Qīndìng Huángcháo Tōngdiǎn 欽定皇朝通典
Imperially Authorized Tōngdiǎn of the Reigning Dynasty by 高宗弘曆 (敕撰)
About the work
The Qīng-dynasty Tōngdiǎn, sister-volume to KR2m0016 Xù Tōngdiǎn. In 100 juǎn, eight gates following Dù Yòu’s original plan, with adjustments: the Qīng territorial reach is taken from the Dà Qīng yītǒng zhì rather than the Yǔgòng nine provinces (since the Qīng “now governs east to where the sun rises and west to the Wúléi country”); regulations long abolished (the Hàn salt-monopoly, the fēngshàn sacrifice) are dropped rather than retained as empty heads; and the supporting volumes (Dà Qīng tōnglǐ, Huángcháo lǐqì túshì, Lǜlǚ zhèngyì, Dà Qīng lǜlì, Zhōngshū zhèngkǎo, Yītǒng zhì, Rìxià jiùwén kǎo, Shèngjīng tōngzhì, Rèhé zhì, Mǎnzhōu yuánliú kǎo, Yǔ Xīyù tújì, Dà Qīng huìdiǎn / zélì, the Eight-Banner zélì, etc.) are cross-referenced. One of the Sāntōngdiǎn of the Qiánlóng Shítōng.
Tiyao
By imperial command of Qiánlóng 32 (1767). The eight gates follow Dù Yòu’s original plan. Within them, regulations were either inherited or revised: where currency is appended to Shíhuò, the horse-administration to ritual, the military-system to penal law—if the connection is sound and the principle defensible, no change has been made. But where ancient and present systems differ irreconcilably, no forced uniformity is attempted. Things abolished by the present court—the Hàn salt-monopoly and suànmín (head-tax) under Shíhuò; the fēngshàn under Lǐ—are simply dropped, not retained as empty headings.
The Geographical Treatise, in covering all dynasties, must take account of constantly shifting jurisdictional boundaries; so it must trace origin and use the nine provinces as a framework. But here, dealing with the present dynasty alone, we follow current practice. Moreover the realm’s reach has expanded—east to the country of sunrise, west to Wúléi country, the Two Mountains forming the boundary line; recently the Rǎnmáng tribes have been pacified, settlements established beyond. The imperial domain is far broader than the old nine-province frame can hold. We have therefore taken the Dà Qīng yītǒng zhì as our authority, rather than disrupting the August-Bright domain by appeal to Yǔgòng.
Dù Yòu treated the institutional record of the Táng together with all preceding dynasties in one work, hence appended Táng material to the end of each section, briefly: the format admitted no other treatment. Here the present dynasty is given a separate book, befitting its status. In an age of legal flowering, the great policies of the sage rulers are too numerous for the historian to record; so the volume count exceeds the original. And whereas Dù Yòu had only the Kāiyuán lǐ in detail, today every category has its own complete reference: ritual has the Dà Qīng tōnglǐ and Huángcháo lǐqì túshì; music has the imperial Lǜlǚ zhèngyì and its hòubiān; criminal law has the Dà Qīng lǜlì; military has the Zhōngshū zhèngkǎo; geography has the Huángyú biǎo, the Dà Qīng yītǒng zhì, the imperial Rìxià jiùwén kǎo, the Shèngjīng tōngzhì, the Rèhé zhì, the Mǎnzhōu yuánliú kǎo, the Huángyú Xīyù túzhì; and again the Dà Qīng huìdiǎn with its zélì heads them all, with the Eight-Banner and Six-Board zélì providing the operational detail. Thread by thread the matter is set out, beginning and end made plain—shown forth for ten thousand years, fitly compared to the Guān lǐ of antiquity. How can Dù Yòu’s gathering of fragments stand in the same breath?
Abstract
The Huángcháo Tōngdiǎn covers Qīng institutional history from 1644 to roughly the 1780s. Compilation began with the Xù Tōngdiǎn in 1767; the work was substantively complete by Qiánlóng 51 (1786) and presented to the throne shortly thereafter. The dating bracket here spans 1767 commissioning to 1787 effective completion. The catalog meta gives “Qiánlóng 32” as the date, which is the commissioning year.
Wilkinson (§51.2.4 #5) treats this as the third of the Sāntōngdiǎn. The work is structurally a Qīng-only equivalent of KR2m0001 (the Tōngdiǎn itself) and complementary to KR2m0015 (the Huángcháo Wénxiàn Tōngkǎo). The principal innovation is the explicit cross-referencing of the supporting Qiánlóng-era reference works; in effect, the Huángcháo Tōngdiǎn serves as an index-and-overview to the major imperial compilations of its own era.
Translations and research
Standard editions: the Shítōng set, Shāngwù 1935–37, Zhōnghuá 1990 (in Scripta Sinica). Wilkinson, §51.2.4. R. Kent Guy (2010); Lǐ Yìlóng (2017). Tāng Yìjùn 湯一介, ed. (2015), as cited at KR2m0016.
Other points of interest
The decision to use the Dà Qīng yītǒng zhì as the geographical framework, replacing the Yǔgòng nine-province scheme that Tōngdiǎn and Wénxiàn Tōngkǎo tradition had employed, is a substantive scholarly judgment: it acknowledges that the Qīng dual structure (provinces in the inner empire, banners and jiānglǐng offices in Mongolia, Xīnjiāng, and Tibet) cannot be reduced to the classical Yǔgòng framework. This becomes the standard solution for Qīng-period geographic reference.