Description
Through the case of a single well-placed official, Chen Hongmou (1696-1771), this book studies the consciousness and the governing project of the 18th-century Chinese official-elite.
"Rowe's new work can be said to be a model of painstaking and exhaustive research. It is also quite possibly the best single study ever written anywhere of the life, thought and career of a pre-1800 Chinese scholar-official . . . .This is a brilliant picture of the world of a major Chinese thinker and bureaucrat in the 1700s . . . .[It is] must reading for anyone interested in the thought and practices of Chinese politics after 1700."
"Whatever doubts may remain regarding the phrase "early modernity" or how well Chen Hongmou represented the mainstream of eighteenth-century bureaucratic thinking, historians of China owe a debt to Rowe for sharing his stunning research talents with us in this impressive piece of scholarship."
"This is a large, important, and most welcome book."
"In this blockbuster book, William T. Rowe uses Chen's life to examine the culture of the 18th-century bureaucracy, encompassing nearly all the classic problems of Chinese society, past and present."
"It is an essential and thought-provoking work that contributes greatly to the study of Qing history."
"It is the merit of Rowe's fine analysis that it opens a world of discourse to future students of China's Eighteenth Century..."
William T. Rowe is John and Diane Cooke Professor of Chinese History at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895 (Stanford, 1989) and Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889 (Stanford, 1984).