User:Arilang1234/Sand box/Literary Holocaust by Manchu Qianlong

Literary holocaust was coined by Alexander Woodside in The Cambridge History of China  by Willard J. Peterson and John King Fairbank, describing events in Qing era during the reign of Qianlong emperor. Quote:Wave upon wave of "writing prosecutions" known conventionally in English as literary inquisitions, swept away both books and living authors for about two decades, from 1772 to 1793. Because of the repetitions among the various lists of condemned books, and the gaps in the court archives that concern the Chien-lung court's suppression of undesirable literature, it may never be possible to make a reliable estimate of the size of this literary holocaust. Page 290. Unquoted

Using the emperor initiated movement as a form of elite political contention among themselves, the Han Chinese literati of the society  gave the emperor full cooperation and participation, thus helping Qianlong to fullfill his dream of establishing cultural  superiority over all past emperors.

Qianlong's intention was very clear, he wanted his Siku Quanshu compilers to create a definitive, antimillenarian library of classical culture, resulting in an empire-wide movement of  house-to-house searches for "evil books, tracts, poetry, and plays". The movement was directed and led by Qianlong himself; the "evil texts" that were discovered were to be sent to Peking and burned. In 1883, Yao Chin-yuan estimated that it might be slightly more than 3,000 titles(or separate works), were burned in Peking in these two decades.

Famous cases of inquisitions conducted by Qianlong
There were 53 cases of literary persecution during Qianlong's reign.


 * 1753: The Qianlong emperor's frequent tours of Jiangnan were partly funded by local governments, and therefore indirectly by the local people. One local official by the name of Lu Lusen, using a higher ranking minister's name, Sun Jiajin, sent a memorial to Qianlong pleading with him to stop the tour for the sake of the local people. The text achieved widespread popular support. Eventually Lu Lusen was sentenced to death by slow slicing for sedition, his two sons were beheaded, and more than a thousand relatives and acquaintances were either executed, exiled, or thrown into jail according to the notion of "collective resonsibilty" that automatically applied in cases of sedition.


 * 1755: A Provincial Education Commissioner named Hu Zhongzao (胡中藻) wrote a poem in which the character qing 清, the name of the dynasty, was preceded by zhuo 浊, which means "murky or muddy." The Qianlong emperor saw this and many other formulations as the taking of a position in the factional struggle that was taking place at the time between Han official Zhang Tingyu and Manchu official Ertai, who had been Hu's mentor. Hu was eventually beheaded.


 * 1778: The son of a Jiangsu poet called Xu Shukui (徐述夔) had written a poem to celebrate his late father. Qianlong decided that the poem was derogatory towards the Manchus, and ordered that Xu Shukui's coffin be unearthed, his corpse mutilated, all his children and grandchildren beheaded.


 * Cai Xian (蔡顯) wrote a poem 'Any color not true color but red color, alien flowers has become king flowers', to show that he preferred red colored peonies over purple peonies, and stating 'red peony is king peony' and 'Other color peonies are aliens'. In Chinese, 'red' and the surname of late Ming dynasty emperors shared the same character: 朱 (zhū). Qianlong then accused the poet of trying to attack the Manchus by innuendo and ordered the beheading of the poet.