Qīndìng pīngdìng Táiwān jìlüè 欽定平定臺灣紀略
Imperially Authorised Account of the Pacification of Táiwān by 高宗弘曆 (敕撰)
About the work
The Qīndìng pīngdìng Táiwān jìlüè in 65 juǎn (the Sìkù tíyào gives 70) is the imperial campaign history of the Lín Shuǎngwén 林爽文 (1756–1788) / Zhuāng Dàtián 莊大田 revolt of Qiánlóng 51–53 (1786–1788) on Taiwan — the largest of the eighteenth-century Tiāndìhuì 天地會 (Heaven and Earth Society / Triads) risings and the seventh of Qiánlóng’s Shíquán wǔgōng 十全武功. Lín Shuǎngwén, born 1756 of a Zhāngzhōu lineage in Dàlǐ 大里 in central Taiwan and inducted into the Tiāndìhuì in 1783, raised banners in the 11th month of Qiánlóng 51 (Jan 1787), took Zhānghuà and stormed Zhūluó 諸羅 (modern Jiāyì), and proclaimed reign-titles. In the south the Fèngshān 鳳山 leader Zhuāng Dàtián joined him. The first commanders despatched (the Provincial Commander Huáng Shìjiǎn 黃仕簡 and Lieutenant General Rèn Chéng’ēn 任承恩) proved unable to act, and the imperial court progressively replaced them: first with Cháng Qīng 常青 and Lán Yuánméi 藍元枚, then in late 1787 with Fù Kāng’ān 福康安 (the indispensable late-Qiánlóng troubleshooter) and Hǎiláncài 海蘭察 with metropolitan crack troops. Fù Kāng’ān landed in late 1787 and, joined by Shēngfán 生番 (“raw” Aboriginal) auxiliaries, broke the rebel forces in successive engagements; Lín Shuǎngwén was taken alive in early 1788 and sent to Beijing for execution. The Qiánlóng emperor’s two extended yùzhì statements on the campaign — the Jiǎomiè Táiwān nìzéi shēngqín Lín Shuǎngwén jìshì yǔ 剿滅臺灣逆賊生擒林爽文紀事語 and a companion piece — are unusually candid about the campaign’s near-failures and the slow reaction of the metropolitan court, and stand at the head of the work.
Tiyao
The Qīndìng pīngdìng Táiwān jìlüè in 70 juǎn was, in Qiánlóng 53 (1788), reverently composed on imperial command. Taiwan stood remote in the sea, never within the territory of any earlier age, and yet was the screen of the Mǐn 閩 (Fújiàn) and Yuè 粵 (Guǎngdōng) provinces; thus in the Míng, the Dutch held it and there was no defence; the disaster of the Wōkòu 倭寇 spread there; later Zhèng Zhīlóng 鄭芝龍 held it and lay there in unruliness — truly a place of importance. — Our Shèngzǔ Rénhuángdì 聖祖仁皇帝 in his sevenfold virtue made plain his hand, swept away the whale’s lair, sent Shī Láng 施琅 to take Zhèng Kèshuǎng 鄭克塽 prisoner, and made it a jùnxiàn (prefecture-and-county) administration with officers and garrisons, an iron-clad city upon the sea. Yet because the mountain forests are thick and dense, the products plenty, and the people of Guǎngdōng and the men of Zhāngzhōu and Quánzhōu rush to come, no sooner does it grow rich and busy than crookery makes its way in. From Zhū Yīguì 朱一貴 (1721) onward, the prick of the hedgehog and the chop of the mantis have once or twice broken out, but always been quickly extinguished. Only Lín Shuǎngwén, Zhuāng Dàtián, and the like raised the wing of the kite and gathered around them the swarming ants, and so caused the gāoqiáng (the zhì-block) execution to be deferred. — By the imperial plan and the divine guidance, the principal head was set in the cage and the burning sea purified for ever. The cause first lay in the greed and venality of the local officials, who were not seen by those of the fēngjiāng (frontier-territory) management; thereafter it lay in the watching-and-waiting of the generals, who in their counsel were of many minds, so that the rebels were able to call up the runaway, fortify their lairs. The means by which they were swept away lay in His Majesty’s seated illumination of the principle in advance, in his looking at the sharks’ palaces and whales’ waves as upon a palm, in his planning everything beforehand and in establishing the strict discipline; in his clear judgement to nothing, things lurking nowhere; in his brightening the rewards and the punishments, the various courses cleansed and made spotless, the lax becoming reformed and stiffened, the cowardly becoming reformed and stout: all in awe of the imperial wēi, the threat near as a foot away. — The senior officers were thus enabled to spend their force; they took Zhìjiēyǔ 䝟㺄 alive to set up the guójiā statute. The terror of his power further reached even into the Nèitái shēngfán 內臺生番 — Aboriginal peoples never before in contact with the Central Kingdom — who came forward to drive the great rebel; bowed the head at the throne; and brought reverently the offered tribute. — Within and without, the ministers and people, on bent knee reading His Majesty’s yùzhì jìshì yǔ (Recorded Words of the Affair) in two pieces, all set their hands to their foreheads, saying: even Yellow Emperor’s killing of Chīyóu was done by his own going on the line; even Wǔ Dīng’s 武丁 conquest of Guǐfāng 鬼方 was not over the sea: today His Majesty rules from the height of the Nine Heavens above and looks across ten thousand miles, in unbroken antiquity no Sage Ruler matches him; the jiānghàn and the chángwǔ of nearby places are no longer worth speaking of. — After the song of victory, the courtiers reverently set down the imperial directives, the answers and the memorials, dividing them by month and day, ordering them by beginning and end, into this volume, that it may be set down to teach ten thousand ages. We, on bent knee reading, see that the Sage both spirit and martial, the warp and the weft of ten thousand strands; though the place be only one corner, with terrain heavy and tortuous, the whole plan is in truth equal in gōngliè (heroic feat) to the campaigns of the Iyi 伊犁 (Dzungar), Hui 回, and Jīnchuān 金川. With my brush I find the song hard to exhaust. — Reverently collated, Qiánlóng 54 (1789), 4th month. Chief compilers: Jì Yún, Lù Xīxióng, Sūn Shìyì. Senior collator: Lù Fèichí.
Abstract
The Lín Shuǎngwén revolt was the high-water mark of eighteenth-century Tiāndìhuì (Triads) activity, and the most expensive Qing operation ever conducted across the Taiwan Strait — the campaign required two complete rotations of senior commanders, the call-up of metropolitan banner units, the importation of grain and supply from across coastal China, and the recruitment of Aboriginal allies in the central highlands. Lín Shuǎngwén had been initiated into the Tiāndìhuì in 1783, three years before raising arms; the surviving testimony from his interrogation has been one of the principal pieces of evidence used by Murray (1994) and others in arguing for an authentic eighteenth-century origin of the society, against the older view that the Tiāndìhuì was a nineteenth-century projection. The Aboriginal participation on the imperial side — the so-called Shēngfán contribution that the Qiánlóng emperor singled out for explicit imperial commendation — also had long political consequences, opening for the first time direct Qing administrative contact with the Atayal and Tsou groups of central Taiwan. The book, with its 65 juǎn of memorials, edicts, and battle reports preceded by extensive imperial poetry and prose, is the most extensive late-Qiánlóng fānglüè on a coastal-naval campaign and the principal contemporary documentary record of the affair.
Translations and research
- Murray, Dian H. (in collaboration with Qin Baoqi). 1994. The Origins of the Tiandihui: The Chinese Triads in Legend and History. Stanford: Stanford University Press. The standard English-language treatment of the Tiāndìhuì origins, with extensive use of the jìlüè and the surviving Lín Shuǎngwén interrogation records.
- ter Haar, Barend J. 1998. Ritual and Mythology of the Chinese Triads: Creating an Identity. Leiden: Brill. (Treats the Lín Shuǎngwén materials.)
- Shepherd, John Robert. 1993. Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600–1800. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (Treats the campaign in its longer eighteenth-century Taiwan-frontier context.)
- Hummel, Eminent Chinese, biographies of Lín Shuǎngwén, Fù Kāng’ān, Hǎilán-cài, Lán Yuánméi.
- Wilkinson, Chinese History, §66.6.1, ch. 50 (under fānglüè); §21314 on the naval dimension.
Other points of interest
The seventh of Qiánlóng’s Shíquán wǔgōng — the campaign was officially counted as one of the “Ten Complete Military Victories”, though the imperial preface here is unusually candid about its having been “neither very early nor very fortunate.” Wilkinson notes (§21314) the operation as one of a small number of large amphibious deployments in Chinese history. The recruitment of Shēngfán auxiliaries marks the beginning of significant Qing engagement with the central Taiwan Aboriginal peoples.