A Book by Jonathan Spence

Emperor of China: Self-portrait of K’ang-hsi by Jonathan Spence is a fascinating memoir of the life of an Emperor of China – something you largely do not see in any form. The Chinese Emperor was largely seen as being something of an earthly manifestation of the divine, and as such, their subjects would scarcely have ever met nor have a real comprehension of how they would be as a person. Since most people of his stature rarely wrote about themselves or have surviving records, it means that this book is quite a breakthrough in many ways. Not only are we able to read about the life of a great man in his own words, but author Jonathan Spence was also able to assemble what amounts to a chronicle of his entire life.  

“A remarkable re-creation of the life of K’ang-hsi, emperor of the Manchu dynasty from 1661-1722, assembled from documents that survived his reign. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.”

With Emperor K’ang-hsi having ruled from 1661 to 1722, one would assume that getting any sort of material together in order to understand things such as his personality would likely be out of bounds of typical courtly documents and decrees. Jonathan Spence went to great lengths to scour through numerous old documents and other contemporary writings in order to get a better grasp of the man’s mind and personality that, as he states, “would have been viewed as both incongruous and presumptuous by “K’ang-hsi’s own subjects”. [preface] To gain such insight, Spence had access to and was able to scour through reams of Qing Dynasty documents, as well as K’ang-hsi’s own personal correspondences. Having this sort of material is not unheard of, but in the case of this particular ruler, the material is far more digestible than some of his predecessors. As Spence points out, “The day-by-day chronological history of the governing of China-the so- called Veritable Records-exist for K’ang-hsi’s reign as they do for the other Ch’ing emperors. Such records were often immensely lengthy and highly formalized, but K’ang-hsi encouraged brevity and directness, so we find that in his case they are manageable in size (around 16,000 pages, by Western count” [Preface]

These snippets were then edited together in such a way that a pseudo-autobiography from the point of view of K’ang-hsi himself was assembled, a fact that makes this book very interesting. “It was after much stylistic and organizational experiment that I decided to present the preceding varied material by constructing an autobiographical memoir out of K’ang-hsi’s own words. This seemed at once the best way to organize the many fragments I had assembled.” [Preface]

The book is assembled into five parts that each represent a broad category that the author felt various thoughts should logically fall into. These include: “In Motion”, “ruling”, “thinking”, “growing old”, and finally “sons”. Part six is labeled “Valedictory” and consists of what is referred to as his “Valedictory edict”, and the following half of the book are numerous appendices and other supporting material including translations of some of the source documents the author used to create this “memoir”.

I think the main question one might have going into this book is “What kind of man was K’ang-hsi?” As mentioned above, gleaned simply by the style in which he kept court documents, K’ang-hsi seems like a no-nonsense and blunt man that takes special note of some of the smaller things in life that others would likely ignore. For example, in his descriptions of his hunting trips early on, he is VERY poetic and detailed in the way he describes nature and various animals. This affinity to nature expands throughout his life when he becomes rather engrossed in traditional medicine and, likely to prologue his own life, goes on asides about topics such a nutrition, which is not something I personally expected to see in this book. This matter-of-factness has what most of us in 2024 would consider a darker side keeping in mind cultural relativism. It seems that for the most part, K’ang-hsi is proud of the numerous executions, exiles, and tortures he sentences people to. He is very glib about this, especially when he doesn’t kill too many people “I told the court that I killed only a few people on the first occasion, and I will kill only one or two on the second” [pg. 117] He does, also, gloat over how benevolent he can be, detailing various pardons and lenient sentences he gives. Truthfully, by seeing not only his interests and his thoughts about his own ruling style, it definitely makes him human rather than some sort of natural force that most Chinese peasants likely saw him as. K’ang-hsi is not too far removed from a modern-day politician, especially those that are obsessed with social media and post about their thoughts regularly.

This human characterization extends to K’ang-hsi’s family life, by which we get quite a bit of information on, especially considering his sons get their own section in the book. Through various concubines (we are told thirty women), he fathers over fifty-six children including thirty sons. “The Emperor K’ang-hsi having, in all, 56 children who lived for some while after birth, borne by 30 consorts of varying ranks: 20 daughters, of whom 8 grew to maturity, and married; and 36 sons, of whom 20 grew to maturity, and 18 had sons—the number of the sons of those 18 being 123.” [pg. 103] Of these thirty sons (twenty who grew to maturity), he comes across a great problem – who should he allow to be his successor? As with any family, K’ang-hsi has sons that he likely “liked better” than others as well as sons that constantly got in trouble. For example, we learn of one son that K’ang-hsi suspects as plotting his death: “I began to suspect that Yin-jeng planned to avenge that death. I couldn’t tell if I would be poisoned one night or killed the next morning; I was never at rest. How was I to let Yin-jeng take up his imperial inheritance, he who killed his mother at his birth, he who was so extravagant, so demanding, so interfering?” (pg. 105) The courtly drama and the succession discussion is, without a doubt, one of the more interesting parts of the book.

Emperor of China: Self-portrait of K’ang-hsi by Jonathan Spence is an interesting book that peels back the mystique of Chinese courtly drama and paints Emperor K’ang-hsi as an important and very human man. As stated before, K’ang-hsi seems himself as, and generally acts as a benevolent ruler. He tries his best to make correct decisions, and even though some of his decrees and decisions are harsh, he never seems to cross the line into being a tyrant. He is a simple man that likes simple things such as hunting, and values when people engage with him in ways where he does not see an ulterior motive in their political movements. He especially gets tired of Westerners (usually Jesuits), for example, trying to push their values and opinions on him, and would rather not have to deal with them at all. Overall, reading this book was a very pleasant experience, and I will have to look up this author in the future.