travel; 4) Poetry,
Novels, Plays; 5) Dictionaries, Works of Reference; 6) Miscellaneous, includ-
ing a number of translations of Christian tracts into Chinese; 7) Religion,
Science; and 8) Works in Manchu and Mongol. Wade had all the major rit-
ual texts, the Liji, YiIi, and Zhouli, numerous commentaries on these and
other classic texts, especially the Erya, various editions of the Board of Rites
Precedents (Libu celi), and the Comprehensive Rites of the Great Qing (Da
Qing Tongli). There were also dictionaries—Chinese, Manchu, Mongol—and
literary concordances, organized by subject, rhyme, and radical; all the great
encyclopedias produced by dynasties; huidian and Da Qing huidian shili or
statutes and precedents of the Qing dynasty; the complete dynastic histories;
the descriptive catalogue of Four Treasures of the Library (Siku quanshu);
various commentaries on history; Qing court geographies and accounts of
Central Asia, including the Xinjiang shilue written by Songyun, the Qianlong
emperor's personal expert on Tibet, Turkestan, and Russians, and the same
"Tartar" official whom Lord Macartney had found very congenial in 1793
(Cranmer-Byng 1963:162-163); Manchu translations of the Chinese classics
and the Yiyu lu, a work on the kingdoms of Central Asia; biographies, memo-
rials, and writings of the Qing court elite; histories of Beijing; gazetteers from
the frontiers of the Qing empire; and even translations of western science and
mathematics, among which was a truly hybrid work, the Jihe yuanben, "the
elements of Euclid translated (Bks I-VI) into Chinese by Li Ma-tou (Matteo
Ricci) and Hsü Kuang-ch'i, the preface of the former being dated 1607, and
(Bks VII-XV) by Alexander Wylie, whose preface is dated 1857, edited by
Tseng Kuo-fan. 1865" (Giles 1898:135). 17
Pioneer, guide, collector—Wade was a superb agent. The position and
resources at his command might even generate envy among contemporary re-
searchers; and how often his model of knowledge production was duplicated!
Could any training program involved with the business of empire do without
what Giles termed "a comprehensive library admirably suited to the needs
of any ordinary student?" (1898:vii). Moreover, having seen the collection
in Cambridge, Xie Fucheng, Qing ambassador to Great Britain in the early
1890s, noted that it was not only "remarkable," but made up of many rare
items, even more valuable now because of the destruction of great reposito-
ries of books in the mid-nineteenth century by Taipings in the Yangzi river
valley,18 to say nothing of Royal engineers at the Yuanming Gardens.
17In subsequent years, various donors added additional sources to the Wade collection;
see Giles 1915 for these additions.
18See Chien 1993:77 and Giles 1898:vi-vii.
An Imperial Nomad and the Great Game9

Imperial Nomad as Pedagogue

When they contemplated the frontiers of empire, British imperial strate-
gists faced the problem of how to influence areas where direct rule was out of
the question. This was a fundamental consideration in how the British played
the Great Game. Operating from secure bases, agents circulated into frontier
regions where they gathered information, made agreements with leaders that
were understood to have the force of binding contracts, and sought pliable
local authorities. In China, the challenge to British agents was how to make
Qing officials do what the British wanted them to do, and, at the same time,
believe that their actions in support of treaties, which in many cases had been
imposed by force, were in their own best interests.19 Lord Elgin, the architect
of the Tianjin Treaty and the 1860 Anglo-French incursion into China, the
arsonist who burned the Summer Palace as "a solemn act of retribution" and
contemplated doing the same to the Forbidden City,20 warned that when the
shooting stopped the real work would begin in China (Cooley 1981:334). The
difficulty the British faced, according to Elgin, had to do with the painful
"position of a negotiator who has to treat with persons who yield nothing to
reason and everything to fear, and who are at the same time profoundly ig-
norant of the subjects under discussion and of their own real interests" (cited
in A. Smith 1901, 2:19).
From Wade's perspective, such ignorance was compounded by the fact
that Qing officials were obsessed with the shadow, rather than the substance
of power; with appearances instead of hard political realities; with ceremonial
form rather than the material manifestations of power.21 Such seemingly
wilful ignorance and misapprehension of reality prevented the Qing court
from addressing constructively China's political and military weaknesses.
The solution to this problem of ignorance and fear, at least according
to educated opinion in China and Great Britain, was to enlighten the Qing
19Except for the comment at the end of the sentence, which is mine, I draw here on
Pelcovits 1948:29-31. At the time they were put forward, his views of British imperialism
must have been controversial since they argued for a split between state and commercial
interests. The point perhaps is that by the middle of the nineteenth century, the British
government had become much more interested in order and predictability, than in forms
of penetration that might produce disorder either within their empire or on the frontiers.
Unregulated commercial capitalism was seen as one way of producing anarchy in a place
like China; see Blackwood's Magazine 1863, 93:44 and Pelcovits 1948:31.
20See Walrond 1872:366 and FO 17/362:120a-b.
21FO 17/748:8-9, 77, 134. The imputation that Chinese officials had difficulty distin-
guishing between the apparent and the real has a long history among Euro-American
observers of the China scene; see Hevia 1990 and 1992. For similar representations of
China in other areas of knowledge and practice, see Zito 1993 on late ninteenth-century
characterizations of Chinese Ii, or ritual.
10James L. Hevia

elite about the real conditions of the world. As early as 1863, the editor of
Blackwood's Magazine, under the headline "Progress in China," concluded
that not only was this necessary, but that through the offices of the Foreign
Inspectorate of Customs success was already discernible. As the editor put it,
the Inspectorate was "a most potent engine for introducing to the minds of
the Chinese governing classes Western ideas and practices, political and moral
as well as commercial; and a perfect guarantee against any more Chinese wars
with Europe" (1863, 93:59).22
Wade seems to have had similar ambitions for the British legation in Bei-
jing. Replacing gunboat pedagogy with the discipline of the classroom, the
legation functioned at times like a little red schoolhouse on the frontier. Young
British nomads learned the local language, forms of Qing imperial commu-
nication, and how to generate reports for the imperial archives in England.
Meanwhile, attentive Chinese officials were introduced to geography, world
affairs, and the reciprocal advantages to be gained from the free flow of in-
formation and commodities.
At the same time, however, the dynamics of the situation were more
complicated than simply a Chinese-British binary. In Beijing there were
French, Germans, Americans, and especially Russians, also engaged in var-
ious projects. Often impatient and alarmist about what he saw as Chinese
foot-dragging and complacency in the face of aggressive moves by other West-
ern powers,23 Wade attempted to teach the Qing court the proper lessons so
that he could not only help to stabilize British interests in China, but limit
Russian penetration of northeastern and Central Asia.24 A stronger China
was required, in other words, to check Russian advances in these geographic
areas. This was to be accomplished in part by creating an element within

22Under the leadership of Robert Hart, the Customs service launched its own pedagogical
projects to educate China's leaders. Among these were the establishment and support of a
language school, the Tongwen college in Beijing for training Chinese in English. A second
kind of project Hart supported was the translation of Western works into Chinese. Of
particular significance in this regard was W. A. P. Martin's translation of portions of Henry
Wheaton's Elements of International Law; see Covell 1978:146-50 and Hsii 1960:125-31.
23Hart complains often in his diary about Wade's alarmism, see R. Smith et al. 1991:174,
295, 303, 319.
24In 1866, for example, Wade wrote a memorandum to the British Minister at Beijing,
Rutherford Alcock. Translated into Chinese by the latter and with a Chinese preface added
by Wade, the "Brief Discussion of New Proposals" (Xinyi luelun) was sent to the Zongli
yamen. Among other things, Wade urged the Qing government to recognize the changing
international situation that now placed powers such as Russia, Great Britain and France on
the borders of the Qing empire. He suggested that China begin a reform process that would
include the reciprocal exchange of diplomats. For further discussion see Hsii 1960:156-58
and R. Smith et al. 1991:288-89.
An Imperial Nomad and the Great Game11

the Qing ruling class dependent upon British assistance and sympathetic to
British interests.
Wade's teaching often occurred in a positively reinforceable environment—
the routines of diplomatic practice and negotiation. In this setting, he at-
tempted to organize what might be termed a culture of diplomacy in Beijing,
one in which Qing diplomatic officials could interact with European diplomats
as if it were the capital of any other nation-state anywhere else in the world.
The audience issue was a good case in point. For example, Wade noted that
a memorandum he wrote in 1873 to the Zongli yamen requesting the audi-
ence was designed to "help educate the Chinese for the question which must
be faced."25 As a kind of natural corollary to this sort of instruction, Wade
also applied pressure on the Qing government to establish embassies abroad.
Presumably, Qing officials deputed to the capitals of Europe would have the
opportunity to continue their education.26
Diplomatic practice allowed Wade the opportunity to play the pedagogue
and to create conditions for generating more archival information; to elabo-
rate, as it were, on the official responses to his many initiatives. Moreover,
whether his actions involved negotiations about protocols for imperial au-
dience or revision to existing treaties, Wade's diplomacy taught one other
lesson—Qing officials ought to take the British extremely seriously. After all,
Wade had their books and knew their secrets.

Implementation
Wade's reports to the Foreign Office on the 1873 audience negotiations are
cross-cut with references to Great Game strategic considerations, applications
of local knowledge, pedagogical practice, and descriptions of new knowledge.
In this regard, the reports present the audience issue as more than simply
an opportunity to realize treaty provisions. From Wade's perspective, when
25 Following Wade's suggestion, Cooley has characterized the memorandum as "an in-
strument of instruction," see 1981:89. The memorandum and quotation are in FO 17/630.
26When his many efforts failed to convince the Zongli yamen to establish an embassy
in London, Wade used the occasion of the negotiations that led to the Chefoo Convention
to force the Qing government to dispatch a mission to Great Britain to apologize for the
killing of Augustus Margary. On the Margary affair and the Chefoo Convention, see Cooley
1981:116-31, Morse 1918, 2:297-305, and Hsu 1960:184.
On the apology mission and the establishment of the first Qing legation in London, see
Frodsham 1974. For a sense of how Qing officials were learning European practices, see
the discussion of their audience with Queen Victoria on February 7, 1877 (pp. 188-21).
According to Liu Xihong, a member of the delegation, the embassy had brought with them
a text entitled Xingyao zhizhang, or a Handbook of Diplomatic Procedure, and appear to
have consulted it before their meeting with the Queen. Hsii indicates that the text was a
translation of George Friedrich de Marten's Guide Diplomatique; see 1960:138.
12James L. Hevia

the Qing court accepted European forms of diplomatic audience, it would be

signaling to the Western powers and the Chinese public27 at large that it
recognized the change in its global position and that it no longer desired to
make universalistic claims about its own superiority. Such acknowledgement
would, in turn, give all the other foreign powers in China a stake in retaining
their legations in Beijing. Wade thought this particularly important because
he was convinced that Russian policy was to keep the missions away from
Beijing "not only as corps of observation, but as civilizing influences which
may develop China more rapidly than Russia desires" (FO 17/748, 134; also
see 14-17).
Limitations of space prevent me from discussing in detail the audience
negotiating process,28 all of which is exhaustively detailed by Wade in over
2000 pages of handwritten reports for Foreign Office consumption (see FO
17/748-750). The upshot, however, was agreement on an audience protocol
in which the ministers of Great Britain, France, Germany, the United States,
Russia, and Japan were received together at the Pavilion of Purple Brightness
(Ziguang ge), in the park to the west of the Forbidden City. There the
ministers remained standing while they delivered their "letters of credence"
and congratulated the emperor on having reached his majority.
In the negotiations leading up to the audience, Wade not only relied on
face-to-face contacts with Chinese officials and other foreign ministers, but
on information he gathered from other sources. In addition to Robert Hart,
they included the director of the Tongwen college, W. A. P. Martin, and the
British consul at Tianjin, Thomas Meadows (see FO 17/748:9, 13, 339-54,
376-81). Wade also drew on the historical records of British relations with
China, particularly accounts of the first two British embassies, those of Lord
Macartney and Lord Amherst in 1793 and 1816 respectively (FO 17/748:345,
433; 749:11-14, 22-24). Extensive knowledge of those encounters was impor-
tant because Wade found that Qing officials were attempting to rewrite the
historical record by claiming, for instance, that Macartney had performed
the koutou (three kneelings and nine bows) or knelt more often than British
sources indicated (FO 17/749:16).29 At the same time, these same officials
argued that the Macartney precedent of kneeling on one knee before the
Qianlong emperor should be retained in the forthcoming audience with the
Tongzhi emperor. Wade not only clarified what had "really" happened dur-
27The concern with the Chinese public "knowing" of concessions granted by the Qing
court to foreign powers seems to have been a major element in the thinking of all the
foreign representatives in Beijing, see FO 17/748, 126; 749, 130; and 750, 6ff.
28See the discussion in Rockhill 1905:41-42, Morse 1918, 2:266-70, and Cooley 1981:86-95.
29In the case of the Macartney embassy, the rewriting and reevaluating of the historical
record was hardly a one-sided affair. See the discussion in Hevia 1995a, chapter 10.
An Imperial Nomad and the Great Game13

ing the first British embassy to China, but rejected the precedent that Lord
Macartney had successfully negotiated. In conversations with Wenxiang, the
head of the Zongli yamen, Wade stated that in the present age, it was out of
the question for ambassadors to kneel before other sovereigns. Moreover, he
added, references to kneeling were "offensive" to the foreign representatives
"not only as Ministers, but as individuals" (FO 17/748:345-346).
He also relied on his own knowledge of Chinese history and imperial prac-
tices, knowledge which he had acquired from the study of ancient and contem-
porary Chinese language sources, some of which were official publications of
the Qing government. In the case of the audience negotiations, Wade's overall
understanding of these and other sources, as well as the language skills he
seems to have acquired from using them, allowed him expertly to annotate
the translations of Qing government correspondence he made and forwarded
to the British Foreign Office (see, for example, FO 17/749:142-47). His fa-
miliarity with Chinese language materials also allowed him to produce what
I would like to call The Scholarly Treatise With Direct Policy Implications.
I use the phrase to provide some sense of the wholly new form of knowledge
about China it represented and its location within the knowledge-archive-
state nexus.30 It is entitled "Memorandum on Chinese terms used in the
discussion about the Audience," dated June 11, 1873 (FO 17/749:236-303).

From Library to Archive

The audience memorandum is an extraordinary document. Among other
things, it demonstrates the close link established in British strategic think-
ing during the latter half of the nineteenth century between scholarship, local
knowledge, policy making, and negotiation with officials like those to be found
in Qing China. The research report itself was necessitated, Wade explained,
to outmaneuver these officials. According to the Zongli yamen, the Chinese
translation of the audience request received from the foreign ministers used
the character jin for audience, which, they explained, referred to one held
in the autumn. It being the spring of 1873, Qing officials then apparently
attempted to defer the negotiations and/or the date of audience in order to
comply with the request. Wade's research demonstrated that their interpre-
tation was either a subterfuge, which he easily could expose, or an example
of how ignorant Qing officials were of their own historical sources.
Wade's inquiry extended over the range of material dealing with imperial
30Wade was not the only Euro-American in China quoting Chinese sources back at Qing
officials; see Covell 1978:149 on W. A. P. Martin. Yet, the product of Wade's scholarship
was, as I argue below, substantively different than that generated by Martin and other
sinologues of the era.
14James L. Hevia

audiences and rituals that can be found in the library catalogue prepared
by Herbert Giles. From these sources, the British Minister reconstructed
a history of the character jin with full citations of sources, footnotes, and
Chinese characters in the margins. Furthermore, he brought the entire issue
into the contemporary scene through reference to sources from the court of
the Daoguang emperor (r. 1821-1850) and to the writings of the Qing scholar
Ruan Yuan (1764-1849).
In his conclusion, Wade argued that any effort to limit the meaning of
the term jin to specify only autumn court audiences, particularly when the
sources used to do so were questionable ones from the Zhou period, was in
error. Moreover, in historical sources whose authenticity was less in doubt,
the term itself was never used to refer to audiences at a certain time of year,
but referred in many cases to audiences between emperors and their officials.
Perhaps more important than this conclusion is what it signifies. It shows
that a well-trained agent could move among the native population and the
highest realms of political authority in China, gain command of significant
cultural and historical objects prized by China's ruling class, and turn those
objects back against the natives to make a number of tactically significant
moves. To Qing authorities, it may have made the point that there were
few routes of escape from the British imperial archive. In this sense, the
knowledge produced by an imperial nomad like T. F. Wade cut two ways.
First, it worked to collect information for tactical deployment in Great Game
machinations with Russia. Second, the information could also be used, if
necessary, to undermine positions the natives might attempt to secure. And
it did so with the minimum outlay of energy.

The Limits of Nomadic Imperialism and the Peculiar Nature of China 's Semi-
Colonialism
If the accumulation of total knowledge for the manipulation of native pop-
ulations was the objective of the archive state, specters, Thomas Richards tells
us, also haunted the archival project. One kind of phantasm was at the impe-
rial center, the other at the periphery of empire (1993:43-44, 57). The first of
these had to do with the impossibility of the center being able to process or
control the flow of information generated by nomadic agents like Wade. The
high command, as it were, was unable to keep up with the activities of its
subordinate parts, leading at times to moments of panic-stricken disavowal or
even to the recall of inventive nomads.31 Later forms of the imperial archive
31In the case of the audience negotiations, Wade was told early on by Lord Granville
that he had exceeded his instructions and must take full responsibility for the consequences;
see Granville to Wade, March 22, 1873, FO 17/748:250-51. Like other frontier nomads,
An Imperial Nomad and the Great Game15

would build in disavowal (deniability) and disinformation as necessary ad-

justments in an overloaded system, but these novelties were very much the
product of the failure of the nineteenth-century British Imperium to achieve
the Utopian goals of total knowledge and comprehensive application of that
knowledge.
The other specter haunting the archive was that of mutations on the
periphery. The logic of the Great Game ran information in one direction and
manipulation in the other. What began to emerge on the edges of empire,
however, was a double game in which the natives resisted or subverted lessons
taught by imperial pedagogues, creating monstrosities like the Boxer Uprising
(to give but one of the more prominent examples of imperial pedagogy gone
awry). Wade himself expressed concern that, as an unintended consequence
of British actions, lessons might not be learned, or that China's "false and
timid" rulers and lettered elite might unlearn lessons painstakingly taught in
the past (Cooley 1981:51, 53, 64, 79). On the other hand, Wade never seemed
to have confronted another possibility, that his Qing officials might learn all
too well, and begin to turn his own lessons back at him.
There are indications of such occurrences in Wade's reports on the audi-
ence negotiations. When, for instance, foreign ministers insisted on points
of honor, officials of the Zongli yamen responded that they themselves had
honor, and wondered when their own dignity would be taken into account.
On another occasion, Qing officials challenged Wade and some of the other
European ministers with the fact that the Qing court had long had foreign
relations based on equality—with Russia!—and was perfectly willing to abide
by precedents established in those instances. Why, they seemed to be asking,
wouldn't this particular set of Europeans take Qing-Russian treaties into con-
sideration? Why did the current notion of international law apparently ignore
long-standing relations between imperial Russia and the Qing empire?32
Rather than seeing these statements by court officials as signs of his suc-
cess at teaching them rational processes of negotiation, Wade interpreted the
initiatives of Zongli yamen officials as problems external to the pedagogi-
cal project he himself was embarked on. Qing officials didn't give way to
argument, he reported to his imperial center, but to fear. They endlessly
returned to issues already resolved; and they only made concessions when
it was possible for them to claim that they had gained a counter-concession
Wade often ran well ahead of the more cautious imperial center in imagining and fashioning
policy, and eventually was recalled as a result (see Cooley 1981:135).
32See FO 17/748:227-28, 345. These examples are only part of the issue. The Qing
court records indicate that there was a good deal of debate over the audience issue, with
a number of positions taken by various officials; see CBYWSM, juan 50-51, 54, 89-91, and
Wang's review of these materials in his 1971.
16James L. Hevia

(FO 17/748:202, 451). Yet one may well wonder what was so disturbing
about these negotiating strategies, or the degree to which they differed from
diplomatic processes in Europe at the same time. One may also wonder why
Wade was incapable of seeing matters in such terms. His Manchu and Chinese
"students" seem, by his definition of the situation, not to be active agents in
the process of diplomatic pedagogy; they are only passive receivers of Wade's
initiatives.33
One possible reason why this was the case has to do with the particular
historical conjunction of European imperial expansion and new notions of
masculinity produced in imperial métropoles like London. If the Great Game
was disrupted by what might be seen as entropie forces at the center and
monstrosities on the periphery, it was also disturbed by another specter, one
that appears wholly a product of a repressed fixation built into the process
of teaching the Qing government useful lessons.
The Tianjin treaty had placed nouveau imperialists (i.e., Europeans and
Americans) at the center of an older Manchu-Chinese imperial order. In this
group, British agents seem to have wanted more than simply the opportunity
to produce useful knowledge for Great Game strategies. They also wanted to
be recognized as equal or superior to those who administered the Qing em-
pire.34 This obsession with acknowledgement or recognition was, by the logic
of the imperial archive project, irrational. In calling attention to themselves
by insisting on an audience with the emperor, operatives like Wade undercut
their own ability to maneuver indirectly and to manipulate the Qing court
into helping British imperial strategists achieve their objectives in Central
Asia.
It is these disturbances in the imperial archive project, I would argue,
that gave Western imperialism in China its peculiar characteristics. Identi-
fied as semi-colonialism by some, and synarchy by others (Fairbank 1957:204-
31, and 1968), the sorts of arrangements that emerged on the peripheries of
nineteenth-century European empires were hybrid formations fraught with
internal contradictions. In China, the British government sought to manipu-
late the local scene through the production of useful local information. The
ability to produce local knowledge was then understood as a means to more
efficiently manage British global interests. Another way of putting this is
to say that the gathering of information and the production of local knowl-
33Nor is Wade the only problem here. It is one of the ironies of modernist historiography
that apologists for western imperialism and advocates of Han nationalism share to a certain
extent Wade's definition of the situation. In later historiography, the resistance of Qing
officials, interpreted variously as culture-bound backwardness, xenophobia, or reactionism,
often appears as the necessary cause for external invasion or internal revolution.
34 For a fuller discussion of this issue, see Hevia 1995b.
An Imperial Nomad and the Great Game1 7

edge provided a means for minimizing the energy and resources required to
maintain British influence in China. Yet because this form of control had in
some sense to remain secret, the Foreign Office often found itself working at
cross-purposes with British merchants, British missionaries, and at times its
own field agents.
At the same time, however, the Eurasian strategy of British imperialism
was quite novel as well as quite contemporary.35 It emerged out of certain
technological advances in communication (steamships, railroads, telegraph)
and military weaponry (the Armstrong gun, which was a breach-loading,
rapid-fire cannon, and the Maxim or machine gun),36 combined with certain
necessities that had to do with Great Britain's size versus the expanse of the
British empire. The technological supremacy enjoyed by Britain for much of
the nineteenth century allowed an imperial policy imagined as maximum en-
ergy conservation, accompanied by highly rationalized uses of material power.
In this sort of imperialism, what was important was not occupying territory,
but controlling information and its channels of flow. Control of information
produced intelligence (expert knowledge of local conditions) which, through
communications and transportation networks, enabled instrumental applica-
tions of force, applications which from the Opium War forward made China a
major staging ground for this new kind of imperialism. Whenever possible, it
worked through native leaders in order to outmaneuver its opponents. When
it could not find pliable natives, it might work through third-party surrogates
or in various combinations of coalitions. If these failed—and only as a last
resort—it applied military force that, thanks to its information processing ca-
pacities and transportation system, could in ideal conditions be concentrated
and focussed for swift results.
If there are problems in dealing with the indirectness of this kind of im-
perialism, if there are difficulties in confronting its manipulativeness, or of
fully appreciating the forms of resistance deployed against it, it is probably
because the field of knowledge of the imperial archive, well exemplified here
in the figure of Thomas Francis Wade, continues to produce useful knowl-
edge about China and much of the so-called third world, to say nothing of
prestigious and authoritative positions in government and the academy. If
we understand colonialism as direct political-economic domination of a terri-
tory and its inhabitants, then the sorts of operational forms that the Great
Game produced were in a sense post-colonial before the demise of European
35It is perhaps the very novelty I refer to here that has made it possible for postwar
American scholars of China to circumvent the Marxist critique of imperialism. For a review
of some of the ways colonialism has been occluded in China studies see Barlow 1993.
36On the relationship between technology and nineteenth century European imperialism
see Headrick 1981 and 1988.
18 James L. Hevia

colonialism! Moreover, insofar as the British imperial archive served as an

interface between the state and knowledge, particularly as I have addressed
it above with respect to relations between Wade's reporting, his library, and
British policies in Eurasia, Great Game history has an uncanny affinity to
that other more famous Cold War that dominated the global scene in the
second half of the twentieth-century.

Glossary

Da Qing huidian shili ?/? WA*n Xiniyi luelun 7pf3ܻfT3BB

huidian Xinjiang shiluef[ SB Ufe :
Jihe yuanben »HU* YiHiftîlt
jin wt Yiyulu¡gj^féfc
Libu celi Zhouli

Liji sie Ziguangge% % K

Siku quanshu Zongli yamenBM'fä?^

Xiangyao zhizhang

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