Awkward angles: multi-frontier coordination in Mid-Qing Foreign Relations

Abstract

The Qing state preferred to manage its foreign relations in discrete units, and historians have naturally tended to approach the subject within these regional segments by separating Inner Asia from China (especially the maritime frontier), or concentrating on even narrower zones. This approach, despite its utility, sidesteps the question of how, and in what contexts, it is useful to consider the Qing empire an integrated entity that functioned as more than the sum of its diverse parts. This paper takes a step toward addressing this topic by examining episodes in Qing foreign relations that transcended regional boundaries, specifically policy debates concerning the military campaigns against Burma (1765-1770) and the Gurkhas (1788-1792), and the arrival of Russian ships at Canton (1805-1806). For Qing rulers, these were awkward cases that cut across normal administrative hierarchies. To manage them, it was necessary to use the full intelligence-gathering and policy-making resources of the empire. Studying the reaction of the Qing government in these cases is useful for two reasons. First, determining how resources from different corners of the empire were drawn together to solve geographic and strategic puzzles reveals intellectual and political ties connecting different frontiers of the empire that often remained hidden. Second, the rise of European imperialism in Asia forged links between Qing frontiers that had long been considered separate. Investigating the early stage of the Qing adaptation to this new reality sheds light on the empire’s policy choices and intelligence gathering later in the nineteenth century.