This double service evidently troubled Ch'ien himself, and he became posthumously notorious for it after the Ch'ien-lung emperor declared him disloyal and treacherous and ordered the complete destruction of all of his works.
The next chapter is much shorter and more clearly organized, consisting chiefly of an account of the Ch'ien-lung emperor's campaign to discredit Ch'ien and rid the world of his works.
The Manchu emperor,
Ch'ien-lung, decided he would be satisfied with nothing less than the extermination of the entire Hmong tribe, a goal whose unsuccessful pursuit ultimately cost him twice what he had spent conquering the entire kingdom of Turkestan.
Whereas the Met's exhibition had relied on a specific group of works that had been incorporated by the
Ch'ien-lung emperor into a strictly hierarchical canon, the Guggenheim's show was to be curator Sherman Lee's selection of whatever good stuff could be found around the Mainland.
Cheng Hsieh earned a chin-shih degree at the age of forty-four and became known for his painting and calligraphy during a successful official career in Shantung, where he was awarded the title "Envoy of Painting and Calligraphy" (shu-hua shih) during the
Ch'ien-lung emperor's visit to Mt.
This book, the author's dissertation submitted to Humboldt University, Berlin, introduces the sixty-eight works included under the category lei-shu [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in the Ssu-k'u ch'[ddot{u}]an-shu [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], the monumental collection of books commissioned by the
Ch'ien-lung [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] emperor (r.
Slight inaccuracies concerning Fang's early career and his involvement in the persecution of Tai Ming-shih do not detract from Guy's perceptive observations, through Fang Pao, about changing relations between emperors and their chief scholar-servitors during the late K'ang-hsi, Yung-cheng, and early
Ch'ien-lung periods.
The Literary Inquisition of
Ch'ien-lung (1935) resulted from his dissertation, and John Fairbank wrote that it "alone made him the risen star of American China studies, and there was much more to come over the next forty years"(4) (actually over fifty years).
Kent Guy, The Emperor's Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late
Ch'ien-lung Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard Univ., 1987), 121-56.